Autumn Interlude

This street near Fortune Green -- the wonderfully named Agamemnon Road -- features a tree that was recently right on the cusp between yellow and light brown. I've said it before, but I love this Waterlogue app.

Blavatnik

I took myself to the Tate Modern yesterday, mainly to finally see the new Blavatnik Building, which used to be known as the Switch House. It opened more than two years ago -- so it's not so new anymore -- but I'd never been. Time to remedy that!

The building has an eighth-floor viewing terrace that wraps around the top, and it's free to get in. From there visitors can get 360-degree views of the city, especially spectacular on a nice day like yesterday:

The viewing terrace is somewhat controversial, because right next door to the Tate is a complex of glass-walled condominiums. Some of the condo owners are incensed that Tate visitors use the terrace to peer into and even photograph their apartments. It's turned into a haves-and-have-nots dispute, with some championing free access to the viewing platform for the common man and others arguing for the privacy rights of the homeowners. But you know, when you buy an all-glass condo, what do you expect? That's what curtains are for!

Still, the museum has signs up saying "Please respect the privacy of our neighbors," and when I was there a guard was standing on that side of the platform, presumably to stop people taking pictures toward the condos. (I didn't try.)

After the terrace I explored some of the galleries, which as usual featured fascinating displays of modern art, including a group of photos by one of my favorite photographers, Stephen Shore. There's a special exhibit now of the work of Jenny Holzer, including a powerful text-art piece called "It Is Guns: Students Talk Sense." Phrases concerning gun violence, and specifically the shootings in Parkland, Florida, flash on a video screen in rapid succession. In the USA, the screens were mounted on trucks and driven around major cities. I bet that put the NRA's panties in a knot.

Afterwards, I walked south and east and then north again, through Bermondsey. It was a good day for pictures, although the sun was low and bright. I passed this place and popped in for coffee...

...because with a name like that, how could I not?!

These Golden Days

We're coming down to the last of our seasonal leaves -- the hazel in the garden is bright yellow, its leaves fluttering down like butterflies, and the Japanese maple is almost completely bare, as is the walnut. When I took Olga to Fortune Green yesterday the ground was carpeted by the plane trees and the limes.

It's been a particularly golden fall. Yesterday morning, looking out at the garden, Dave said, "I don't remember there being so much yellow last year." Whether it's really different or we've simply forgotten is anyone's guess.

Olga had a little visit with the vet yesterday morning. We discovered two more lumps up near her shoulders -- small ones, but deeper than the superficial ones we recently had removed from her hind legs. The doctor felt them but said they're so small he's not sure he could even biopsy them, and given that Olga's last lumps were benign, he feels it's likely that these are too. We're going to just watch them and see if they get much bigger. I was worried they were lymphatic tumors of some kind, but the doc said he thinks they're just lipomas (fatty deposits). Why do we have such a lumpy dog?!

After the vet Olga and I had a nice walk through Cricklewood. Then we came home and I finished my Derek Jarman book. There's apparently another volume, but I'm not sure I'm ready for that -- it covers the years just before he died, and I feel certain it would be full of medical struggle.

On Friday night I went out to a bar in Soho with some colleagues -- a great place with a courtyard, perfect for an autumn evening. It's ostensibly an LGBTQ establishment, but either my gaydar is completely on the fritz or a lot of people there were pretty mainstream. Which doesn't mean they're not gay, I suppose, but one of the peculiarities of our sexually flexible and gender-fluid society is that gay seems much less distinct.

Anyway, after a few drinks, a friend and I peeled off and went to a gay pub nearby and joined the crowd on the sidewalk outside. We were talking about Trump when a British guy joined the conversation, and we were all complaining about the political state of things until the British guy got on a riff about convict labor in the USA and celebrities hiring private firefighters in Malibu. My friend, who's from California and who was also quite drunk, took umbrage -- I think he felt the British guy was mischaracterizing his home state and ignoring the travails of the common man. He got quite bristly and I was thinking, "Holy sh*t, we're going to be in a bar fight! In a gay bar!" The British guy -- who really had said and done nothing wrong -- moved away and I got us out of there and headed for home. Crisis averted!

Jarman on Gentrification and the Tube

As I mentioned a few days ago, I've been reading Derek Jarman's book "Modern Nature," taken from the journals he kept in 1989 and 1990 while living in Dungeness on England's south coast. It's an excellent book, though it took me some time to get into it. I'm finally almost done -- I think I'll polish it off this weekend. Here are three passages that struck a chord with me.

Nov 4, 1989:
     Jarman attends a Bonfire Night party, where the hosts have assembled an effigy to burn: "a Minoan snake goddess in the image of Imelda Marcos carrying a pair of golden shoes -- with a conical dress of driftwood and floral crimplene wired together with fireworks, high-waisted with a belt of gold streamers and breasts of hangers. A small face painted on a paper plate -- delicate as the moon, with an enigmatic smile. Arms outstretched, she stood ten feet tall and burnt like a torch."

Nov. 5, 1989:
     "One of the pluses of the sixties was a depressed inner city, where you could find a grand old Victorian room with dilapidated plumbing for a few bob a week. All this has gone in a tidal wave of mortgage that has throttled the life out of London. The same fate befell Manhattan. How can you describe what has been lost to those who've never known any different?
     As I approach fifty London is foreign -- all the nooks and corners of my student days sanitised, scrubbed, like the buildings, and overwhelmed with rubbish from the convenience food industry. And everywhere clothes shops -- as if everyone, knowing their time was ending had put on their best suit for the occasion."

Jan. 23, 1990:
     "Entered Tottenham Court Road tube this morning down the degrading piss stink passage beneath Centre Point to the besieged ticket machines.
     Cash in the pocket, loose change adrift -- I've never had a wallet or plastic. Unable to fill in forms. I cannot use a public phone without anxiety.
     I fuse in front of the bank of station names, then cross to the kiosk, buy a ticket from the sullen attendant, insert it in the automatic gate that throws it back in my face. There are no escalators any longer, so you spiral giddily down the rotting emergency stairs avoiding the pools of vomit and fungoid walls blistered with putrescence, past the mental decay of Paolozzi's pitiful attempt at mosaic, on to the central platform -- to the strains of some faded Utopian song of the sixties echoing in the corridors. A little death overtakes me as I reel breathless into the final carriage, where the patterned upholstery has disappeared into a slurry of gray dirt -- until liberated onto the streets of Lancaster Gate.
     What has happened to the underground? Crawling with rodent passengers, malevolent dead eyes, stench of damp winter clothes, limp papers, smudged tired fingers black with the world's problems."

I must admit I never found my trips on the tube to be quite that bleak, but then again, Tottenham Court Road station has been recently rebuilt. We all do occasionally seem rodent-like in our teeming hordes, though!

(Photo: Hampstead Heath, last weekend.)

Parakeets and a Crime Scene

Two parakeets showed up in the garden yesterday morning, trying diligently to get into the finch feeders. But the holes on the feeders are so minuscule, I don't understand how tiny finches eat from them -- much less gigantic, lumbering parakeets. I suspect they flew away frustrated.

Apparently our UK government is on the brink of collapse over Brexit. I wouldn't mind too much, except I worry about who might come into power. No one on the immediate horizon seems all that desirable. I can't get over what a shambolic mess this is, and I don't blame Theresa May -- it was always going to be a shambolic mess because it's a terrible idea! In fact, if anything, I think May should get tremendous credit for trying to make this dog's dinner, ordered by a closely divided electorate, palatable. But I'm sure all the blame-casting will focus on her, with the Leavers beating their "leave" drums even harder rather than beating a retreat back into the EU, as we should.

I found this somewhat alarmist and yet not incorrect sticker on a streetlight while walking home from school a few nights ago. I have yet to see a pro-Leave sticker in London. We are a hotbed of Remainers.

I think Dave and I are both glad we haven't invested in property here. Prices are sliding and apparently buyers are holding off, waiting to see what will happen. Of course everything is still astronomical -- houses on our street have gone from something like £80,000 to more than a million pounds in the last few decades. Which is why, if we buy, it won't be in our current neighborhood, sadly. Even Brexit isn't going to make our street affordable.

We finished the TV show "Safe" on Netflix. I really liked it right up until the last episode, when I thought it slid into absurdity. It's still worth watching, though -- the performances are good. Now we're on to "The Romanoffs," on Amazon.

Before, During and After

This is possibly the least attractive photo I've ever published on my blog. It shows our old dining room carpet, complete with its odd discolorations and its random mysterious spots. You can see why we've been working almost since we moved in to get it replaced. (It also had some threadbare patches that don't show in this photo -- they're the reason the landlord was so convinced we had moths, but I think they were just the result of age.)

As I said, the handymen came Tuesday and ripped it out, leaving...

...the bare floor. As you can see, it's a very strange floor. One of my commenters asked why the dining room is carpeted at all, given that it could be the site of spills. Well, this is why. The floor around the edge of the room is beautiful old wood in a herringbone pattern, but for some reason in the center there's just particleboard -- and beneath that, the unfinished subfloor.

We entertained the idea of trying to refinish the wooden perimeter and carpeting just the center, which is the way our bedroom is carpeted. But it would take some work, and besides, in front of the non-functioning fireplace there's a concrete patch where the hearth used to be. I'm not sure how we'd fix that. And, you know, it's not our house.

Here's another view. The little trash can is there because I was pulling all the old staples out of the floor, from the old carpet padding -- which was some very weird ancient fibrous stuff like coir or sisal. God only knows how long it had been there.

Yesterday, on schedule, the new carpet arrived along with a single guy to install it. (For some reason I thought it would take more people to put in the carpet than remove the old one, but in fact, it was the opposite.)

And...ta-da! The finished result. Dave and I are both convinced it's not the color we chose, but we're fine with that. It looks so much better than the old one -- and feels so much better, even to Olga.

Last night we put all the furniture back where it belongs -- having driven out the Bolsheviks -- and our flat is intact once again. At least on the inside -- we still have scaffolding around the exterior, and who knows what's going on with that roofing project.

Hospital Butterfly

Here's another photo mural from the elevator lobbies at the Royal Free Hospital. (You may remember, but probably not, that I blogged the fish a few years ago.) I took this during our visit on Sunday.

Part 1 of the Great Carpet Odyssey was completed successfully yesterday morning. The handyman (men, actually) showed up about 10:30 and removed the old stuff, including the padding underneath, in about 20 minutes. They left behind some of the fasteners, though -- I have to go in this morning and pull old staples out of the floor before the guys show up with the new rug later today. I was going to leave them but I don't want the new installers to balk at having to deal with them.

So, anyway, maybe tomorrow I'll have some photos to show you. I know you can't wait.