Smollypop

... and if I were to explore a neighbourhood's streets, I might go back to The Space at the Isle of Dogs just because that's where I watched the world's smallest freak show. And it was a riot :)

Pulse, at Coin Street this year, was such fun.
The clouds were manic.
Shikha was clicking furiously.
And my socks were perfectly matched.

Reminders at the FCO

The FCO is Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It's a little bit unnerving for us fresh-off-the-boat types in the same way the British Museum can be. Huge, huge rooms, sprawling driveways, lavish wall decorations comprising spoils from former colonies and everywhere reminders of the hundreds of years of plunder and conquest.

But the FCO has delightfully retained some old murals, and what caught my eye was this one, Sigismund Goetze (abt 1914), Brittania Pacificatrix:


The people represent different countries. It's Britain at the centre, holding out to her hand to America prettily dressed in the flag (see the red stripes and blue stars on her gown?), Japan behind, with the fan, Russia - in mourning - hides her face at the back (Bolshevik Revolution, we were told!).

On the other side, behind Britain is Canada with maples leaves covering his, er, modesty as also South Africa with a lionskin and Australia with sheepskin. Belgium is at Britain's feet - a naked young girl - meant to symbolise the fact that "she has lost everything but her honor". Apparently there was some controversy over this, so the FCO wrote to Belgium who said they didn't mind.

I wonder if anyone wrote to Africa? Represented by a young slave boy holding a basket above his head. This, right at the head of the central stairway to the FCO!

Bizarre bits of here and there

The mania of the morning builds up. Suddenly discovering I'm meant to be at work in five minutes... build up begins... tearing out... it gets higher... no swipe card... hammering at door to be let back in.. nearing a peak... rushing down the staircase.. out the door.. out the gate... and suddenly it shatters.

Police have cordoned off Penton Rise around a massive metallic-looking truck. Dull grey tape zigzags across the road and two cops shuffle around a bit aimlessly. They climb in the truck, they adjust the tape, they chat with our security guard, they persuade a pedestrian that he can't in fact jump the tape. No sir, he can't. Sir, he will have to just take a detour, please.

Grumbling, panting, down the road, up a narrow lane, back on Pentonville, confronted with the tape again. Students climb the barricades, traffic crawls to a murmur.

Pant, pant. All uphill, already a half hour late.

And then I pass by the other side of the tape. A crumpled tangle of a bicycle. Dust heaped around it. Clothes in a mound by it. Spotted tarmac. And then, looming so forebodingly over it, that massive, grey truck. An entire horror played out in the one image of its remnants. Needless to say the cyclist didn't survive.

And then at lunch, at a nice, cosy, yellow restaurant with a view of Upper Street's pram-pushing masses and shambling pedestrians (it is late afternoon; the trendy types are presumably at work in the City), a loud lady comes to sit at the chair behind.

In a few seconds, I hear the deep slide of my handbag moving rapidly away from me.

Clumsy lady, I think, and don't bother to retrieve it. I imagine a tangle of handbag arms, hers in mine, caught under her chair. Routine.

Slllliddee.

Still? I wonder. How much of a tangle before you panic? I reach out - we're back to back, I haven't seen her - and retrieve my bag, placing it close by me.

She's loud on the phone. Loud to the stewardess. She decides to move tables, to sit next to A now and shuffles over, dropping some things. There's hardly any room between her and A. Their bags on the floor between them.

In some minutes, A moves her handbag over to the other side, looking disturbed. A lady from a table across has said, loudly, clearly, "She's trying your handbag now". And so she was. Reach out her heel, stick it in the loop of the handbag, deep slide and it would be hers. To take and run? To wallet pick?

She seemed completely unfazed though. Still on the phone. She's just seen someone warn us about her, completely openly, but she carries on her conversation even as she gets up and moves to another table. The lady from the table across told us she was trying it again. Brazenly. Completely publicly. As normal as if she was choosing cheese toppings.

I moved back to concentrating on the view outside. The sights and sounds of Upper Street. And noticed that now, from the centre of my window, prams and old couples had disappeared. Instead there were two cops taking a lengthy testimony from witnesses. What a delightful neighbourhood.

view from the window

You wonder why people are calling you at 7: 30 a.m., when you're so fast asleep.
Then you wake up.
You open the blinds but don't look out.
Then you do, five minutes later.

And wonder what the trash is, in white swathes by the gate. You crinkle your nose. Foam?

And then you look up.

It's indescribable, the feeling on seeing a first snow. London looks vulnerable, tamed... humbled, almost.

In the darkest hour there may be light

The first few moments of walking into an exhibition of contemporary art are always, for me, completely disorienting. You have no idea if you'll "get it" or if you can find any anchors within your own experiences for what you're seeing.

And so, this weekend when a bunch of us trooped off to take a look at Damien Hirst's new murderme collection at the Serpentine- "In the darkest hour there may be light", my first few moments, spent gazing at Sarah Lucas' "big silkscreen print of Sunday Sport porn shots and a neon casket (in the darkest hour there may be light, as it were)" threw me somewhat, but then after some meandering around the somewhat random collection, we ran up against the first Angus Fairhurst.

I saw it - huge photograph against a stark white wall and it hit me...

because it's big and strange and stark but then I bent down to take in the name of the piece and the artist and then it hit me even harder because the piece is called The Pieta and a print of that other, original, Pieta has been hanging in my father's room ever since I was 12. Right above the desk I studied for computer exams at so I really have it etched in my mind and the contrast couldn't be starker because, of course, the original Pieta (Michelangelo's) looks like this:

That done I was completely hooked. Of course for a long while I pondered that eternal favourite "what is art" question because to me it wasn't the piece that was engaging in itself but my subsequently being jolted by the comparison of mood and representation between the two pieces and that occurred only after I read those two words - "The Pieta", not from the piece itself.

Unfortunately not so much excitement after that, except of course for a Banksy right across the room: the iconic image of the Vietnamese girl screaming and running after the napalm bombing- except in this representation she's being led on either side by Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse. Her terror is particularly contrasted by Mickey Mouse's bland smile and McDonald's goofy grin... imagine to find Banksy in an art gallery after chasing him around all over the damn place. The irony.

Brick Lane and Banksy

I tried to like Brick Lane. Really, I did. And I know that street harassment is not restricted to any one community. Really, I do. But sometimes communities play definer, and every time I've had something obscene yelled at me, someone aggressively plant themself in front of me and mouth an obscenity, a tune whistled suggestively at me - 9 times out of 10, it's been by an Asian man. Or, as in the flats off Judd Street, very embarassingly young boys.

So you take all the harassment incidents, plus some street signs in Bengali, a sort of generic "crowded market experience" from any crowded market that's too busy to let you sort out its building blocks and voila! Brick Lane.

Half way through, we noticed with some slight irony that the brown faces had faded out. This was about mid-way through, after the great-samosa shop. Maybe just one or two Asians, but everyone else, not: tourist, Londoner looking for a good deal, salesperson... sort of adding to the feeling that Brick Lane had become a caricature of itself and all it had built itself up to be in its many years as an essentially immigrant community. The mandatory hippie restaurant with psychedelic colours. The mandatory crazy knick knacks on the streets. The mandatory pseudo-craft stores. What was the Real Thing?

Maybe it was the Banksy. We saw just a few, but there's a lot more around London. Such as this:

I liked this article on Banksy in The Guardian where Simon Hattenstone ponders Banksy's branding: like Naomi Klein, he opposes corporate branding and has become his own brand in the process.