jane went riding this morning so i took the girls to henley
we had a good time, especially in the play park. we also went round the Henley Rowing Museum with jeremy paxman who was there with his kids at the same time as us (it’s a small museum and kezia kept running up and pressing buttons on the interactive displays that he was looking at)
day five of the advent calendar picture challenge – it’s a leafy berry thing (or it might be a fir tree or fish bone)
here are my attempts. this was trickier than i imagined as there isn’t much folliage in london. instead i found these whilst walking back from a Christmas street fair in the village with esther, kezia and jane. kezia and i (well me mostly as kezia was strapped in to her buggy) went in search of the berries whilst jane and esther came back through a short cut.
so here we have holly and a mega close up of some berries (twice actual size)
not my best photos ever ! here is a much better one i spotted a few days later
someone has chalked the words Arthur Beresford Pike 1855 – 1965 on the street outside the Middlesex Hospital near my office.
A quick google for such a fellow reveals he was an architect.
very strange someone would just randomly chalk his name on the street, and get the dates of birth/death wrong.
i love mysteries
we’ve just been to visit the fantastic Pollocks Toy Museum across the road from my office.
here are a few photos of some of the dolls:
and here are some dolls doing a comedy line-up (notice the mysterious floating head on the left hand side):
i can’t recommend this highly enough (so i won’t)
here’s a good safety idea. it’s a whistle left in the street. if anyone has any problems they can pick it up and blow it and the local constabulary will come and help them
last year i found a couple of christmas cards in the street and compiled my own lost christmas on a shelf in my office. i thought i was off to a terrifc start when i saw this envelope just off Harley Street. It’s addressed to a Doctor and says “by hand”. It wasn’t actually opened and was lying in the road.
i decided i shouldn’t just take it so left it on the nearest doorstep (not bread) and hoped that it would find its way to its intended recipient. i should have changed the ‘by hand’ to ‘by hands’
a white glove this morning – taken without flash hence the shadeyness
i haven’t been home much this week because of work stuff in the evenings and various meetings for other stuff. i got home around 9pm last night and jane greeted me with a potato which had been in the oven for 2 days. it was tuesday’s tea i think. ooops.
day four of the advent calendar picture challenge – it’s a bird:
here are the entries:
dali winged person (part of a statue of a floppy clock outside the london eye)
searching for a bird picture i also went to trafalgar square which was once famous for its pigeons. however there were no pigeons there when i got there for three reasons:
1) it’s now illegal to feed them
2) it was dark and pigeons go to bed early in winter
3) there was loads of activity because they were lighting the official christmas tree and they probably would have been scared away
so here is an arty shot of a don’t feed the pigeon sign and the bloke on the stick. interesting the sign looks like a tomb stone, which i suppose it was in a way for the pigeons. perhaps john shuttleworth would be interested, writer of the famous song “pigeons in flight”
this is a mysterious sign at Embankment Tube station (for those who want to pay homage to this sign, it’s near the steps which lead down to the Bakerloo Line if you arrive on the Circle/District Line travelling in an eastward direction).
here is ann widdecombe on whitehall.
these blokes are from Brazil and i bumped in to them twice on my walk down the South Bank. each time they asked me to take their photo with a famous landmark in the background. they must have heard i was an award winning photographer.
our old friend big ben
london eye (from an angle)
there are two sorts of sign writers – those who can finish their sentences and those who
no ft, no comment (thanks grahame !)
here are some more:
this last one is quite interesting and may reveal the sad truth behind this inadequate sign writing.
perhaps the sign writer wrote “look right” but then realised he’d stuffed up the word “right”. So he over did the word “right” which meant he didn’t have enough paint to do all the letters in the other sentences.
instead he ended up creating a sign which nearly says “look bright” which he obviously doesn’t. he “ooks stupid”.
my apologies yet again to purveyors of the english language. i know i’ve used “”s when i should have used ”s around my words.
there were no blue ones. so we requested them. then they were mostly blue. so we ate them and gave one to a man in a suit. modern life is far from rubbish
here is a comprehensive website on the blue smartie phenomenon
i found THREE seperate photos yesterday. all of them passport ones (my favourites). They were all in different bits of London and all totally random finds. someone was trying to tell me something … but what ?
here is a nice idea. if you run out of office space or meeting rooms, simply order this van and off you go. you can even use it to avoid transport between meetings. for example if you have a meeting in the city at 1pm and a meeting in westminster at 4pm you could work in the mobile office between 2 and 4 and get them to drive across town during that period so you don’t waste any travelling time.
fit it wifi and off you go.
update: looks like British Telecom have just stolen the concept …
