April 24th - April 30th 2006
Sunday Wood Street
Saturday Dairy product
Friday Taking sides
Thursday Badgered
Wednesday Git
Tuesday Marathong
Monday Very Modern
Sunday 30th April
Wood Street, Spring 2006
Saturday 29th April
Rich confusion amongst the op-ed nabobs of the street known as Fleet, faced with revelations concerning what the Telegraph insists on descrbing as John Prescott's lurid affair.
Is it low comedy (as typified by The Times image of 'a couple of well-built mastodons frolicking in a swamp') or political tragedy (cf the Daily Mail's wistful talk of a government in meltdown)?
Coupled with the equally farcial 'news' of nurses booing a Health Secretary (what, she expected flowers?) and a Home Secretary absent-mindedly forgetting to banish criminal foreigners (debts to society being entirely payable only by British nationals), this one will doubtless run and run.
My thoughts trail along baser lines. The initial, unlikely, thought of John Prescott as a sex-object reminded me of nothing so much as the apocryphal description of being made love to by Nicholas Soames: "like being fallen on by a very large wardrobe with a very small key."
Thereafter my creative dyslexia kicked in, such that I cannot now read of Prescott's mistress as having any other job than, sorry, Dairy Secretary.
Friday 28th April
Late-breaking news that Luiz Felipe Scolari has rejected the FA's offer of the chance to manage the England squad might be what you call a lose-lose situation.
The FA loses out because, once again, it's make to look like an utter bunch of twats.
And the crusading gay press loses out, because everybody was hot to trot with the 'Is Scolari a homophobe?' stories.
(His position seemed perfectly logical to me: he didn't want anybody in his squad who played for the other side.)
Thursday 27th April
East End boy savaged to death by Badger
Wednesday 26th April
Even so, it was Allen who remained the infuriating villain of the piece.
Despite his advancing years, he apparently still regards himself as a combination of fearless iconoclast and lovable rogue.
Instead he came across more than ever as part phoney and part git.
- The Telegraph reviewer lays into Keith Allen's over-central role in 'Michael Carroll - King of Chavs'
Tuesday 25th April
I was really quite pleased with my performance at this Sunday's London Marathon.
Despite grave misgivings as I crawled into bed with dawn breaking over the route, I managed to obey my alarm in time to crawl back out again at 10am, and made it up to The Highway just in time to see the front-runners passing. (At least, I assume they were the front-runners: small, black and moving kinda fast.)
As I ambled eastward along the Highway, overtaken by the odd wheelchair, I soon found my natural pace; pause to take a few photos, spark up another fag, force onwards for another fifty yards or so, repeat.
As Narrow Street hove into view, with fun runners just starting to be noticeable amongst the crowd of runners, I congratulated myself on a goal achieved: despite persistent rain, a good 40 or so images captured.
It doesn't matter how good they might or might not be: this was not about competition, this was for me.
The return journey was almost as enjoyable - though, to be honest, a certain fatigue was beginning to set in.
Another forty photos, another twenty minutes, and I was home, preparing the Fullest English Breakfast you ever saw:
Monday 24th April
The early Modernists didn't make perfect guesses about what the future would be like, but they played a large part in determining how it would look. They understood the implications of new technologies for the appearance of manufactured goods and industrially manufactured buildings.
Because the look they established for such things is so familiar, because they still feel 'modern', you can be taken aback by the way the originals of everyday things have aged.
Time adds a glow to old walnut and elegance to faded tapestries, but the discoloured plywood of a Breuer chair or the chipped paint of an Aalto, the yellowed paper of a Le Corbusier drawing or photographic prints which have begun to fade, have the poignancy of wounded veterans at a memorial parade.
- Peter Campbell reviews the V&A's Modernism exhibition in the London Review of Books
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