It’s been a while since I’ve featured a viaduct here.  Time to correct that:

It’s Glenfinnan Viaduct.  The picture of it above, taken by Jason Hawkes, is one of these.

More aerial photos by Hawkes here.

Last Tuesday, at 10pm, I met somebody at Piccadilly Circus.  I seem to recall it being on QI that actually the Eros Statue isn’t really an Eros Statue, but despite that, we met next to the Eros Statue.  It sounds more exciting than it was.

While waiting for this person to arrive, I of course, took photos of people taking photos:

And on the way home, I photographed some Modern Art:

That’s in a tube station.  Green Park, I think.

When I am very old, and immobile, I will still be a photoblogger, posting pictures that I took one, two, five, ten, even twenty years ago.  I won’t be frustrated by not getting out any more.  On the contrary, it will be my chance to catch up, and with photos that are all the more fun for being of stuff which is now often quite different.

Photos like this one:

What I love about that is that it looks like it’s been Photoshopped with some sepiation trick, but it is actually real.  As is demonstrated by the red advert middle left.

It’s the Shard, again, by which I am currently fascinated, as are many other Londoners-with-cameras I believe.  But don’t you just love, also, those almost biological creepy crawlies in the foreground, between the train lines?  The thing is, it takes me a while to realise how good a snap like that is.

This is the same DLR railway line from which I also took this snap, also involving the Shard, and also involving other things - in that case another Big Thing.

By the way, saying that’s a great photo doesn’t feel to me like boasting.  The real geniuses of such things are not me or my fellow snappers.  They are the techies who put the toys in our hands, that enable us to make such magic, just by going … click.

One of many reasons to keep this blog going is if I find myself enthusing about someone or something rather too much to accommodate it all on Samizdata.  Too many photos of one event.  Too much cricket.

Well, now I find that I have too much enthusiasm for Steve Baker MP.  Had I not already done two SBMP Samizdata postings last Friday and last Sunday, this at Baker’s own site would have had me doing another.

I recall being at the Evans home on the night of the last general election.  The only thing Tim Evans cared about - the only thing - was whether Baker won or lost.  Thank goodness he won.  I had never heard of this man until that night.

Things have been very quite around here, apart form the fucking spam commenters.  So here, just to keep things alive, is a picture of what could turn into the biggest airplane yet:

Found the picture here.  Samizdata and Instapundit are also excited.

The thing about conspicuous consumption is that in the end, it has to be truly impressive, and all these space rocket ventures really are impressive.

What I want is a world where the ultimate multi-billionaire purchase of choice is a new country. Imagine half a dozen of them competing to have the best one of those.  Hey, I think I just came up with another Samizdata posting there.  (But, I promise nothing.)

Indeed.  Try to guess what this next oddity is before you follow any links.  Or, don’t.  It’s entirely up to you.

First there was this photo, which I took yesterday.  And now a picture, which I did not take but which I have horizontalised a bit:

It’s one of these.

Early last week, via the Londonist, I heard about a big occupation of Regent Street that was going to happen yesterday, not by idiot hippies with no agenda (thank god), but by cars – veteran cars, E-type Jags, Minis, boringly modern cars, and surely plenty of etc. type cars.

But, come yesterday morning, I really wasn’t in the mood to get out, and nor was the weather very getoutful.  But I am very glad that I forced myself to attend.  I have never seen so many interesting cars assembled in one spot.  Any one of them would have deserved a photographic effort.  All of them congregated together was stupendous.

The light was poor, the kind where you have to hold your camera still or it’s disaster.  But I held it just about still enough, and snapped away like a mad thing.

There were, as promised, lots of E-Type Jags:

Lots of E-Type Jags and Minis:

Yes, lots of Minis, and we’re not talking the fake German Minis of recent years, that aren’t even that Mini.  These were real Minis:

The reason for all that Mini Jag action being that both are this year celebrating their fiftieth birthdays.

Better yet, there were lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of vintage cars, of the sort constructed over a century ago, when they were still trying to work out what a car was:

There were other cars, some exciting, like the knee-high red rocket car, and some dreary, like all the cars that demonstrated different varieties of fuel, such as electricity.  The dreary thing about the modern cars on show is that they look exactly like ordinary cars, i.e. in the nature of this, dreary cars.  You can’t see all the bizarrely new mechanical stuff, or not most of the time, because it is hidden behind dreary metal, just like a regular car:

But despite the dreary modern cars, it all added up to digital photographer heaven.  Many of the above pictures contain photographers, whom I couldn’t have avoided snapping had I been trying to avoid snapping them, and of course I wasn’t.  Was I going to be the only digital photographer present?  Of course not.  Here are some more of my tribe in action:

But what exactly, besides cars, were we all photo-ing?  I believe I was not the only one who was particularly noticing all the details of the vintage cars.  Like I say, they hadn’t (around 1900 or so) fully worked out what a car was supposed to be, and you can see them experimenting and juggling around with this and that arrangement, these and those luxury appendages, these and those sorts of seats, these and those sorts of bonnet shapes, right there in front of you.  Things had to be somewhat different from horse-drawn carriages.  But how different?

Amazing.  That all took hardly more than an hour.  Throughout, it was threatening to rain, but it never did until I was ready to leave.  I love how, when you visit something with a camera, you can photo it, and then go home and look at it all at your leisure.

Including “Sport” in the category list is because today, many of these cars will have been racing down to Brighton.

I have been neglecting Transport Blog.  We all have.  So here are a clutch of transport-related pictures, which I can link to from there.  Maybe that will get me going again.  Click on the photos to get the bigger pictures.

Photo 1:  I saw her in a shop window, in Oxford Street.  No I don’t understand that headgear either.  It’s definitely London bus.  But why?  Art, I suppose.

Photo 2: A helicopter, parked outside the Department of Trade and Whatnot, inside the huge new front door of the place that probably cost more than a house.

Photo 3: The police still use horses, mostly for riots I presume, and perhaps for public events.  But when there are no riots or events, the horses still need to get out and keep busy.  These two look like they’re escorting some buses along Victoria Street, but they aren’t really.

Photo 4: Lorry for transporting plant, not plants, and certainly not tomato plants.  It’s a joke.  But why all the lights?

Photo 5: The Police again. Police vehicles never used to be this garish.  Click and you also see a bike shop.  But it doesn’t seem to bother with a website.

Photo 6: Seats on some London buses have been replaced by vertical leaning surfaces, so that more can stand in a bus than could have sat on it.

Photo 7:  Advertising on the move.  The trick is to have a weird vehicle that attracts attention.  If there is a website, I can’t find it in my photo.

Photo 8 Again, two kinds of transport in one snap. The Goodyear Blimp hovers over the former Eurostar Station at Waterloo.  Is that going be doing anything, any time soon?  Or is it going to be empty for ever?  All I could find on the internet was a reference to it being turned into a theatre:

The Railway Children was first produced by York Theatre Royal at the National Railway Museum before transferring to a newly built theatre at the old Eurostar terminal at Waterloo.

What a waste.  Still, I suppose anything is better than absolutely nothing.

London never used to look like this:

Click to get the bigger picture.  Which I found while having a rootle through my photo-archives.  Sometimes I love my hopeless memory, because I come across photos I took myself but which I later encounter as pleasing strangers.

It makes me think more of somewhere like Miami.  What we’re doing is looking back towards central London past the Thames Barrier, to the Docklands Towers and then beyond.  Spot the Shard, somewhat more under construction than it is now.

When I took this photo in early February of this year, all that I considered worth exhibiting here of the photos I took on that day were these, of signs.

Around this time of year, I often take a break from regular blogging, and I will be again, this year, starting now.  Before I went on my recent trip abroad, I warned that my usual rule of something at least once every couple of days might take a bit of a hit for the duration, but actually, regular service here continued.  But now I feel the need of a break.  So, for at least the next few weeks or so, and quite possibly for as long as two months, things will only appear here if I entirely feel like putting them here, and this time, I think I can promise some quite long gaps.  I am not forbidding myself to blog here, merely saying that for the next bit of a while, you should expect only whatever you may happen to get, and no more.

I’ll sign off with another of Goddaughter 2’s editings of one of my Rennes pictures (see below), this time of crippled bicycles:

I hate it when people do that to bicycles.

And a happy holiday to me.

I don’t always do cats here on Fridays, but I often do.  For me they signify the fundamental point of this blog, which is to entertain, and in particular to entertain me, rather than just to be serious and political about everything.  There is more to life than the fact, if fact it be, that the politicians are making a mess of everything.  So it was that, when on my recent trip to France, I kept half an eye open for cats.

Another thing I found myself snapping was motorbikes.  The French really seem to love their motorbikes, perhaps because their roads are longer and emptier than they are in Britain.

So imagine my delight when, wandering around the centre of Quimper of an evening, I came across this:

And I wasn’t the only one who felt that this was suitable material for digitalised immortality:

My favourite snap of a fellow digital photographer in Cat-on-Harley action being this one:

Was the cat in any way disconcerted by all this attention?  On the contrary:

The cat loved it.

Here, I hope you will agree, is the appropriate song, sung by one of the all time great French sex kittens.  (I actually have this on CD.)

For ages now I have been wondering how exactly to blog some more about the big and rather beautiful footbridge that goes north south across the Royal Victoria Dock.  Well, here are a couple of pictures of this bridge, taken by me from the north side of the Dock, looking back towards the Docklands Towers, the Dome, and central(er) London generally.

This picture is probably better from the artistic expression point of view:

But this next one shows how the bridge works much better, because it includes the two lumpy towers that pedestrians must go up and down at each end when they use the bridge:

The walkway doesn’t just carrying on walking, so to speak, the way it does with the best urban footbridges.  Instead it sits above the urban fabric, disembodied, separate.  And rather inconvenient.  (But, a great place to take photos from.)

On the right there you can just see the edge of the gigantic ExCeL building.

My friend Gus, who is a structural engineer who specialises in bridges (and who knows about every bridge recently constructed anywhere), recently told me that this bridge began life as a transporter bridge.  That is to say, there was originally going to be a mobile platform, hanging down from the top deck, moving people and things across at ground level, so to speak, while still allowing tall boats to go through underneath.  That makes sense.  It does look a lot like a transporter bridge, but without the transport bit and hence able to be more thin and elegant.

I really like it.

And somewhat the worse for wear, I’m afraid:

I think it’s fairly obvious how this hedgehog was “sculpted”.

Perhaps originally it was just a hedgehog.  But then there was a terrible accident, and they found that the result sold much better.

Snapped by me exactly a fortnight ago, beside the canal, about an hour before I took this photo, as it happens.  (I do love how digital cameras tell you exactly when you took it.)

Like I said (see immediately below), a good photo-trip yields many treasures.  From the purely artistic impression point of view, one of my favourite snaps that I took last Sunday was this:

That’s the underneath of our final railway bridge before we got to where Old Oak Lane crosses the canal, and we went north along it to the station, and home.

Things I like about it:

No graffiti.  They would have if they could have, because there is graffiti everywhere else in the near vicinity, including all over that same bridge, except on that wall.

I used my good camera, the Panasonic G1.  Cumbersome normally, but good if the day is dedicated to photography and nothing else.  Lots of brick detail, and lots of near-evening shadows.

Even the best cameras have a problem with lots of sky on a bright day, either turning the sky white or the stuff below it black.  But here the bridge blots out almost all the whiteness, apart from a tiny bit top right. 

And even that little bit is nice, because look at the contrast between how even the brightly lit bank looks for real, and how the sky looks - bright blue - when reflected in the water.  One of the nicest light effects is when the sky is bright white, but is also reflected in something like water or windows, and it suddenly turns blue and fills up with clouds.

Finally, it’s not quite your usual pretty photo.  There were gasholders nearby as well, and the photos of them came out predictably well too.  But everyone knows about the photographic joys of gasholders.

One of the pictures here:

Reminds me of this, but it’s even better.