A Wet, Misty Day

I took Olga for a walk to Hampstead Heath yesterday morning. It was a very wet day and I wasn't sure she'd even want to go, as persnickety as she can sometimes be about rain. But it wasn't really raining, just misting -- and as long as Olga doesn't feel drops coming down on her body she seems OK with getting wet.

The gray weather was actually kind of beautiful and there weren't many people out. The only sounds were dripping leaves and occasional fluttering magpies and crows. Oh, and squirrels, of course.

Olga had some opportunities to chase her Kong on the sodden playing fields...

...where she got a bit muddy.

Needless to say, a bath was required when she got home. She carried a flower bed's worth of soil into the bathtub with her.

Afterwards I zipped off to school to see the high school music department's holiday concert. It's always interesting to see and hear first-hand the pieces that Dave has been talking about all semester -- including, this time, a medley of marches from "Star Wars." Appropriate, right? The students did a great job, as usual!

Robotics

I spent all day yesterday at school, judging a robotics competition. Talk about something I never imagined myself doing! A co-worker ran the event and about a week ago pleaded for volunteers to be judges. To get him out of a jam, I agreed to help out.

I was a bit concerned because I'm not really a technology-minded person. Talk about machines and gears and circuits makes my eyes roll back in my head. But as it turned out I was assigned to judge projects, which have more to do with identifying a problem (in this case, about ecology) and devising potential solutions. We looked for thoroughness of research, diversity of sources, that kind of thing. Not SO different from my background as a journalist and librarian!

The hardest thing was scoring everyone, and last night, I was beset by second thoughts about whether we'd been too hard on our teams. I kept envisioning all the kids and their various projects and thinking, "Geez, maybe I should have given so-and-so more credit!" But it wouldn't have changed the lineup at the end of the day, because we were just one of four judging categories and any variation would have been just a point or two within our category alone.

If that makes sense.

Anyway, it was all fun and kind of stressful and the responsibility nagged at me afterwards. I hate being responsible for someone else's happiness and/or disappointment. Particularly a child's!

But on the positive side, I got to present an award, which required me to flex my muscles as a public speaker -- podium, microphone and all -- and proved a moment of great excitement for one team. Again, not something I expected to be doing! Life is full of surprises!

Last night, Dave and I watched the movie "Michael Clayton," with George Clooney, and we got all the way through it and during the final scene, when George confronts Tilda Swinton in the hotel lobby, I realized I'd seen it before. I'm not sure why it took me that long to tumble, but it did. I have a vague feeling I rented it from Netflix not long after the Oscars in 2008. Still, we liked it.

(Photo: The entrance to a mews in Knightsbridge, on Wednesday evening.)

Diane Arbus

I just finished Patricia Bosworth's fascinating biography about the life of photographer Diane Arbus, who is famous for wandering New York in the 1950s and '60s, taking photos of peculiar characters. Her images are often said to capture and accentuate the grotesque aspects of humanity, though she resisted the idea that she only photographed "freaks" and did not want to be known as the "freak photographer."

Toward the end of her life in the early '70s, by suicide, she began to believe she was losing her ability to "capture a person's soul" with her camera. She felt like her newest work didn't reveal anything about her subjects.

But she had a lot of demons of her own, going back to her girlhood as the daughter of a wealthy Manhattan department store family. She was prone to depression, as was her brother, the poet Howard Nemerov, and she often seemed fixated on physicality and sexuality, and would flirt with and manipulate her subjects to get them to give her what she wanted. As the rather overblown back-cover copy on my mid-'80s edition said, "HER CAMERA WAS THE WINDOW TO A TORTURED SOUL."

I came away thinking I might not have liked her very much. Which makes sense, in a way, because her pictures are not my favorite, either. Portraiture has never really been my thing, and the idea that you can reveal a person's inner character through a portrait seems like folly to me. You can say something about them, yes, and you can try to capture the moment their "mask slips," as Arbus put it, but what they reveal may be no more than a passing mood or reaction. I'm not sure it's an inner constant. Why is it significant to annoy your subject enough to get a photo of them pursing their lips or grimacing? Part of why she became so frustrated with her own work, I think, is that she expected more from it than it could give.

She also shot in a style that doesn't appeal to me much -- occasionally dark, grainy images with slightly tilted horizons and cluttered margins. She's not as slapdash and immediate as Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, but like them, she seemed to rebel a bit against the neatly composed image. I, on the other hand, am very into neatness -- and where she was interested in exposing grotesquery, I'm more interested in accentuating the beauty of the routine. So we have different objectives, I guess.

(Photo: Our neighbor's driveway, on Wednesday.)

Feather and Staffy

A few minutes ago, as I was making my coffee in the dark morning kitchen, I heard a lot of mad scrambling and growling at the back door -- Olga trying to get out. I suspect our friend the fox is in the yard. Fortunately this time there was no houseplant carnage.

I usually try to keep Olga inside until dawn, so she won't disturb our nocturnal wanderers, but it's getting harder to do at this time of year, when it's dark so much of the day. (It gets light about 7 a.m. and dark promptly at 4 p.m.)

She was thrilled last night because I gave her a bone from the last of Sunday's lamb. She ate the entire thing. It always amazes me how thoroughly a dog can consume a bone.

This is not Olga, but another staffy I found sitting outside a grocery store as I walked home last night. I wish I'd had my good camera, but I had to make do with my ancient iPhone. I was amazed how placidly this dog was waiting for its owner. Olga would be playing in traffic, and following any friendly passerby home! (Especially if they had food.)

Today is Holiday Jumper day at work -- and you know what that means. Time to break out the tacky Christmas sweater from last year! ("Jumper" is the British word for sweater.) We also get to wear jeans. It's the little things!

(Top photo: A feather caught in a tree on Hampstead Heath.)

Harrods

I don't often go to Harrods, London's most famous luxury department store, but yesterday my friend Pam was in town on business so we agreed to meet for dinner in the food halls. She wanted to pick up some things for her family for Christmas.

(I say I don't often go, but I have gone at least three times in the past -- once with Pam before, once with Dave's parents and once to buy running shoes, of all things. I couldn't find my size anywhere else!)

I know Pam from the Peace Corps and it's always great to see her. We went to the seafood counter for dinner, where we had insanely expensive but delicious fare. I ordered the "Cornish mussel pot," even though I'm usually a bit wary of mussels -- I correctly assumed that if there was ever a place to be ensured of fresh mussels, Harrods is it. Pam got sea bass, and we talked and caught up on the news of our families.

Then Pam got her shopping done. She had a specific list of requested items from her husband, such as a particular brand of oat biscuits (but he'd mistyped "oak biscuits," so we didn't know what the heck we were looking for). With the help of the sales staff we got everything figured out, and I picked up a few goodies for my own family.

Dave and I aren't planning to do much gift-giving this year, since we're spending so much on flying home and throwing our party -- but you gotta have something, right?

In other holiday news, we put up our Christmas tree at work. I strung the lights on Tuesday afternoon, and yesterday morning a gaggle of middle-schoolers did the rest. (Which meant that afterwards, the ground around the tree was strewn with pine needles, tinsel and shrapnel from a broken ornament, so I had to request a vacuum cleaner.) We did not reprise the dog penis chain -- this year we went with more conventional decor.

(Top photo: A busker outside Harrods, playing an electric violin. He was really good, and just as I took some pictures a police car passed with its blue lights flashing, giving everything a surreal glow. Middle photo: A tiny portion of a colorful window display.)

Lost Property Office

Every Saturday morning, on my way to French class, I pass the Lost Property Office for Transport For London (TFL), the agency that operates all the tube trains and buses. There's an interesting assortment of objects in the window, bearing lost property tags from years gone by.

There's an ancient iron, supposedly left behind on Bus 23 in 1934, as well as an old Arriflex film canister from 1965 and an Austrian Eumig C16 camera from 1936.

There are stacks of records -- singles of Petula Clark singing "Downtown" and Anita Harris singing "Trains, Boats and Planes," supposedly lost in 1966, and albums including "Abbey Road" from 1969. (I say "supposedly" or "ostensibly" for the dates because I'm not 100 percent sure these items were really lost that long ago. There's an ABBA album in that stack of records, for example, that didn't come out until 1977. But maybe I'm nitpicking.)

Time Out London did an entertaining article about the Lost Property Office back in 2007, revealing that it contains trays of pink false teeth, racks of umbrellas, and items including wheelchairs, pushchairs (strollers), crutches, prosthetic limbs and mannequin parts, and even breast implants. Apparently most items stick around for only 30 days or so, after which time they're donated to charity.

Presumably, then, these are some of the oddities that they decided to keep.

They're quite possessive about them, too. There's a sign in the window saying that none of the items are for sale. But why not, if it would help pay expenses for TFL? Seems to me they need an eBay account!

Leonards Mystery Solved

Remember a couple of weeks ago when Olga and I walked past the old camera store in Hampstead and found workers dismantling the shopfront? All we could see was a bit of old sign underneath saying "Leonards." No one seemed to know what Leonards was.

Well, now we know! Olga and I found the shop in this condition on Sunday. I was afraid they'd have the old sign removed or covered up by the time I saw the place again. I'm glad I didn't miss it in its entirety.

And look at those beautiful old windows that have also been revealed, below the sign itself!

I'm sorry to see the camera shop go, but I must say, I think the storefront is going to look better.

In other news, I'm having a torrid little fascination with photobooks lately. I bought James and Karla Murray's second book of New York shopfronts, as well as a retrospective book of Joel Meyerowitz's work and a Phaidon book called "Photo Trouvée," made up entirely of found photos from flea markets, junk shops and rummage sale bins. Maybe this is to compensate for the fact that it's hard to take my own photos at this time of year because it's so freaking dark.

The father of one of my oldest friends died at home the other day, rather unexpectedly. I was so sorry to hear it -- in fact he'd been planning to attend our wedding party on the 29th and I was looking forward to seeing him. I'm a little surprised at how sad I am about it, considering I rarely saw or communicated with him.

Perhaps you saw that Holly Woodlawn, one of the transgender actresses who orbited Andy Warhol back in the days of the Factory, also died a few days ago. Dave had a student concert last night and I was alone in the evening, and I tried to watch "Trash" in Holly's honor -- but it wasn't available to stream from iTunes or Netflix. Bummer.