the new emotional blackmailer's handbook

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Saturday, November 23, 2013

3BT, 23rd November 2013

The River Thames at Putney Bridge is drenched in winter sunshine. The crews of several rowing boats seem to move very slowly, whilst some just drift on the current, as if very badly hung-over.

Three big school girls are playing a game that seems to involve dancing manically with much tossing of heads and waving of arms, but without moving their feet … in the carriage of a moving train on the Piccadilly Line.

After a delightful second visit to the John Soane Museum, a lovely house full of marvellous objects and paintings, some gleaming in the low winter sun, I emerge in to their tiny shop, and morosely view it’s unlovable and unaffordable contents. Just as I am about to leave, I am startled and uplifted by not just one, but two irresistible gifts that I feel compelled to purchase guiltily, there and then, for a very important someone. Only you and I know who !

i'll be on my way to madrid two weeks from today ... but what am i going to wear ?

http://www.sombrerosgorras.es/gorras.htm

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Friday, November 1, 2013

A sometimes daft and improbable Friday

Homeward bound at dusk, the platforms at Vauxhall are crowded, the signs aren’t working, the African station announcer is hesitantly struggling with his syntax … and then everyone on the station looks incredulous because a completely clean and completely empty train draws in.

In mid-afternoon, as I slow down for a level crossing by Betchworth Station, a highly polished green steam locomotive thunders past, belching grey smoke and drawing eight antique brown and cream Pullman carriages.

On the three-thirty bus to work this morning, a jolly crowd of well-heeled but penniless Halloween clubbers get on and argue about the fare. One athletic young man is dressed as a pumpkin … and he is ready and willing, he declares loudly in a public school accent, to fight any passenger that disapproves. “Relax !”, I tell him, “You look great !”

http://www.orient-express.com/web/uktr/british_pullman.jsp?c=ppc&p=uk&cr=uktr_br_bp&gclid=CM-5yanyxboCFRMctAodwxsAZQ

Friday, October 25, 2013

3BT

Alvi greets me at his front door. He holds up two small pine cones for me to see. Laughing, I reach in to my bag and pull out … a pineapple ! You can see from his expression that his little brain is already engaging with problems of difference and similarity.

Walking through the dark rainy streets to the factory, above the roar of two cheese lorries backing on to their loading bays just before four in the morning, the night loader Winston Heavens’ radio is playing. I hear, and then recognize in only two or three seconds, the opening bars of Talking Heads' Once In A Lifetime (Same As It ever Was); same as it ever was indeed, because that riff excites me now just as much as the first time I heard it in the Dug Out thirty something years ago. I pause to stand there in the rain, briefly enraptured

School is out for some, and all along the Wandsworth Road, and down in Nine Elms it is a great sunny afternoon for tiny children of every race and colour to be out walking with their grandparents.