Here.

Via here.

Lunchtime O’Booze is the name given by Private Eye to a certain vintage of Fleet Street era (i.e. when they really all did work in or near to Fleet Street) journo.  One of these (now long retired) characters was staying with me earlier this week, kipping down on my sofa-bed to be precise.  Tony now lives in France, but he was over here for a few days, to participate in a lunch, with a dozen or more of his old Fleet Street cronies.

I met up with Tony on Sunday evening, and we dined out, very well.  Thanks to my twiddly screen, I was able to take photos of him like this, with the camera resting in the middle of the table, and me just looking down at it:

Tony looks rather like one of those South African type villains in The Saint, which I have been watching lately from time to time, waiting for the IPL to start on ITV4.

Next day, Tony departed for the lunch.  Ring me when it’s over, I said, maybe we can do something in the evening.  Nine hours later, Tony rings to say he’ll be back soon, and eleven hours later he is.  I feared drunken disruption.  Which I would have survived.  Tony has been very hospitable to me over the years.  But the evening ended very pleasantly.

To give you a further idea of what kind of lunch it was, here is a limerick, which Tony brought back from it:

An Argentine gaucho named Bruno
Said I’ll tell you something I do know
Girls are just fine
And boys are divine
But a llama is numero uno

And here is a photo, taken by someone else with Tony’s phone:

The big guy - a very big guy indeed - in the middle used to play prop forward for the Harlequins and is now a wine correspondent, the sort of bloke who has a special table in his home for drinking guests under.  The ultimate oh-stay-a-bit-longer-and-have-another-one bloke.  I think the guy on the right drives new cars for a living, in such places as the south of France, and then writes about them.  Certainly, someone of this kind was involved.

Do not ask men like this to drink and drive.  They just might do it.

A while back, I had an enthusiasm for posting thin, horizontal pictures, of a sort that are ideally suited to the blog format, because they don’t provoke a lot of annoying scrolling up and won (the way the rest of this posting actually does), like this one:

I took that picture near South Kensington tube station, earlier this week.  It tells you that the sign is on the outside of a restaurant called “Gessler at Daquise”, which is an odd name for a restaurant, but there you go.  Gessler is a Polish family, and Daquise is ... what?  A place in South Kensington?  A building?  There is a Gessler at the Daquise website, and it would appear that “Daquise” is a legendary restaurant, so legendary that they didn’t want to drop the name when the Gesslers took over.  Or something:

Several decades of hard work and evolution have produced what arguably is the best Polish food offer in the world. Our U Kucharzy restaurant in Warsaw has gained both national and international acclaim, and was awarded a Bib Gourmand status by Guide Michelin for two years running - the only restaurant in Poland to be awarded such accolade. Now we are running a legendary Polish address in London - Daquise in Thurloe Street, which has been around since 1947. Our aim is to make it great again and we hope to see you there in the process!

Here is another snap of the outside, that shows what it looks like:

I didn’t eat that much, but what I did eat, a pancake, was delicious.  The menu looks enticing, as do the prices.  I shall return.

Meanwhile, I enjoyed the ambience.  Not too loud for intelligent conversation, which restaurants often are, even if there’s no music.

Above all, given the excellent light that day, I loved the look of the place.

Here are two more photos, in the Digital Photography Imitates Art genre.

First, a still life:

Perhaps rather too much stuff there for a proper still life, but I liked it, especially the string of lights and all the little signs.  Maybe you had to be there.

And second (note the Rothko influence on the décor in this place) an abstract:

With added mirrors, showing me from the neck downwards.

Most fun of all was the staircase down to the basement toilets:

That’s right.  It’s in the front window!

At his talk chez moi on Friday Feb 22nd (see below) on How globalisation has made the world less rather than more homogenised, Michael Jennings intends to show us some photos.  Indeed, he will be dropping by earlier in the week to make sure that the relevant technology can be guaranteed to work properly on the night.  This may also require some creativity with the seating.

Here, in the meantime, are a few photos that he has emailed to me, together with commentary.  Enjoy.

Georgia:

This is in Sukhomi, Abkhazia, a breakaway non-recognised state that is de jure part of Georgia (and is supported by Russia). Mango is a fashion label that grew out of a stall in the Ramblas market in Barcelona, and is now to globalised retail what the sub-prime market is to home ownership.

Cyprus:

An interesting phenomenon occurs when there is a market for a particular international business, and that international business does not operate in that particular market for whatever reason: because the market is too small, too distant, too poor, too corrupt, or there are political problems. Clones of the business will often spring up. These can be particularly entertaining in places where there is no trademark law, trademark law is weak, or where it can be legally difficult to pursue claims from the owner of the trademark. This burger place in northern Cyprus in no way resembles Burger King. Obviously.

One of the most extreme cases in which this phenomenon occurred was in South Africa under apartheid. Many international companies boycotted the country, which in some ways was a modern country with a sizeable middle class, economy and legal system. (In various other ways, it wasn’t and isn’t.) South Africa in 1990 was therefore full of quite good clones of international businesses, that until then were constrained as to where they could operate, but faces competition only from one another at home. Post 1990, the international businesses that they were clones of entered South Africa in a big way, and the South Africans themselves were subsequently able to compete in the wider world. The South African clones weren’t good enough or rich enough to compete in the home markets of the major internationals, and have subsequently expanded into countries that are poorly served by the internationals for a variety of reason - this means Africa, parts of Eastern Europe, parts of Asia, parts of the Middle East. Politically dubious markets of questionable legitimacy a lot the time. One often finds South Africans and Russians side by side.

Tianjin:

One could write an entire book about fake Apple Stores. The ones in China (this one is in Tianjin) are the most awesome. The entire story of international brands in China is itself fascinating. Everyone is there, because of the perceived size and importance of the market. Yet the country is far more chaotic, far more unstable, far more corrupt, for more authoritarian, has weaker copyright and patent laws and a weaker rule of law in general than many of the markets these companies would generally consider operating in.

Mumbai:

India is more problematic in some ways: bureaucratic beyond words, and culturally difficult in ways that make foreign business models work less well, or at least require a lot more adaptation. (Imagine you are McDonald’s, and you are told that you are not permitted to use either beef nor pork in the food you sell). There have historically been limits on foreign investment. Supermarkets are only now in the process of being legalised. Very large companies can find entry to the Indian market - car makers or mobile phone companies. Medium sized companies - which is where most of the interesting stuff happens - find it much harder.

It’s going to be an interesting evening.

As already mentioned here, my next Last Friday of the Month (i.e. Feb 22 – please arrive at my home between 7pm and 8pm) speaker is to be my good friend Michael Jennings.  The long version of his talk’s title is:

How the globalisation of commerce has made the world less rather than more homogenised, and what I have learned out this by travelling the world.

Which I will hereby shorten down to:

How globalisation has made the world less rather than more homogenised.

As all his friends will unite in telling you, Michael has done a lot of travelling.

Emails will soon be going out confirming all this, and in particular drawing the emailee’s attention to the following, which is Michael writing at a little more length about the kinds of thing he intends to be talking about:

Around a decade ago, a friend of mine decried the fact that the American clothing chain “The Gap” was expanding around the world, and destroying the local character of the cities she was visiting. I then asked her in which cities, precisely, she had seen their stores. She paused for a moment, and said “New York, Toronto, London, and Paris”.

At the time she said this, The Gap had stores in precisely five countries in the world: The United States, Canada, The United Kingdom, France, and Japan. (They have since spread a little wider, but not much wider. And certainly, not much deeper. In many of the countries they operate in, they might have one or two stores in the capital city, but they are not a brand that ordinary people will interact with on a day to day basis.) This said far more about her than it did about The Gap: she travelled to the very small number of places that were its target market - places containing people similar to her - and assumed that this was “the world”.

An observation I made then was one that has been confirmed to me since: when you find someone who decries the corporate homogenisation of the world caused by globalisation, one immediately realises that they haven’t travelled very widely. With more thought, one also realises they haven’t travelled very deeply. The number of interesting restaurants in a city is strongly correlated with the number of McDonald’s outlets and the number of fast food chains present, and it is a positive correlation. The number of interesting coffee shops (and Bubble Tea cafes, and Polynesian Cava outlets) is strongly correlated to the number of Starbucks outlets, and once again it is a positive correlation.

The question really, is whether correlation is causation. Does the spread of McDonald’s and Starbucks cause local ecosystems of food, drink, and other retail outlets to become more complex and more sophisticated? If so, how do they spread, and why do they spread?

I have spent much of the last five years travelling the world, chasing the answers to these questions in various countries and quasi-countries. (Quasi-countries such as Northern Cyprus, Palestine, or Kosovo are particularly interesting, in that the forces that spread businesses and cultures are impeded and obstructed in certain ways, while simultaneously being not obstructed in other ways that they are obstructed in real countries, and one can learn a lot about what these forces are from this.) In doing so, I have learned much about the spread of international corporations, but also much about real estate booms and cheap money. The spread of international business confirms, in many ways, the starkness of international borders and the power of international institutions and how these things trump commerce. A quick glance at shopping malls and high streets in a foreign country can tell huge amounts of information about the governance and legal systems of a country - merely through the presence and absence of brands, and through what alternatives fill the gaps left by the absence of international brands.

On February 22 I shall attempt to draw and share some conclusions from what I have learned.

As to Michael’s question about correlation, causation, and so on, between on the one hand Starbucks et al, and on the other hand greater eating diversity, my untravelled guess would be that both are caused by globalisation, and in particular by lots of foreigners descending on the place, because of easier and cheaper travel, more globalised business activity, and so on.  Some of these foreigners want their familiar stuff, i.e. Starbucks.  And other foreigners welcome the change to get away from all that, and want sample local delicacies and diversions, perhaps guided by local work colleagues.  Opposite sides of the same global coin, you might say.

But what do I know?  Less than Michael Jennings, that’s for sure.  He has not merely travelled.  He has travelled, to use his own excellent phrase, deeply.

If you want to attend this event, email me, or leave a comment here, and I’ll get back to you to confirm that you will be very welcome, as you surely will be.

Back to regular, occasional blogging, following my mad Thursday Odyssey (see the previous dozen or more postings below).

Via Alec Muffet and Michael Jennings, photos of people photoing food.  The one of the right is this one.

The marginal cost of digital photography is zero, which means that all sorts of people will find all sorts of further uses for their digital cameras, once they have them for some old fashioned reason like taking holiday photographs to bore their neighbours or blog readers with, or because they have a mobile phone which has a camera anyway.

Like photoing food.  Or like photoing people who are photoing food.

These people photoing food are described as “hipsters”. But are they?  They just look like people to me.

The reason for all my meandering about in the London Bridge stroke Southwark stroke Waterloo area last Thursday was that I needed to be at London Bridge to photo the bottom of the Shard before it got too dark, in other words around 4pm, but then had to wait around until after 7pm, before going to the Rose and Crown for the Libertarian Home social.  Had I gone home, I’d only have had to turn around and come back again, more or less immediately.  Hence all the meandering.

The LH social was a lot of fun.  There was no one big conversation, just lots of little ones, and one of mine was about architecture and city planning.  The problem of how to switch from a statist world to a libertarian one without destroying lots of sacred buildings was touched on, which I think is a very good question.  Libertarians aren’t the Taleban, but the early effect might be the same if we aren’t careful.  And if we don’t have answers to such questions, we won’t get very far.

Also on an architectural theme, I was reminded of these photos, by the man, “Ian F4”, who took them.  He still had them on his mobile, and reminded me that he had put them in a comment here, on this posting.  They deserve greater prominence, and at the very least, another showing:

I love how, in the left hand photo, a bright light (or in this case a bright reflection of the sun) makes everything else go dark.

The one on the right is the shot of the Shard from near the bottom of the Monument,

It was Ian F4 who got me doing this mad series of Thursday Odyssey postings, by telling me about how he reads my blog.  This cheered me up no end, and I decided to have a bit of a go here, more than I have been doing lately.  So, all these recent postings are his fault.

It is now Monday afternoon, but the end of my Thursday Odyssey is hardly yet in site.

My next stop was at Gramex, where second hand classical CDs are on sale, in particular abundance during the last week or two, as it happens.

The BBC is making a big fuss of LPs just now.  Fair enough.  LPs had a huge influence on the music being created at the time.  Pop music was transformed, for a while, by the album, as was Pop Art, the album cover being a new arena for graphic fun and games of all kinds.  Remember all those concept albums?

I just about do, but for me, Pop etc. was a parallel universe.  I never disliked it, in fact I admired and admire it very much, and I like occasional pop tracks hugely.  Pop is hugely better than recent “classical”, classical being basically a museum now.  But despite all that, then as now, I still preferred and prefer classical, and for all but a few vinyl-obsessed classicists, the LP was never more than a means of reproduction, a window to look out at the classical garden, and a very ropey one at that what with all the clicks and scratches, particularly during your favourite bits.  Classical music was a going concern long before recordings of any kind existed, and classical LP graphics never amounted to much more than pictures of the musicians, fancy ye-olde typography and/or kitschy chocolate box type landscapes.  So when classical LPs were replaced by classical CDs, little was lost and a universe of distraction-free clarity was gained.  CDs, certainly classical CDs, after a brief interlude of euphoric demand-driven bonanza profits, quickly got cheaper than LPs if you knew anything about how to buy them, on account of them being so much cheaper to make and distribute.

At first, people thought CDs would eventually disintegrate, but actually what was disintegrating was the CD players.  CDs last for ever, provided you are minimally careful.  Certainly mine all have, the only problem CDs being the ones that were scratched when I bought them.  Crucial to the cheapness of CDs is that you can buy them second hand with reasonable confidence.  On Amazon, sellers are terrified of a bad rating, and in shops, you can search out scratches for yourself.  Often a shop will let you buy and try, and return if it is too much of a mess.  Often what looks like a mess plays just fine.  (The trick is to realise that scratches often don’t matter, provided they point towards the middle, as it were.  The ones that go with the groove, sideways, because they seriously interrupt the one stream of digital stuff, are the killers.)

So for me, classical CDs were love at first sound.  I keep wondering if I may soon stop buying them, but the sort I continue to buy, second-hand at Gramex or (more recently) from Amazon, continue to drift downwards in price.

Here is what I bought at Gramex on Thursday:

I paid only eight quid for those.  And the one on the left is a double, which I have been looking for cheap for quite a while.  Look for them on Amazon, here and here, and you discover (today anyway) that you would have to pay more like thirty quid for those.  Plus, there is no postage to pay if you buy them in Gramex, like there is with Amazon.  The cheaper the stuff you like to buy, the more that matters.

Which, along with the exercise I get from going there, is why I keep returning to Gramex.  Boss Roger Hewland knows exactly what he is doing.  He knows all about Amazon, and regularly checks prices there so as to go below them.  He buys big collections for about one quid per CD, often within a minute of looking at them.  He then piles them high, sells them cheap, and turns over his stock fast.  He knows that getting four quid for something he sells in two days is a better deal for him than getting a tenner, but a month later.  And he charges more like one quid for less desirable CDs, just to get rid of them and to make it worthwhile for his regulars to keep on visiting.

More and more regular shops won’t or can’t think like this, and in the face of online selling are just folding their tents, to be replaced by gift shops, restaurants and coffee shops.  The latter two being what I did next.

First I went to Marie’s Thai Restaurant, a minute away along Lower Marsh from Gramex, and had my regular chicken and cashoo nuts with rice and a glass of orange juice, and then killed some more time in a Cafe Nero, while continuing to read about Tamerlane, in a book I recently bought for four quid in a remainder shop.  He was born.  He deceived.  He tortured.  He slaughtered.  He conquered.  He died.  His vast empire immediately fell apart amidst further slaughter.  What a pointless monster.  Read about all that and tell me there’s no such thing as progress.

Coffee shops do puzzle me a bit, though.  How to do they pay their rent?  The morning and lunchtime rushes I suppose, which I avoid.

After checking out the bottom of the Shard, my next date last Thursday was at the Rose and Crown in Southwark, which meant that I had time to kill.  I decided to go back along the Jubilee Line to Southwark, and then walk on towards Lower Marsh, one of my favourite places.

On my way there, I saw this sign, which flags up one of the many reasons I was in such a good mood that day:

This time of year is one of my favourites partly because the days are getting longer again, which lifts the spirits of any photographer of my sort, who relies so much on daylight.  But lengthening is not nearly as good as actually lengthy, and February and March are still pretty grim.  Except that they are not grim at all, because of the Six Nations.  This is the northern hemisphere rugby tournament that takes place around now, annually, between England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, and also, for quite a few years now: Italy.

The commentators were all drooling after Weekend One, which was a try fest.  All three games this weekend were consequently very enticing.  Could Italy go 2 for 2?  Could England do likewise?  Who would be 0 for 2, France or Wales?  But those games happened this weekend, not last Thursday, so more about them Real Soon Now, maybe (for I promise nothing), but not now.

One thing I will say is that the Six Nations has a lot to do with the fact that it is now nearly Monday, and I am still telling you about last Thursday.

Yes, my Last Friday of the Month meetings are starting up again, with the first new one being on the 25th of this month.  Speaker: Sam Bowman.  Subject: libertarianism and “unknown unknowns”.

More about why the meetings, again, and about what Bowman will be saying in this Samizdata posting.

If interested, please get in touch, with an email, or with a comment here, or there.

Last night I attended a dinner at Chateau Samizdata.

Lots of photos were taken, and not just by me.  The basic reason for all the photography was that the food was the sort of food that deserved to be memorialised in pixels:

And once one camera is out, I get out mine to photo the photoing, and from then on it escalates.  As well as three old school cameras like mine, there were also several tablets and smart phones in action.  In fact, there were probably more cameras present last night than there were people (which I reckon to be an interesting moment in social history) especially if you include cameras like the camera in my mobile phone.  This stayed in my jacket pocket all night, but it was there.

Here is Michael J photoing two of our fellow guests:

And finally, here are a couple of snaps of our host and hostess, being photoed ...:

... and then looking at the result a few seconds later:

As I keep on saying, the history of photography just now is not that this or that famous photographer has just taken a bunch more famous photos.  It is that we all now have these things.

Incoming from Michael J:

A link.

I could just use a nice little slice or two of Helvetica on my toast.

I met up with a friend in Kensal Green last night, and after we’d dined upstairs (here), we went back downstairs to watch those Jamaicans do their 1-2-3 in the 200 metres.

I have been trying to ignore the Olympics, and I actually did (I now realise) pretty much completely ignore the Beijing Olympics.  But if you live in London and the Olympics are in London, remaining indifferent to the Olympics is hard, especially in a place containing lots of Jamaicans, or at any rate Jamaicans for the night.

I took some photos of the screen, featuring Usain Bolt taking some photos of his own.

My photos were wonky and taken from way off to the side, like this:

But, stretched out and rotated a bit, that one looks quite good:

Here is a more photographically professional treatment of the same story, and they have some of the photos that Bolt himself took.

My favourite Bolt snap is this one:

How many photographers do you see there?

The man in the red circle is the owner of the camera Bolt borrowed.  He was obviously not in any doubt that his camera would be returned to him by Bolt (rather than it going walkies in all the excitement), and he was a very happy man.

Emails are now being exchanged about having a Transport Blog dinner, here:

… which is on the top of a multi-story car park near Peckham Rye railway station.

It seems like this won’t happen for a month or so, but I shan’t be waiting that long to visit this enticing spot, which seems to be a sort of sixties brutalist version of this.

Designed, the little cafe bit on the top that is, by two ladies called Paloma and Lettice, at whose website I also found (scroll sideways a bit) this lascivious image:

Click on that to get it considerably bigger.

I wonder if Paloma (Gormley) is any relation to Anthony (Gormley).  Yes.  Daughter.

Indeed.  As earlier explained, I’m now concentrating most of my Fixed Quantity of Blogging on Samizdata.  But you never know when BrianMicklethwaitDotCom might come in handy again, so I will keep it in business with occasional postings.  Who knows what the future may bring?

Good things for you, I hope.