next door to the cat show was a soft play kids thing so we went there for 2 hours this afternoon. kezia is qute liable to get stuck in the middle of these things. she’s driven by her determination which often takes her beyond her capabilities.
the end result is that i spent two hours following her up and down slides and ladders and all sorts and generally squashing down gaps which 5 years old find tricky to fit through.
but it’s cheaper than gym membership.
we went to a very strange cat show this afternoon. it was siamese cats i think.
in this show everyone was a winner and by the time we got there most cats couldn’t see out of their cages because of the amount of rosettes and trophies attached:
The cat-type is breed 32 which sounds like a government feline experiment to me. these strange felines were probably developed during the cold war. the rosettes are won by cats decrypting secret message produced using the most advanced algorithms.
It looks like an innocent cat show but is in fact a spooks convention …
jane gave esther, kezia and myself a long shopping list and we spent a ‘happy’ few hours playing find-the-foodstuff round Asda.
here are kezia and esther having a telly-tubby style big supermarket hug
and here they are playing toilet brushes like trumpets.
if you think the blog entries today have been a bit tedious, then you haven’t seen what my working day has been like ! it’s all thanks to all the stuff published here yesterday. Yes, they are all as exciting as they sound. [actually some of them are quite exciting but you won’t catch me admitting that in public]
but never mind. because it’s now the bank holiday weekend. hoorah for 3 days of non-work (for me at least – jane’s still marking exam papers).
it’s a random roast potato on our doorstep. how bizarre.
great font. ‘pub door sans serif’ i think
this pub has a secret room that no-one can find an entrance to according the bar man. i said i didn’t believe him. “there’s always a hatch” i said. but apparently there isn’t.
here is ian bowling. i think this photo is fantastic. the exposure time was just the right amount to keep his aura !
click for big
here are two people we’ve seen before. it’s our old friend Big Eye and the lovely Sally.
it was bowling this evening. not entirely what i expected. bowling is all about cardboard shoes. but this was in a pub. so it should have been about throwing mishapen chunks of wood.
but this being the south of england it was about throwing small round balls (about the size of a baseball i think) at 9 sticks of wood. you have to put them back up yourself if someone knocks them down too.
anita organised it (very efficiently):
and here is everyone eating:
one of the great things about london is the mixing of people from amazingly diverse backgrounds.
i spotted these bollards just off the Edgware Road which is an appropriate place to see this multi-cultural bollard meeting.
i paid the gentleman holding this sign 30 pence for a photo of his sign. he said “30 pence isn’t any good to me mate” which wasn’t very greatful. i gave him the money anyway. just in case you know.
it was a job he wanted and not money apparently. and it was his first day homeless. a cause for celebration perhaps.
i’ll go looking for him next week and see if he has incremented this sign or produced a new one. i may also get an update on how the 30 pence is going.
it’s cold and i’m inappropriately dressed. so i went to the local charity shop and bought a long armed shirt for warmth (i have no meetings today so casual is ok).
john insisted on putting his hat on my head and taking this photo of me and my mug of hot water. i feel he may be making a mockery.
i know a lot of you like mysterious doors. my colleague harry pointed this out to me. i can see it from my desk out the window (why DO they put my desk out the window).
i’ve never seen anyone open it. perhaps i need a brick door webcam ?
ntoe the curving distortion of the bricks in this picture. hoorah for converging verticals (and horizontals). they used to be so uncool you know.
by request (via comments) here is a close up of the signage which only adds to the mystery:
i took our old telly back to Asda last night to exchange it for a new one. it was a bit weird wheeling it in on a trolley.
the new telly is a widescreen one so i can see what we were missing on the sides of the picture.
i assumed that all telly was broadcast widescreen these days. but it appears not.
i might fit some little curtains on either side of the screen like in the cinema for when the picture is not broadcast in widescreen.
look at this protruding screw. be careful not to scuff your shoe.
ho hum. raining and cold day today.
ideal conditions to spray water all over the street. note how the spray has created another Stars In Their Eyes moment.
i bumped in to Heinz Wolf this evening as i left a work meeting. he was heading south from Barbican station and i asked him if i could take his photo. he said “yes, if you can tell me where something or other square is”
i said yes, took his photo then we looked at his AtoZ and we both went on our ways.
i’ve mentioned before i’m a man of science and that’s partly because of his influence when he did the Great Egg Race on telly when i was a nipper.
(by the way in the last week i’ve also stood next to Steve Wright (radio 2 DJ) in the street and Tim Burgess of the Charlatans in a record shop. I wasn’t 100% sure they were who i thought they were at the time so i didn’t take a photo, so sorry about that. i’m pretty sure they really were them though. ooops)
update: thanks to tony for pointing out that Heinz was on the BBC website today. great quote:
Heinz Wolff is a self-confessed boffin, and the affable professor is quite proud of it. When asked to define exactly what a boffin is, he pauses, and then says, “Well, I am one.
“It isn’t a negative word,” he says. “It is no more negative than egghead. It describes a person of some intellectual ability, who has unconventional ideas.”
