aspiblog

As I write this post England are moving inexorably towards a 2-0 lead in the Ashes Series. Only once in all the history of Ashes contests has such a situation been overturned, in the 1936-37 series when England won the first two before a certain D G Bradman produced innings of 270, 169 and 212 in successive matches.

I have been away at Marxism 2013, and then at a gathering of the clans in deepest Derbyshire. In order that posts should not be unmanageably long I have decided to write about things one day at a time, starting with…

Thursday July 11th

Having assembled everything I was going to need for Marxism (having prudently arranged for a few bits of stuff to be ferried to Derbyshire in advance by my parents whose car has a large storage capacity) I caught the 10:56 to London King’s Cross, and then walked to the Institute of Education (IE), which along with the University of London Union (ULU) was hosting the event, deposited my baggage and made inquiries about my accommodation, which had still not been sorted. 

My first meeting was at Nunn Hall, where Xanthe Whittaker was speaking on: “Is the Media All Powerful” – clearly not since thousands of us had signed up to an event of this nature. I proceeded straight from the end of this meeting to the Drama Studio for Jonny Jones’ meeting on fracking. After a lively opening presentation from Jonny, there was an excellent set of contributions from the floor. A personal favourite came from Jonathan Neale who has been involved with the campaign on the Fylde coast when he dealt nicely the “NIMBY”  (Not in my backyard) question: “We are not NIMBYs we are NOMPs (Not on My Planet)”. 

In the meantime, the accommodation team had done very well to rectify the situation for me, finding me a mattress on the floor of a shared room (with one other person) in a private house. I phoned the person with whom I was staying and we concluded arrangements.Thus I headed for the opening rally in a much more relaxed frame of mind than I had been in earlier in the day.

The opening rally was (as it usually is) a superb occasion. The opening speaker was a disability rights activist who set a very high standard for the others.

Having been advised as to buses and where to get off I was able to locate my accommodation without difficulty and got some sleep.

I have some photos below….

This is going to be a fairly short post, as I am about to to do some more work on a Microsoft Office Specialist course that I have signed up to, before heading off to Seetec to do my mentoring work. I hope to fit in another session of work on the course this evening, while listening to live tennis from Wimbledon (well done to Laura Robson knocking out world no 10 Maria Kirilenko in straight sets yesterday). 

Yesterday an eagle owl (a species of bird that unlike the ravens, moorhens and such that I usually get pictures of is not local to these parts) was spotted in the environs of Nelson Street, and I got a couple of good pictures of it with my digital snapper (I have already emailed them to the Lynn News – maybe they will feature in Friday’s edition) which I take this opportunity of displaying:

The job at James & Sons continues to go extremely well, and our client database now contains  some 850 records, and I am starting to get some serious detail in there. In connection with this I mention two of today’s photographs, which are of a car parked not only illegally but quite spectacularly selfishly when I arrived in Fakenham on Thursday morning. My camera was ready to hand, and I needed two pics because the first did not display the registration number. I may well forward details of this to appropriate local newspapers (The Lynn News, The EDP). Fakenham town centre is extremely compact, and since Tesco were obliged to provide free parking for up to three hours there has never been a problem with finding parking there, so I cannot see any hint of an excuse.

England have started their home season with two emphatic victories over New Zealand, a most satisfying aperitif to the main fare of the summer – the retention of the ashes.

I have a good selection of photos for you….

Tomorrow the King’s Lynn Asperger Support Society (KLASS) has it’s May meeting (6PM – 8PM) at the Community Hub of King’s Lynn Town FC, before reverting to our regular first Monday of the month 6PM-8PM at the Hub – next meeting after tomorrow will be June 3rd and then July 1st. There are at least three possibilities of new people attending, as well as the regulars.

I have a veritable gallery of new photos which I will be using over the next few blogs because yesterday I walked to the Hardwick Sainsburys from Nelson Street where I had been doing some watering and today after the same I took a circular walk starting along the Broadwalk, continuing out as far as Lynnsport and returning to the Town Centre by walking along the length of Bawsey Drain.
James & Sons continues to go extremely well. You will notice from one of my photos that we recently had an unusual visitor to shop!

Joe Root continues to score colossally this season, his last four scores being 49, 182, 236 and 170no in his current knock for the Lions against New Zealand.

Here is my first selection of recently taken photos…..

I write this post having literally just finished hanging a new length of washing line (74p from Wilko’s) which now means that I will have enough space to hang any load of washing I choose to do outside.

The work at James & Sons continues to go well, and I still have all my other commitments.

Joe Root continues to pile on the runs – saving Yorkshire after Chesney Hughes had scored 270 for Derbyshire (just four less than George Davidson’s record individual score for the county) by producing a double hundred of his own.

Ronnie O’Sullivan having played no competitive snooker for a year retained his World title with almost embarrassing ease – the first time the feat has been performed since Hendry in 1996.

A couple of photos with this one….

The great Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos once defined a mathematician as: “someone who turns coffee into theorems.” I am inclined to think something similar could apply to data input operators. However, my new work at James & Sons continues to go extremely well – the client database I am establishing now contains 270 records, from which I have already generated large numbers of queries and reports which will provide useful information.

In the last round of county championship matches Joe Root served notice of intent with an innings of 182 that enabled Yorkshire to make light of a fourth innings target of 335.

Continuing my London Underground 150th anniversary theme, I will acknowledge Leanne Shapton’s effort on the Waterloo and City line by saying that her treatment was inventive and although I did not greatly enjoy the book, it would be quite difficult to come up a better way of handling this line.

Lucy Wadham’s book connectting with the Circle Line did not seem to me to fit very well with the brief. Some of the things that I might have covered relating to the Circle Line are: South Kensington and the museums, Temple and the London Underground scenes in Skyfall, Monument, the great fire of London and the escalator connection to Bank, Tower Hill (with various connections spanning nigh on a millennium of history), and a few others.

If you recall the first post in which I mentioned these books, you will know that i was particularly disappointed by John O’Farrell’s Jubilee Line effort owing to having had very high expectations of it. My own treatment of this line would have begun with the history of the Stanmore to Baker Street section, before moving on to the plans for an extension to serve the areas of Southeast London and West Kent which were and remain under served by public transport and how these were deformed by the Thatcher regime into an extension that served the new Canary Wharf development. The natural progression from this would have been on to a mention of North Greenwich and the dome. A dramatic change of tack would then have seen me focus on Wembley Park, and in my particular case a mention of the visit by John Paul II and the service he held there which I attended, which in turn would have led on to some thoughts about religion (from my present, atheist, perspective). After Wembley Park would come St John’s Wood and Lord’s cricket ground.

We are now progressing towards books which I am not necessarily critical of, but for the sake of completeness (and because I have found the exercise enjoyable) I will float my alternative ideas in any case. I would open my account with Walthamstow and a tale of a famous victory for the forces of good agains the Eejits, Dipsticks and Losers (EDL for short), before skipping all the way south to Warren Street to talk about the Marxism festival and my involvement with it. Recognising that I am hardly the person to talk about the Tate gallery my next port of call would be Vauxhall, to talk about the pleasure gardens that were once there, maybe mention the rail connections and of course MI5, and a mention of the Oval cricket ground, overlooked at one end by this station (The Northern line can spare this). Finally we come to Brixton, which would feature accounts of the latter stages of election night 1997 (at a lock-in in this part of the world), working for Lambeth council and choosing to walk the four miles to and from my home in Streatham, which would segue naturally into ideas about extensions of the line.

For the first time in this blog a photograph will feature that is not mine, though it will be balanced by one of mine….

The cricket season (the centrepiece of which will be England retaining the Ashes) is in full swing – the current commentary match on Sports Extra is Durham v Yorkshire and Durham are enjoying a late revival after a day that had largely gone against them.

Today’s look at the London Underground 150th Anniversary books focusses on the East London Line. While conceding that Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom had the toughest job in that the East London Line offers the least scope for finding things to write about I still consider their effort (Buttoned-Up) to be quite abysmal. Two obvious topics that could have been used are the tunnel between Rotherhithe and Wapping which started life as Brunel’s Thames Tunnel, which could then lead on to more about the Brunels and the University which now bears their name, and the changing nature of the East London Line from a run-down and largely neglected line serving a similar area to it’s current state.

Also,  Wapping being on this line opens up the possibility of something about the print unions and the Murdoch press.

Fortunately, I received the letter featured in the photograph below after I had been at Seetec and told my caseworker not to worry about it, so I was able to give it the response it deserved: laughter. If it began: “Dear Grandmother, here is an egg….” it could be no more ridiculous than it actually is:

My last post made so bold as to claim that spring had sprung. This prediction fortunately seems to be well founded – to the extent that I am creating this post at my outside table.

Tomorrow work will start on my outside space since in its other function as a roof it is leaking and therefore needs replacing.

Continuing the theme I opened up two blogs ago of the 150th anniversary of London Underground and the series of books published to honour this event, although the book connected to the Bakerloo line was actually a proper book unlike Parreno’s travesty, it was a very disappointing one, being devoted almost exclusively to the Sony Walkman. Although not so rich in options as the Hammersmtih & City line, the Bakerloo is by no means starved of interesting possibilites any or all of which would have resulted in a much better book than Morley’s contribution. In order from South to North some of the possibilites are:

Elephant of Castle and the urban legend concerning the origins of that name.

Waterloo: The South Bank Centre, the National Theatre, the National Film Theatre, The Museum of the Moving Image, the Neon Sculpture, the walk along the Thames (concentrate on the local stretch as far as Blackfriars), the London Eye, the Millennium footbridge, London’s biggest railway station (and Britain’s first international rail terminus) and much more.

Charing Cross: Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery, ‘The Knowledge’ and London Black Taxis etc.

Piccadilly Circus  – many possibilities

Oxford Circus – London’s best known shopping street etc.

Baker Street – In addition to yesterday’s post this is the point at which the Jubilee line took over what used to be the Stanmore branch of the Bakerloo.

This little lot, by no means a complete listing, provides plenty of possibilities for a book that is a) genuinely connected the line it commemorates and b) would be the proverbial country mile better than the actual one.

the VFR part of the title is an abbreviation for View from the Rooftop, which was a regular feature of this blog until I discontinued it a while back. It returns because this morning I noticed a view I had not previosuly captured on camera:

 

 

This is really a pretext for a continuation of the theme of yesterday’s post, but it does appear that the cold weather we have endured for six months is finally releasing its grip – I sat outside for almost the whole of yesterday afternoon and have been making use of my recently repositioned outside washing line. I respositioned it because in its old alignment adjoining an outside space rather larger than mine that belongs to Arterton’s because of the hazards on clothing blowing off the line (even when anchored with extra pegs to guard against this) and down into the unused space belonging to Arterton’s when the wind gets up (in King’s Lynn whenever there’s a y in the day. The process of retrieval is complicated by the fact that the only access to and from Arterton’s space is via a fire escape ladder, and climbing down that with retrieved clothing under one arm is not nice.

Returning to the theme I opened up yesterday (the 150th anniversary of London Underground series of books) I have decided to post some ideas that I jotted down yesterday evening about things relating to each line that could have been used in books. I will be starting unsurprisingly with the Hammersmith and City line (victim as you will recall of M. Philippe Parreno’s travesty).

Before moving on to my suggestions I quote his explanatory paragraph from the back cover, the only words he saw fit to produce (if indeed they are his): “An attempt to produce a psycho-geographical map of a subway line. It’s a mental construction. An abstraction. The title of the book is from the French word “Derive”. Derive means “drift”. A derive is a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences in a city described as such by Guy Debord as a “situationist” practice.” In otherwords it is supposed to be ‘art’, to which I say: “Art, Schmart”. Maybe a book of this type, consisting entirely of pictures and functioning as Parreno describes has a place but ti certainly does not belong in this series.

My ideas for what might have been used in a book to commemorate this line were jotted down in a few minutes while sitting outside listening to Laura Robson win a Fed Cup match in emphatic style – in otherwords these ideas come from the same amount fo research as Parreno performed – none.

Firstly the original section of line opened in 1863: Paddington to Farringdon, with the platforms at Paddington structurally part of the mainline station (a unique feature on the whole system).

Various stations along the route either have special features on serve places of particular interest. Moving from west to east some of these are:

Hammersmith: St Paul’s Girl’s school where for many years Gustav Holst was director of music – could use this is a jumping off point for writing about classical music more generally if one wished.

Ladbroke Grove: The name commemorates the fact that there was to be a race course here (it was never completed as the developers want bankrupt but the street pattern betrays the history).

Baker Street: Home to the world’s most famous fictional detective (and unlike the other lines that serve this station, these platforms would have been in service the whole time that Holmes lived there) – obvious potentialities there. Also home to Madame Tussaud’s and the Planetarium, both wonderful places to visit. Finally for those interested in trivia this stations has the most platforms of any underground station with 10.

King’s Cross: Six underground lines serve this station. Home to platform 9 3/4 from where the Hogwarts express sets off.

Farringdon: The original eastern terminus of the 1863 route. Also for Dickens fans there is a tavern just down the road called the Betsey Trotwood.

Barbican: The Barbican Centre and the Museum of London (although St Pauls on the central line is a fraction closer to this latter).

Mile End: Only cross-platform underground interchange between subsurface and tube (central) lines.

There is much of a geeky nature that I could have added to this list but did not. Any or all of the things detailed above could have been used as the basis for an excellent book.

Today’s photo features the newly positioned washing line, with Clifton House Tower in the background.