Coot and Goose

Well, the snow is already gone, at least in our immediate neighborhood. But we're supposed to have more cold weather this week, and possibly more snow, from what I understand (having only briefly glanced at the newspaper headlines while in the grocery store yesterday). At least we're not getting hammered as badly as other parts of Europe. I see that parts of the Balkans are buried under six feet of snow!

To celebrate the brief respite, here are some pictures of waterbirds, which are no doubt happier when they can get in the water rather than standing on it. That's a coot up above.


And these are Egyptian geese, which I don't recall ever seeing before my walk along the Regent's Canal late last week. Apparently there are colonies of them in eastern England. Love the pink legs!

I'm helping my former boss with a project, so I actually have some work to do today. Yay! Income!

Polite

As I was running Saturday, I came up behind a man and two women who were walking abreast, blocking the sidewalk. "On your right! Excuse me!" I said -- probably louder than I had to, but it's hard to modulate your voice when you're gasping for air. As I passed them, the man reprimanded me with an added "Please!"

The British are definitely big on politeness. I thought afterwards about whether I'd been rude. I suppose I could have said "please," but I thought "excuse me" had me covered.

At least I didn't say, "Move the f*ck over, and don't block the sidewalk," which was my inner New Yorker's first thought.

(Photo: Notting Hill, on Jan. 23.)

Snow

As our trusty meteorologists predicted, we had our first snowfall of the winter last night. Before I went to bed, I looked out the window and found that I couldn't see the tall buildings normally on the horizon through the falling shroud of white. This morning, the world looked thoroughly frozen and wintry.


The white snow contrasts nicely with the colorful houses across the street from our apartment. The snow is pretty wet, and the temperatures are supposed to climb above freezing today, so I don't think it will last long. Dave is happy about that -- he's supposed to fly back from Spain tomorrow, and snow-related flight delays would not be pretty.


A little farther afield, the Grand Union Canal is frozen over. It looks quite a bit chillier than it did a few months ago! That's Trellick Tower in the background. (I'm rethinking my earlier position that Trellick is London's Ugliest Building, but that's a subject for another post.)


The poor waterbirds were just standing around on the ice, looking hunched up and cold.


And the neighborhood was shuttered and quiet, at least when I was out before 10 a.m. The Portobello Juice Bar didn't look nearly as sunny and carefree as it did in August!

Housecleaning

The other night I was looking through my Flickr account, and I stumbled across several photos that made me think, "Why did I upload that?"

They weren't even old photos, some of them -- they'd just ceased to say or mean anything to me. Some were uploaded solely to share with friends on a short-term basis. So I've embarked on a project to clean out my Flickr. It won't make much difference -- I have more than 12,000 pictures there, and I'll probably only remove 100 or so. But it will make me feel better knowing that anyone browsing my photostream won't stumble onto stuff that I think, frankly, sucks.

So, yeah, that's what I'm doing today.

It's allowing me to recover from yesterday, when I walked around Shoreditch for a couple of hours in really cold weather. We're having our first serious cold snap of the winter, with temperatures in the high 20s when I woke up this morning. It's even supposed to snow tonight, which should be interesting!

I got some good photos yesterday, but my hands got so cold they burned. I need some of those fingerless gloves, so I can operate my camera in winter and still preserve the circulation in my fingers.

(Photo: Brick Lane, yesterday.)

Hunting Lions

I went to the British Museum yesterday, primarily to see the Elgin Marbles, those controversial pieces of the Parthenon that the British removed from Greece more than 200 years ago. (The Greeks want them back.)

But of course I wound up wandering around the museum checking out other interesting artifacts, and I was particularly struck by this Assyrian sculpture from 645-635 B.C. It depicts the king Ashurbanipal hunting lions -- skewering them with arrows as they are released into a confined arena.

"The hunt scenes, full of tension and realism, rank among the finest achievements of Assyrian art," read a placard posted beside the sculptures, which served as stone paneling in the king's palace at Nineveh.



Apparently after numerous years of ample rain, lions were especially plentiful in the hills around Nineveh at the time of Ashurbanipal. (This is according to the king's own records.) The lions terrorized the villagers, killed people and livestock, and reduced everyone to a state of mourning. As a result, the king -- as protector of his people -- faced the task of killing them. (In fact, I suspect he enjoyed the job -- the museum notes that Ashurbanipal was "exceptionally proud of his exploits as a sportsman.")

I don't dispute the artistic merit of the carvings, but how tragic! They show the animals in all their agony, dragging paralyzed limbs and vomiting blood. The poor lions, turned to pincushions in an enclosed space by an egomaniac king!

Elsewhere in the museum, I found the medieval British Tring Tiles, which depict an imagined childhood of Jesus. They show children teasing or taunting Jesus only to be struck dead, and other parents hiding their children so they won't play with Christ and meet a similar fate. Now that's an effective way to deal with a bully! Go, Jesus!

As for the Elgin Marbles, they weren't quite what I expected. They're mostly friezes, or wall-mounted carved murals, and I thought there would be more freestanding sculpture. (Alas, much of the sculpture on the Parthenon was blasted to pieces by a gunpowder explosion in the late 1600s, so the remaining freestanding pieces are mostly fragmentary.) While interesting and remarkable given their age, the marbles are badly damaged and worn. As for who should have custody, I take no position.

Dreams

Dave is off to Spain today -- he's supervising a five-day trip with the other music teachers and the senior music students. They'll visit Madrid, Segovia and Toledo, and I'm jealous. I visited Madrid and Segovia, as well as the south of Spain, almost 20 years ago and loved it. The wine! The bread! The olives! But this time, there was no point in me tagging along -- he'll be working all day every day, and my presence would be more distraction than asset. (Especially given that this is his first trip with students at this school.)

Why not save our travel money for trips we can enjoy together, like our upcoming jaunt to Amsterdam? Makes sense to me.

I've mentioned that I'm sleeping much more soundly now than I did with our dogs, much as I miss them. Consequently, I'm having a lot of dreams. I think I rarely entered an extended REM state when the dogs were slammed up against me in bed, snorting and snuffling and moving around. Now, my god, it's like an endless surreal movie inside my head. My dreams never make much sense and in fact they often don't seem to have much of a plot -- one thing becomes another, people change into other people, locations shift. It's all very fluid. But I love the feeling of waking up from a dream and coming back to myself, and thinking, "Whoa."

(Photo: Portobello Road, last week. Apparently Lana Del Rey is a musician...?)

Amaryllis

This is our kitchen window at the moment -- not too shabby, right? Dave ordered four amaryllis bulbs from the Netherlands a few months ago, and we planted them in our herb pots when the herbs began to look ragged. The bulbs sat quietly for several weeks and didn't seem to be doing much, and then all of a sudden, boom! Stalks and flowers. Leaves come next, apparently. (Isn't it funny how that third one is so much smaller than the rest? Genetics can be unpredictable!)

We were disappointed to learn that our neighborhood fishmonger closed over the weekend. Apparently the rent went up on their Notting Hill store, so they will now operate solely from Selfridges department store on Oxford Street (not at all nearby). Although they're a posh fishmonger, and we mainly went there when we wanted something special, I hate to see them driven out. Several other stores have also closed in nearby buildings. This seems to be happening more and more all over the world -- I read about it often in New York. What will we do when every store is a Starbucks or a Subway or a 7-Eleven?

Speaking of Starbucks, I always liked it in the states, but here in England the Starbucks drip coffee is nasty. I don't know whether it's the water or the roast, but I am not a fan. Even more of an incentive to search out independent coffee shops.

I think I figured out my voting problem. Apparently I am entitled as an overseas resident to vote in the district where I last lived in the U.S. So I'm in the process of registering in New Jersey as an overseas voter. I believe the designation entitles me only to vote in federal elections, but that's fine. I don't really need to weigh in on the Middlesex County freeholder race.