Pith Helmet

I've slept a little later than usual this morning. I looked at the clock and it was 3:30, and then I dozed and looked again and it was 4:30, and then suddenly it was 6:30! Fortunately, I can be a little more leisurely about getting to work today, since the kids aren't in school and the teachers are all having parent conferences.

I spent yesterday shelf-reading. Dave asked me last night what that means, so I'll tell you too, just in case you're not sure. It means running a report in our library system that lists all the books in the order in which they should be shelved, and then going down each shelf -- carrying an iPad displaying the list -- making sure they're all in order and none are misplaced. It may sound tedious, but I think it's fun.

I did find a few books that were nowhere near where they were supposed to be, and identified two that seem to be missing -- so I feel like I'm achieving something. As I told Dave last night, one needs a certain kind of personality to enjoy a task like that, and fortunately for me, I have it.

I also weeded some books that seem old or out of date. To wit:

"The Present Day," in this case, means 1979, when this book was published.

It's full of these strangely awkward drawings. I meant to capture the woman with the turned-up hat brim, but I decided I had to show you the other woman too. Did people really wear pith helmets with head scarves in 1970? Maybe in Rhodesia.

Every time I find a book like this, I wonder how it escaped all our previous weeding. Last spring, when we packed up and reorganized the entire library and moved all the books, we got rid of hundreds and hundreds of old volumes. How did we miss this one? It's a mystery. Anyway, it's in the charity box now.

When I came home, I cleaned up some stuff in the garden. We finally took out the lavender bush that I found several years ago -- half of it had died and it had flopped over so that it was lying on some other plants, and although we staked it up nothing seemed to work very well. Dave's been wanting to get rid of it for ages and I resisted but I finally gave in. We got five years out of it, and now I can use that space for foxgloves.

(Top photo: A fallen leaf on Abbey Road, a few days ago.)

The Screaming Hand

Walking with Olga back from Wormwood Scrubs on Sunday, I passed these vivid posters. This is the "Screaming Hand," a well-known trademark for Santa Cruz skateboards. Kind of an interesting image to find in northwest London, but I guess skate culture is everywhere.

Here's the story of the creation of the hand, by artist Jim Phillips, in 1985. I was once in Santa Cruz myself, way back in 1991 (when the hand was only six years old!). Unfortunately I don't remember much about it. I drove through with a friend from San Francisco on the way to Big Sur. Here's what I wrote in my journal afterwards: "The drive to Santa Cruz was hell. All kinds of traffic and road blockage -- it was really irritating and my temper was short. But after Santa Cruz things opened up as we drove south through Monterey and Carmel, past vegetable fields, pastures on the coast and stylish beach homes."

That's my sole exposure to Santa Cruz -- traffic. I have even less experience with skateboarding.

Speaking of obscure sports references, take a look again at yesterday's post. Do you see on the ceramics shop window the creature at lower left saying "COYS"? I wondered what on Earth that meant. Well, through the magic of Google, I learned that it's a football (soccer) reference that means "Come on You Spurs!" It's a reference to the Tottenham Hotspur football club. Apparently our ceramics dealers are fans.

Today and tomorrow are going to be fairly low-key days at work. The teachers are all having parent-teacher conferences, which used to happen in massive face-to-face gatherings in the school gym but are now held entirely on Zoom, much to everyone's satisfaction. There are no kids around, so for me it's time to work on catch-up projects in the library. I think I'll just do some shelf organizing and weeding.

Remember how I said Dave got his Covid booster shot not too long ago? Well, after the fact, he got a very peculiar letter from the NHS saying he needed a third shot -- and that it should not be considered a booster but part of his original set of vaccinations. (This is because his Crohn's medication leaves him somewhat immunocompromised.) He was told if he'd already had a third shot, he could ignore the letter. And if he'd already had a booster, he could likewise ignore it. So we ignored it, but he's still scratching his head about whether the shot he got counts as a booster or not, and what the difference might be, if any. Mystifying!

Spooky Ceramics

The ceramics shop on the high street has adopted a Halloween decorating theme.

I've never been in this place. It's a paint-it-yourself establishment where you buy the blank and the glazes, sit at a table and decorate your piece, and then they fire it for you and you pick it up when it's done. I see tons of people there, so it seems pretty popular.

I doubt that anything I painted would turn out this well!

Slugs and Space Aliens

Today, a random collection of photos from my iPhone.

First, an exotic fowl seen perched on a wall on our street. I am forever finding these little toys from baby strollers littering the sidewalks. I don't know why the manufacturers can't make them so they don't fall off. (I guess that guarantees parents will buy more?)

Look! It's the Donald Trump smiley-face shopping bag!

A poem (you know it's dubious when it has to TELL you it's a poem) on the side of some discarded furniture near Willesden Junction. (Nowhere near Abbey Road, incidentally.)

Remember my shot of Olga in the tiled shop entrance? Well, the entrance has since become littered with fallen leaves, so I thought I'd do a follow-up picture. She's still not thrilled about being asked to stand there.

Some scary-looking graffiti on Billy Fury Way, just in time for Halloween.

This is an interstellar brand of "cosmic corn snacks." I would totally have eaten these a kid.

Here's another over-a-wall picture of a construction site. This used to be an old pub, and not only has it been torn down but they've excavated a gigantic pit in its place. What's going in here, next to the Finchley Road and Frognal overground station, I have no idea. I suppose I could look it up if I get motivated.

(Addendum: I got motivated. A block of flats was announced several years ago for the site, but it was supposed to be finished in 2019. So either there have been significant delays or perhaps the project has evolved into something else, or been sold to another owner. Who knows.)

A mischievous doodle some kids left on a whiteboard at work -- an astronaut, I believe, noting that there is indeed life on Mars. (Funny how life on Mars continues to be a myth that haunts our imaginations, even though we've pretty much proven there's nothing there but rocks.)

And finally, I once again came upon a parade of slugs (a dozen in this photo alone) descending this tree and crawling along the sidewalk, all in the same direction. This is the second time I've witnessed this phenomenon at this location. Do these slugs live or breed in that tree? What makes them come down to the ground? Where do they go from there? (It's mostly paved in the immediate vicinity.)

Very mysterious!

Latimer and Wormwood

A couple of nights ago, Dave and I were watching "Ted Lasso," like the rest of the planet, and suddenly I recognized where they were filming. "Hey, that's the Westway!" I exclaimed -- the soccer fields under the elevated highway known as the Westway, near a large sports center. I used to walk Olga there all the time when we lived in Notting Hill. I'd go to photograph the omnipresent and ever-changing graffiti.

Olga and I hadn't been back to the Westway since we moved, but we could get there easily by taking the tube to the Latimer Road stop. So that was our outing yesterday.

It's hard to tell with dogs, but I would swear Olga remembered the place. She seemed so comfortable there.

The area has been transformed by the Grenfell Tower disaster of 2017 -- the fire that swept up the side of a newly refurbished council-owned high-rise, killing 72 people. The Westway Sports Centre is practically in the shadow of Grenfell, and there are memorials and murals everywhere. (The criminal inquiry into the fire, incidentally, is still dragging on. The government is considering tearing down the remains of the building, over the objections of some survivors and relatives of victims.)

After that, we walked up Latimer and North Pole roads to Wormwood Scrubs, one of Olga's favorite spots to run wild and chase squirrels.

You might remember the last time we were at Wormwood, back in April, a massive utilities construction project had begun that required the clearance of some of the woodlands. There was a protest camp near the area being cleared. Well, that's gone now.

All we found at the site of the camp were some stacks of old debris and, weirdly, a grimy unicorn hobby horse.

Oh, and not too far away, some very autumnal mushrooms.

We walked through the Scrubs, enjoying the wilderness around the construction zones, and then made our way back to West Hampstead via the overground railroad from Willesden Junction. It was quite a walk for Olga at this stage of her life and she's still asleep as I write. But she had a good time and I enjoyed being able to take her to once-familiar places she knew as a young dog.

I finished "Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze," which was better than I thought it might be. Given that it was written in the 1930s I feared it would contain outdated Asian stereotypes, and it kind of does -- the author refers to workers as "coolies," for example. Still, it wasn't as scary as I thought it might be.

Whenever I hear the term "coolie" I think back to a woman my brother and I knew when we were kids in Florida who had a shrub in her yard that produced flowers she called "coolie hats." (I see that Wikipedia gives it the more acceptable names "Chinese hat" or "Mandarin hat.") I remember collecting some while visiting her and drying them for display in our house. Those things were kicking around for ages.

Begonia and Teenage Celebrity Crushes

Dave bought a begonia several months ago, and to our surprise it's now blooming. I don't know why we're surprised, exactly, because I know begonias bloom. I guess we bought it primarily for the leaves so we forgot to even consider flowers.

Dave is working part of each day this weekend, recording students who want to audition for Honor Band. This was an annual event before the pandemic, but there hasn't been an Honor Band for the past year or two -- a band composed of auditioning students from many different international schools, assembled through this organization. So it's nice that they're finally able to put one together again.

I, meanwhile, am working my way through yet another Newbery book -- "Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze," from 1932, which is OK but isn't exactly knocking my socks off. I'm about two-thirds of the way through and my goal is to finish it today. We'll see.

I also took the dog to the cemetery, where we saw:

...lots of dew on the grass...

...and the bright berries of wild arum blazing up like flaming, poisonous candles...

...and hawkweed still in bloom.

And then, while walking home, I found this (below).

It's a curious little drawing. I think it's a masked woman? Anyway, it's very small, and I'm not sure how I noticed it lying on the sidewalk, but I did.

Once home again, I watched "The Blue Lagoon," which we recorded from TV months ago. I hadn't seen it in many, many years and I remember it being quite controversial when it was first released -- Brooke Shields being 14 at the time. At least she had a body double for the nude scenes. (Her co-star Christopher Atkins was already 18.) It seems harmless enough -- mostly it made me want to visit Fiji -- but I wonder if it would be made in the same way nowadays. I suspect they'd cast an older actress, and rightly so.

I had quite a crush on Christopher Atkins when I was in high school (as did plenty of other people at that time). I remember sneaking off to the theater one afternoon in 1983 to see "A Night in Heaven," in which he played a male stripper -- it was a terrible movie but he made the ticket price worthwhile. (Plus it took place in my home state, Florida, on the so-called "Space Coast" near Titusville.) I wasn't out to anyone else back then and the whole excursion felt quite illicit. It's hard to believe he's 60 years old now. To employ a clichéd phrase, where does the time go?

I also had a teenage crush on Lance Kerwin. Remember him? And then he became an evangelical minister and had some legal problems. Can I pick 'em, or what?

Now he's also 60.

Christ!

Bright Leaves and Dark News

I can't resist another post featuring our coleus plants. They're so colorful and lush. I don't know why I don't grow these all the time.

I'm sure you've seen the news about the UK lawmaker who was murdered yesterday while meeting with constituents in an apparent act of terrorism. That's certainly the big news in the UK at the moment. Shocking, and coming not too many years after the murder of another MP by a right-wing extremist, it has shown that these representatives need better security. It's a shame that they can no longer safely meet with the people they represent without a posse of police alongside them, but that seems to be where we are these days.

I've said it before and I'll say it again -- the world has gone crazy. Or maybe it was always crazy. I imagine people in the late 1960s must have felt the same, amid the assassinations and the Vietnam War and the fallout from the Civil Rights era in the USA, as well as the Prague Spring and Biafran War and all the other world conflicts of the time. Whenever I start despairing about current events I try to remember that we've been here before. We've even had pandemics before. None of this is really new, except that now we have the added power of the Internet stirred into the mix.

Our mask policy at work is still scheduled to change as of Monday, to one of voluntary rather than mandatory masking. This is interesting given that England is apparently experiencing "sky-high Covid rates" (in the words of The Guardian) and boosters are still rolling out, as well as vaccines for young people. I still plan to remove my mask when I'm alone at my desk but I think I'll wear it when I'm around people -- although how effective is that when exhaled droplets can stay suspended in the air for long periods of time, as has been reported? I know some of my co-workers are nervous about the kids no longer masking, particularly, and I wonder if I owe it to them, especially, to keep my mask on. I want to be sensitive to their concerns but I really feel like I must get that thing off my face for at least part of the day. Aaaaaargh! Mask ethics!

Anyway, I did not intend for this post to be so somber. Sorry about that.

On a more positive note, I'm hoping to do some gardening this weekend, getting some foxgloves into the ground and doing some more autumn pruning and trimming. I have to ration the trimming because the council will only pick up two bags of garden waste per week. Any more than that and they leave it behind!