Local News and Demolition

A car crash on Friday, apparently caused by a couple of joyriders in a stolen Mercedes, demolished the gate at St. Mary's Church in Kilburn. When I walked past on my way home from work that afternoon, this was the scene. The fallen gate has since been removed, the glass swept away and the rubble straightened, but not fully repaired. I hope no one was standing in the vicinity at the time!

Speaking of demolition, our other shocking local news is that this pub, which I've photographed several times, was torn down suddenly and with all its furnishings still inside after the local government rejected plans by a developer to build flats on the site and instead was taking steps to preserve the building. (News articles here and here.) The Westminster government is now trying to figure out how to penalize the owners, but they no doubt don't even live in London (their lawyer is in Tel Aviv) and have no interest in the community. What incredible chutzpah!

I often suggested to Dave and our friend Gordon that we try that pub. Too late now! Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today, as they say.

Stuff like this makes my blood boil. If I were the council I would crack down on these people hard. Prohibit them from building anything else in London, ever. Some people are arguing they should be forced to build an exact replica of the pub, but that seems kind of silly. You can't rebuild something like that.

I experienced similar outrage ten years ago when the owners of the Sutton Theater in New York put up scaffolding to do "repair work" and then jackhammered away all the architectural details on the facade, subverting any possibility that preservationists would want to save the building. They promptly tore it down and built a condo tower on the site.

Oh well. Let's close with something happier. How about the cactus in the library where I work, blooming beautifully right now?

The Rainbow Box, Explained

I took this photo on Friday on the way to work. I was trying to do something with the shadows on the wall, which were cool, but then a truck drove into the frame at the last second -- and I kind of like the results. Forbidding, sort of, don't you think?

I have had a crazy weekend. I spent Saturday morning cleaning out a tiny gardening shed attached to the exterior of our living room wall. When we moved in it was literally ankle-deep in dirt, old barbecue charcoal, old carpet and plastic bags. It's also been the storage place for a plethora of chemicals and fuels, and is redolent of gasoline. Rather than continue to wait for it to explode, I decided to get rid of all that stuff. I removed three trash bags of debris and will call the hazardous waste people to come for the insecticide. (When I moved one bottle I was dismayed to discover it had been gnawed by mice -- which I noticed only when the contents sloshed all over my hand.)

I also Skyped with my mom on Saturday -- she's got a real estate agent and plans to put the family home in Florida on the market next week. She still seems fine about the decision, as am I, though who knows how we'll feel when someone produces a contract.

I also worked on my new photo book. I haven't really explained this project. For a long time I've had a vague intention to put together a sort of retrospective travel book, with photos taken from my old film negatives as well as newer digital archives, encompassing trips with friends and family over more than 30 years. As you can imagine, it's a hell of a lot of material. I spent much of last weekend sorting through negatives, and I had 85 frames scanned this week. The results were mostly good, and I spent Saturday and Sunday compiling further digital images and uploading it all to produce a book through Blurb. I wound up with a 130-page tome -- and I was super-selective, if I do say so myself.  (There's only one image on most pages.) I've ordered a draft copy, which is supposed to arrive by April 24.

Finally, I took Olga to Hampstead Heath yesterday. The weather has been spectacular -- sunny and cool and clear. Londoners are in the streets! I'd take more photos, but I am a bit photo-overloaded at the moment.

Oh, remember the hippie-ish poetry and art books I wrote about a few days ago? I looked online and found out what the collected set -- dubbed The Rainbow Box -- looked like in its original packaging. Here it is! (The wonders of the Web!)

Kids' Mural, 1978

I am immersed in a photography project today -- making a book of some of my favorite travel pictures, past and present -- so I'm going to leave you with a mostly pictorial post.

On my walk to work each day I pass a mural painted by children on the Abbey Road bridge, over the train tracks. It's a fanciful creation filled with animals and various characters. Cat and butterfly, anyone?

At least the crowds are all smiling.

Hmmm...did Charles Schulz get royalties?

Apparently this artwork has been around for a long time! I'm amazed it's lasted more than 35 years. Maybe it's been refreshed once or twice?

The circus animals look even more caged due to the pedestrian safety railing separating the sidewalk from the street.

There's an elephant in the room!

Inaugurating the Lawn Mower

Dave broke out our brand-new lawnmower for the first time yesterday. Remember what a nightmare it was to have that thing delivered? Well, now we're glad to have it. The back garden is looking pretty good, I must say!

The roses in the middle are all sprouting after their winter pruning and we already have tons of flowers, mainly daffodils and grape hyacinths.

The white camellia is busting out all over. Dave and I both agreed, though, that if it were up to us, we wouldn't plant a white one. I much prefer pink or red. Oh, well -- it's just a rented camellia.

The green flowers in the foreground are euphorbia. We like them, but man, those things are prolific.

Yesterday I did some weeding while Dave mowed and I accidentally weeded one of our plants, a geum. Dave put it back in the ground but I think its survival is in doubt. I feel very guilty. So many of our plants are so small it's hard to tell them from weeds. Dave accidentally weeded one of our Japanese anemones, thinking it was a blackberry. The hazards of gardening!

Short Takes, with Syrup

-- Remember the red beetles we removed from our fritillaria (above)? Well, true to my prediction, there were more (or maybe the same ones) on the plant the next day, and another one yesterday. I had Dave remove them and kill them with tweezers. I'd still really rather not do it myself. Farming out my bad karma!

-- Yesterday I was weeding the garden when I spotted this huge bumblebee hanging beneath a leaf on our butterfly bush. He seemed to be asleep. I was working around the bush, and after leaning over it realized the bee was no longer there. He was on my shirt! I brushed him off, panicked, and then he seemed stunned and I was afraid I'd killed him. I put him back on the butterfly bush, and soon enough he was crawling around again and found his same spot beneath the leaf.

-- Someone at work donated all nine seasons of Seinfeld on DVD to the library. We're not really cataloging DVDs anymore, though, so rather than put them in the charity box I grabbed them. (I'm not sure about the morality of that, but it's a very Seinfeldian question, isn't it?) Dave and I have been watching them each night. I miss that show.

-- Dave's sister sent us maple syrup (real, homemade maple syrup) for Easter! We were going to eat some last night but Dave decided he didn't want to make pancakes so we had Chinese takeout instead. (Without syrup, obviously.) We'll do breakfast-for-dinner another evening.

-- I just read a disturbing article from last September about predictions that the human population will reach nearly 11 billion people by 2100, higher than previously estimated. (And possibly as high as 13 billion!) Much of the growth will be in sub-Saharan Africa, where Nigeria alone is expected to go from 175 million to 900 million people. ("Of the people added to the planet in this century, according to the U.N., one in five will be Nigerian," the article says.) It's difficult to process those kinds of numbers, and what they will mean for the remaining wildlife in Africa, not to mention the rest of the planet. I came across this article because someone linked to it from a recent related piece in The New York Times, about some European countries encouraging pregnancies as a way to combat an aging population. If there's any positive news from these pieces, it's that readers of the Times, in the comments section, were uniformly aghast at the notion that anyone would encourage more births.

The Peace Box

I was thinking last night about how hard it used to be to buy a book.

Remember? The only book stores in many areas were tiny mall outlets like Waldenbooks or B. Dalton, which stocked current best-sellers and classics but would have to order anything even remotely unusual. When I was a kid in Florida we had no Books-A-Million, no Borders and no Barnes & Noble, and certainly no Amazon.

Used or out-of-print books were even harder to source. We could visit Haslam's, a huge used book store in St. Petersburg. New Yorkers could go to the Strand and Portland residents could go to Powell's. But what we found in any of these places was largely just a matter of chance. (Indeed, my reading life in college was partly defined by what I could scrounge up in Goodwill and other used book outlets!)

To find specific out-of-print books, we had to go to book finders, people who advertised in magazines that they would track down whatever book you needed. I used a book finder a couple of times.

One occasion was to complete this set of four small poetry and art books by Joseph Pintauro and Norman Laliberte, from 1970. I bought three of them, "A Box of Sun," "The Magic Box" and "The Peace Box," when I went with my friend Suzanne to a used book sale in the mid-1980s. But the fourth volume, "The Rabbit Box," was missing. (According to the copyright pages, all four were sold together "with a poster and a cube" to make something called "The Rainbow Box." I never tried to follow up on the poster or the cube, whatever it was.)

Anyway, my book finder -- who I located through an ad, I believe, in The New Yorker -- was located in Alabama. I snail-mailed my request, they spent weeks looking for the book, and eventually snail-mailed me back that they'd found it at x price. I then snail-mailed them a check, they ordered the book and snail-mailed it back to me.

I don't remember how long this process took, but good grief -- doesn't it seem complicated now? When we can just hop on Amazon and order practically anything with next-day delivery?

As you can see, I've kept those books ever since. I almost never look at them but they're so bright and cheerful and kind of hippy-dippy that I love just seeing them on my shelf. They make me think of Suzanne and that wonderful book sale.

Years later, at another used book sale -- this time in New York, around 2001 -- I found the volume above. It's also by Pintauro, this time working with another artist, Corita Kent. It's by the same publisher, also from 1970, and clearly in the same vein as the other four. So I bought it too.

Anyway, it's just funny to think how difficult the process of locating a book used to be! Of course, there's a trade-off for our modern efficiency. Border's is gone, Barnes & Noble is suffering, I haven't seen a Waldenbooks or B. Dalton in ages, and book finders (as far as I know) exist no more. Snail-mail, of course, is largely passé, resulting in much smaller postal services. That's a whole segment of the economy irrevocably altered -- but admittedly, at least from the consumer's standpoint, probably for the better.

Olga's Bowls, and Fierce Red Beetles

I used to occasionally write about the great sunlight in our previous apartment, in Notting Hill. Well, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that we get pretty great light here, too. This is a corner of our overly large foyer, where we keep Olga's dog dishes and my former dining room table. That short door leads into a storage space beneath the stairs to the flat above us.

Our yellow daffodils seem to be on the wane, with lots of white ones coming in to replace them. I believe all the white ones were planted by Dave and our gardener last summer. I didn't realize they were white at the time. Dave put some in the blue pot occupied by the horseradish, which hasn't started sprouting yet. Just as well -- the minute it does I'll have to start fending off slugs!

Speaking of pests: Yesterday, when we got home from work, Dave found this pair of amorous red beetles on our fritillaria. He and I took pictures, thinking they were rather pretty. "I bet they're something terrible," I said, jokingly. When I looked them up, lo and behold, I was right! They're scarlet lily beetles, which attack lilies and fritillarias. (Headline on a March 2009 article in the Daily Mail: "Beware the red lily killer beetles set to wreak havoc on UK gardeners.")

I went outside and plucked off the beetles, carried them to a far corner of the yard and threw them behind the shed. I probably should have just killed them outright, but I felt bad enough breaking up their party. I bet they find the fritillaria again in no time!