One of the jobs of random blogs like this one is recommend such things as restaurants.  This is one of those postings.  If you read no further, just know that I recently dined at La Porte des Indes, and I liked it.  It’s just a short walk away from Selfridges in Oxford Street, where a friend had been working.  Address: 32 Bryanston Street.

So, to the details of why I liked it.  One: the food was very tasty.  Always a good start.  And while we were waiting, they gave us little plastic cups of soup, also very tasty.

However, although I like the way tasty food tastes, I now unable to consume very much food all at once.  Perhaps I am lucky, because being unable to eat too much, I am not becoming as fat as I might otherwise become, what with so much of the food I do eat being junk.

But there is a way in which I am often unlucky, which is when I am dining out.  Often, I just can’t manage to eat all that I am paying for.

So it is that a service I especially value is when I am allowed to take my leftovers away with me.  A restaurant willing to package up all my delicious but indigestible leftovers will now have a special place in my heart, and stomach.

La Portes Des Indes was not cheap, when I and a friend dined there about a fortnight ago.  But I still remember the delicious taste of the chicken, the pain of realising that my stomach would not be able to do it justice, and the small translucent plastic carton they used to put my spare chicken in, so that I could eat it later.  I’ve had bags made available in such circumstances before, but never a plastic carton.

I paid about twice what I usually want to pay when dining out, but I also dined twice over, once in the restaurant, and then again back home, the next day.

The place looks great as well.  The outside is unprepossessing, like a fast food joint at the bottom of an office block.  But when you step inside, it’s like you’ve entered the restaurant equivalent of the Tardis.  It’s really big.  It used to be a dance hall, so they said.  And the décor has been preserved from that era and added to, rather than stripped out and replaced with modernistic dreariness.  Plus, the ambient noise was not too loud and we could hear each other talk without any shouting.  Crucial, for me.  I often leave things early for this one reason.

Recommended.

Quota photos, I’m afraid, but I like them:

Taken by me at St James’s Park Tube, yesterday.  Not really sculpture, of course.  But I like the colours that my camera has automatically selected for these images.  And I like how the one on the left has the dirt highlighting the shapes, rather like make-up.

I’ve recently been doing a lot of trawling through old picture archives, and in the course of this I found a directory devoted to Digital Photographers Holding On To Their Maps.

So here is an enormous clutch of such photos, with the little squares below all homing in on the maps.  Click to see the photographers in action, if you wish.

The photos you get by clicking are exactly as taken, but the little squares involved quite a lot of enhancement - brightening, contrasting, sharpening, etc. - the better to reveal their mapitude.

If you don’t wish to click on any of these map squares, fine, but at least reflect with me on how the age of maps, on paper, like this, is now drawing to a close.  The above snaps were snapped between 2005 and 2007.  I wonder how many such photographs I’d be able to take now.  Next time I go out snapping snappers, I’ll make a point of trying to see if paper maps are still being carried by photographers.

My guess would be, yes, just a few.  This would be because the keener you are on photography, the more likely you were to have had a nice camera before the smartphone thing kicked in, and the less likely you might be to get a brand new smartphone, to replace your regular, mapless old phone.  So maps being held by people with regular cameras are still, I am guessing, around.

But, nobody taking photos with a smartphone will now be simultaneously waving a paper map.  Such a person already has a map.

It’s surely worth me adding that I got my smartphone entirely for its map app.  It’s lighter than an A-Z and much lighter than all the A-Zs you’d need if you travelled much, and also much nicer than google maps printouts from my computer, because my smartphone, crucially, tells me where I am.  For me, a smartphone is a book of magic maps which also does occasional phone calls and textings, not the other way around.

Going back to the pictures above, it’s not just the map-flaunting that is now looking quaint.  So do a lot of the cameras.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.  A picture collection is like a well stocked wine cellar.  It gets better with age.

More photos of things past

More because I have already done a posting entitled Photos of things past, as I discovered when trying to save the text file I wrote prior to posting this.

I must say, I do find myself missing this Thing.  If they hadn’t smashed it to bits, I would definitely be thinking that they should, but now that they have, this kind of Thing is on the defensive, and you find yourself siding with the architectural underdog.  I’d certainly not be happy if all traces of New Brutalism were brutally expunged.  We need a bit of it to hang around, if only as a warning of how mad architects can get, when they get mad.

This Thing was situated in the roundabout on the far side of Westminster Bridge, now occupied by the big hotel featured in picture 1.3 below.  Someone told me a few days back, when I was talking about having posted an earlier picture of it here, that it was a G(reater) L(ondon) C(council) office annex, reached by a tunnel under the road from the main building.  So, now that London’s local politicians have moved downstream, to The Testicle, this Thing became superfluous to requirements.

It was destroyed in October 2006, as these photos, taken on October 13th of that year, prove:

On that same day, October 13th 2006, I took other photos, of other things that have moved on, or which soon might.

The first two of these next snaps are of cranes, temporary by their nature.  Who knows what that crane cluster (1.1) was building?  I could probably work it out, but that isn’t the point.  The point is: what an excellent crane cluster!  And I think I found another picture I took of it, this time looking along The Strand.

What that blue crane was doing, floating on the river, posing in front of The Wheel, I also can’t remember.

1.3 is another shot of the Eurostar trains at Waterloo, which in 2007, as reported here, moved on, to St Pancras.

I include the bus (2.1), with its entertaining reflections, because the London Double Decker Bus has now been redesigned, and all other London Double Deckers could soon be Things of the past.

Those wind propellers, on the top of Palestra House, the Big Thing just across the road from Southwark Tube Station, are long gone.

And the final snap there (2.3) reminds us of another kind of temporariness, which is that sooner or later, we all must move on.  That snap is of flowers and pictures, placed outside Westminster Abbey, in memory of the then recently murdered (it’s still unsolved) Anna Politkovskaya.

I am starting to have a real problem with remembering the names of people.  (And yes, this is another posting about the process of getting old, of the sort predicted in this earlier posting.) I see him.  I know him. Or rather, I know that I should know him, and I do know him.  But, I do not know him, as in: I do not know his name, despite have been told that name half a dozen times and more.  Nothing is more disrespectful than forgetting someone’s name, yet I keep doing it, to people whom I really want to treat with respect.

The worst recent example of this syndrome concerns a guy who has attended several of my Last Friday meetings.  He attended again last night, and once again I got his name wrong.  My only defence is that I ask attenders to email me if they are coming.  But this is not a condition of attendance, and he never does.  So whenever he does show up, as he did last night, it’s a bit of a surprise.  But that is a pretty feeble excuse.  He’s on the email list.

He is a Spaniard, which I think makes it worse.  I ought to be especially pleased when non-Brits show up to my evenings, and I am.  So, why can I not do this man the elementary courtesy of remembering who he is?

So anyway, his name is: Victor.  Victor, Victor, Victor.

It is my hope that the two pictures below (reproduced here with Victor’s permission) will finally nail Victor’s name (Victor) into my head:

On the left Victor, photoed last night in my kitchen.  On the right: Victor.

What’s the betting that next time I meet Victor, I call him Vulcan?

Yes.  I spent my blogging time today fretting about the finishing of this.  So, no time to do much here.

But there’s an internet out there.

Here’s a very quick vid, of Kenneth Williams opining (which would be a good word for him to say) about specialisation.

And here’s a slightly longer bit of video, which is a snippet from one of my favourite science fiction movies.  An astronaut argues philosophy with a bomb.  I found it here.  And I do mean here.

Enjoy.

Indeed:

It is interesting how the prices of basic supermarket products now seems to fluctuate rather more than they used to.  My last stash of Gold Blend also cost £3 a go, for two.  Today, I bought three of these packets.  For the last few weeks it went up to £4.50, and I held off, waiting in hope of a price drop again.  Today, I was nearly out and would have to buy some, no matter what the price.  But, glory be, it was down to £3 again.

Could these fluctuations be a consequence of containers?  Is it that containers have made supplies of things like branded coffee less continuous, more prone to famine or feast?  And are we now enjoying a capitalist version of what happened under communism, in which suddenly a rumour would fly around Moscow saying that a consignment of meat had arrived, and immediately the queues would form.  With us, the news that Gold Blend is on offer at Sainsburys flies around on our mobile phones, or in this case is featured on my blog, at which point it’s first come first served.

Or is it merely that logistics geniuses, armed with super-computer-networks, are now able to do sums about the precise prices they need to charge at any particular moment for any particular thing, in order to make maximum use of scarce warehouse and store space?  If you get my meaning.

Or maybe it’s a bit of both?

Michael Jennings presumably knows the answer to these questions, because Michael Jennings (see the first two of these comments) knows everything .

Marc Sidwell, who just happens to be my next Brian’s Last Friday speaker, certainly has a way with words:

Like the space in an Elizabethan court masque that the performers left for the courtiers themselves to step forward and take part, today everyone needs to work out how to create a stage on which the constellation of divas formerly known as the audience will strike their own pose.

That’s to be found under this headline:

The Long View: Bob Dylan and the selfie: The world’s now a stage and we’re all performing

And under this photo:

Are yes, selfies.  Says Sidwell, re this new word:

Even as I cling to my old-fashioned desire to take photographs of the things that I see, “selfie” – the new nickname for a photographic self-portrait – has been declared Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year, following a 17,000 per cent increase in usage year-on-year.

I have been long been studying this phenomenon.  We may not have had the word “selfie” in 2007, but there were already many, many people doing selfies:

That being one of my all time favourites from my selfies archive.

LATER: Incoming from Michael Jennings:

Taken, says Michael, on a ferry between Greece and Albania in July.

Mark Steyn may be a grump about such things as the future of Western Civilisation, but he sure can write:

For much of last year, a standard trope of President Obama’s speechwriters was that there were certain things only government could do. “That’s how we built this country - together,” he declared. “We constructed railroads and highways, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. We did those things together.” As some of us pointed out, for the cost of Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill alone, you could have built 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges - or one mega-Golden Gate Bridge stretching from Boston to just off the coast of Ireland. Yet there isn’t a single bridge, or a single dam (“You will never see another federal dam,” his assistant secretary of the interior assured an audience of environmentalists). Across the land, there was not a thing for doting network correspondents in hard hats to stand in front of and say, “Obama built this.”

Until now, that is. Obamacare is as close to a Hoover Dam as latter-day Big Government gets. Which is why its catastrophic launch is sobering even for those of us who’ve been saying for five years it would be a disaster. It’s as if at the ribbon-cutting the Hoover Dam cracked open and washed away the dignitaries; as if the Golden Gate Bridge was opened to traffic with its central span missing; as if Apollo 11 had taken off for the moon but landed on Newfoundland. Obama didn’t have to build a dam or a bridge or a spaceship, just a database and a website. This is his world, the guys he hangs with, the zeitgeist he surfs so dazzlingly, Apple and Google, apps and downloads. But his website’s a sclerotic dump, and the database is a hacker’s heaven, and all that’s left is the remorseless snail mail of millions and millions of cancellation letters.

And then it disappears behind a paywall.  Which is to say a place where links probably don’t work for you.  Which is why I never pay to get beyond paywalls.  I pay for things I want.  But paywalls, walls I cannot direct every single one of my readers through (in the event that they wish to be directed so), I do not want.

But, I’ll bet you anything, at least this paywall works properly.

I took this photo on Wednesday evening, on the way back home from one of Christian Michel’s 6/20 talks:

Do you think it is gloomy and grim?  Maybe so.  But Earl’s Court is London’s Australian quarter, or it was in the days of Barry McKenzie.  And today I am Loving the Aussies slightly less, although my reasons for this are this, rather than that.

A few days ago I did a posting, featuring one of those faked up photos, about how they are talking of moving a bridge in Porto from down by the river to uptown.  Unfortunately, I muddled up two different bridges.  Michael Jennings informed me by phone of this muddle and then he added to the posting this further clarificatory comment:

The Dom Luis Bridge is in the centre of town, and is the principal pedestrian route from one side of the river the the other, the vehicle route for local traffic from close to the river one one side to close to the river on the other, and also (on the top deck) carries Porto’s light metro. The Maria Pia Bridge is the rail bridge a kilometre upstream that is no longer in use.

The Maria Pia Bridge was designed by Gustave Eiffel, although his employee Téophile Seyrig did much of the work. At the time it was the longest arch bridge in the world. Seyrig then (no longer working for Eiffel) built the Dom Luis Bridge, which then broke the record that had been held by the Maria Pia bridge. The two structures are similar, although the Maria Pia bridge lacks the bottom deck that the Dom Lewis bridge has. The two bridges are often confused. Also, perhaps rather sweetly, Dom Luis and Maria Pia were married to one other.

The plan to move the bridge away from the river seems a flight of fancy to me, although the basic problem that the bridge is very beautiful, very historically significant, and not presently used for anything does remain.

Michael spelt it Dom Lewis, but I’ve changed it to Dom Luis, because that does seem to be the proper spelling.  Or maybe it is Don.  Maybe it’s either Don Luis or Dom Lewis, and you can’t mix them.  Whatever.

Michael, who happened to be just about to visit Porto when I said all this, was urged to send back photos of these two bridges.  He did, for which much thanks.

Here is the bridge that is still very much in use, the Dom Luis Bridge, with a railway at the top and a road for cars and pedestrians at the bottom:

Taken with his iPad camera.  Michael apologised for that, but I think it’s rather dramatic.

Later Michael sent two more pictures, presumably taken with a rather fancier camera.

First we have, again, the Dom Luis Bridge:

And here is the one they are talking about moving, the Maria Pia Bridge:

You can see why Portoans like their bridges, and why it seems like a nice idea to turn the disused one into a big piece of public sculpture.

Meanwhile, I repeat my earlier questions.  Will people be allowed on top of the bridge to take photos from it?  And: If Porto doesn’t want this bridge any more, can London please have it?

This is remarkable:

This is what it is:

The crows that live in Tokyo use clothes hangers to make nests. In such a large city, there are few trees, so the natural materials that crows need to make their nests are scarce. As a result, the crows occasionally take hangers from the people who live in apartments nearby, and carefully assemble them into nests. The completed nests almost look like works of art based on the theme of recycling.

Or, alternatively, like a Thing made with coat hangers.

It’s Number 24 of these photos.  Mick Hartley likes Number 3.  As do I.  That posting was what drew me to the entire set.  Both photos are worth seeing larger, along with all the others.

But what I particularly like about the Crows Nest of Coat Hangers (I prefer “coat hangers” to “coathangers” because that could be read as “coa thangers") is that I have never before seen anything made like that by a bird.  Made like that yes, by a human.  By a bird, no.  All the other photos are very nice, but I have already seen similar things, stunningly photographed.  Technically, the crows nest photo is not actually that great.  It’s the Thing itself that is great.

Just got hold of the latest Radio Times, and so far as I can discern, there will be no Ashes cricket highlights on regular TV.  Google google.  Indeed.  It was true last month, and it seems that it still is.

I seem to recall earlier cricket TV brinkmanship, with regard to the IPL.  The Radio Times, some years ago, had no mention of the IPL being about to start and to be live on ITV4, but it was, and it was.

Let us hope that, for the sake of Western Civilisation, sanity will prevail.

December 6th 2006 was a good photographic day for me.  I took these photos, from the top of Tower Bridge.  And, as I approached Tower Bridge, along the south bank of the river, I took many other photos, of which one of my favourites was this:

I think this looks a bit like an owl. I’ve always liked this picture, but for some reason, for years, I thought I “couldn’t show it here”, perhaps because it is a bit blurry.  But of course I can show it here.  I can show whatever I like here.

One of the great technological success stories of our time is the development of glass, a development which has had a profound effect upon architecture.  One of many improvements made to glass has been that it has got a lot stronger.  One of the ways it has got stronger is that it has got less brittle, and more bendy.  And bendy glass results in unpredictable and strange reflections, like the one above.

Do you want to know what that weird shape is?  Almost certainly not, but I’ll tell you anyway.  First up, it is not an owl.  What it is is the NatWest Tower, with the sun shining on it so it lights up like a bar of gold.  And it’s the NatWest Tower lit up like a bar of gold, reflected in the new London Parliament building.

On the left here, the same thing again, but with context, in the form of other towers reflected, such as the Gherkin.  In the middle, the same thing differently reflected, making it clearer that it is indeed the NatWest Tower.  On the right, the NatWest Tower, not lit up like a bar of gold, but so you can see what it looks like.

Are you wondering what the new London Parliament Building is?  Again, probably not, but here it is anyway, viewed from the other side, from the approach road to Tower Bridge.  Here in London this is known as: The Testicle.

That last photo was taken on that same day, December 6th 2006, so again, no Shard.

Increasingly, I am coming to think of the summer as the photographing season, and the winter as the time when I look back through what I’ve got and tell you good people about some of it, and generally try to catch up with myself.

So, this summer, obviously, there was The Wedding.  But there were also other weddings.  Weddings serendipitously encountered, at places like Westminster Abbey (Aug 19) …:

… or in the Kings Road (Aug 31):

Am I entitled to steel the souls of other people’s weddings like this, by not only photoing them but also by sticking up some of the photos on my blog?  I say yes, and I am the one who decides because if I decide yes, nobody stops me.  Probably someone could stop me, but nobody does.  And how can you stop photoing outside Westminster Abbey? Can’t be done.

The way I see it, if you make a big public show of yourself like this, in a public place, you are fair photographic game.  The guests are all snapping away, so why shouldn’t a stranger join in?  And more to the point, how would anyone Official be able to decide, right then and there, who is a digitalised guest and who is merely a digitalised wedding crasher?  Can’t be done.

So, there the photos are, of the brides, the grooms, and of course of the photographers, Real and digital.

These two sets actually make a nice contrast.  In the first, we see the Real Photographer in action, waving his arms around to telling the bride and groom where to stand and how to stand and what to look like they are feeling, like the whole show is for his benefit, which this bit of the event sort of is.  And the bride and groom pose anxiously, communicating love as best they can, but actually looking more like dutiful than adoring.

And in the second, we see the wedding party emerging from Chelsea Town Hall, to confront a digital scrimmage, with all concerned looking thoroughly relaxed and happy and celebratory.

I recently read a piece, somewhere (sorry about no link – commenters?), about how in the Old Days, i.e. the days when there was Extremely Real Photography (tripod – stand very still) or no photography at all, people made a point of looking severe and grim in front of the camera, on those rare occasions when they encountered one, because if they relaxed they risked looking like a total prat, in what might well be the only photograph that anyone ever took of them or ever remembered them by.  As a result we now get a relentlessly false picture, literally, of what life was like for these people in times gone by.  We, on the other hand, treat any particular snap that someone snaps of us as no big deal, and we grin away to our heart’s content, and trust our mates mostly to pick the picture that makes us look okay.  The whole idea of the Uptight Victorian, said this piece I read, compared to relaxed and happy us, is a consequence of the changing nature not of life itself, but of photography.  Interesting idea, I think.

And I further think that these two sets of photos illustrate this contrast rather well.