not cold and windy, really

Who says its cold and windy around Canada Square at this time of year?

There's a contrast between the winter coats and the hardy souls out shopping in shirt sleeves or even standing in shirt for a chat. Of course, there's vastly more people moving about underground in the various tunnels and malls of this area of London's Canary Wharf.

I was 'in transit' but decided to sit outdoors for one of my conference calls, and this was the wintry view.

gap

A regular working day today, with me in a couple of different locations including Canary Wharf. For less experienced commuters, the Jubilee line has those special arrows painted onto the platforms indicating where to stand to (a) align with the doors (b) but stand out of the way whilst others get off the train. Remarkably, they are by the electrically operated glass doors along the platform. I suppose it is good for the avoidance of doubt.

The rather temporary looking markings are different at Canary Wharf and Waterloo, but I'm told its all part of a cunning experiment.

I somehow don't see it as iconic as 'Mind the Gap'.

carpet

After attending the BAFTAs a couple of weeks ago, its quite interesting to see the Oscars on television as a comparison. There's a few more of the central Hollywood gang already arrived, but also many of the nominees are the same folk that were at the British Awards.

I've been working with the television flickering in the background. Its quite interesting seeing quite well known Brit/Irish actors being generally as excited and 'normal' as anyone else would be to be on the red carpet.

Daniel Day Lewis seems to be wearing the same somewhat distinctive tux, whilst the ladies seem to have swapped their swish. I gather the coverage continues through to GMTV's morning television show here. I suspect some of the guests may be somewhat tired and emotional by that stage.

dolce

A pleasant surprise on my short trip to Tesco's today; The Observer newspaper had a DVD of 'la dolce vita' bundled with it.

I havn't seen the film for ages, but its one of those that warrants a proper movie evening. There's many famous scenes in it, shot artfully by Fellini in black and white.

Many people know the Trevi fountain scene also from the reference in 'Lost in Translation' but even the opening has been copied in other movies and the scenes in the car were referenced in Pulp Fiction. There's been a Woody Allen affectionate more or less re-make set in (where else?) Manhattan and the film gave the term to paparazzi, based on the name of one of the characters who shoots candid pictures of stars.

Seven nights and seven dawns.

Sweet?

snaporama

Not exactly a postcard view of Gloucester, because a postcard view would have edited away the dual carriageway from this picture taken a few hours ago. I guess that's one of the things with taking photographs, what to include and what to exclude. I could have moved the camera a little further to the left, which would have removed the bypass, but then I think I'd have somehow included the big tin sheds in the foreground.

If that didn't work, then maybe I could have made a feature of the A417 roadway although then I might have lost the view of the Mendip Hills in the background, although perhaps that way I could hint at the country, town, industrial convergence.

Or another way to look at it would be to put the road off to one side (sort of rive-gauche) and try to capture more of the wintry colours in the few minutes of sun on a rather sold and blustery day.

Or, I suppose I could try cropping the picture to give a different viewpoint. Maybe if I crop the last picture to make it more wide-screen panoramic, still including the road and some hint of the way to the hills?

torchwood babiez

In case the television series is not enough. Click the pic to enjoy.

Technorati Tags: rashbre, torchwood, babiez, captain+jack, gwen, cardiff

Cheltenham sin

Cheltenham from Friday evening, and it didn't take too long to find the Sinners' Enclosure, which rather conveniently was in our very hotel.

There seemed to be a strong emphasis on horsing around in that particular area and actually in the hotel in general, with some fun touches like the extra bathtub in the bedroom of the imposing Georgian building.

We later found the informal and very enjoyable restaurant underneath a chandelier of wine glasses.

They know a thing or two about red nectar at the hotel and we drank a special Gevrey Chambertin with our supper. Of course, by Saturday evening, we'd also explored the town, but that is a whole further story.

year of the rat

Bob-kat just commented to me with that alleged Chinese curse about interesting times. A lot of people believe it is level one of a three level curse originating in China.

Most Chinese folk seem to refute it though, saying that it was made up by a westerner in the 20th Century a bit like the various 'Confucius, he say' type of statements.

I'm taking no chances here though. I've decided to hang lots of bright red lanterns from a couple of weeks ago celebrating the year of the rat onto the top of rashbre central for the day, to ward off any evil spirits that might be passing.

"They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom", as Confucius might have said.

fiddle de dee

Sometimes when I'm travelling (like this week) the act of keeping a blog sort of conspires against me. I don't usually spend more than about 10 minutes on a post, but sometimes even for that I'm caught short if the electronics don't work.

I prefer to add a picture if I can, but as my PC flickr loader has crashed I can't add anything from my camera today. And yesterday the network links were rather intermittent in my previous hotel. Its quite embarrassing when the line crashes in the middle of adding comments to someone else's blog, when its not quite what I wanted to say.

I'm guessing this hotel will have better food, though I need to work this evening on a presentation for tomorrow, so It'll be room service again. I did venture out for a few minutes to a nearby coffee shop though in order to have some sense of the people and the place instead of just the white box view of hotels and meeting rooms.

Some of my friends say this is a little like being a spy, travelling around, random hotels and so forth, but I don't think I'll be applying for a job with SIS, even if it could improve the news.

And there certainly seems to be a fair amount around today, Castro resigns, the Bridgend tragedies, Gordon's latest positive thought and even 'our Tone' getting back onto front pages with more talk of the European Union presidency. Now he's being supported by Sarkozy the whole thing may turn out to be a bad idea. According to my friends in France, Nikky is well past the honeymoon stage with the electorate, even if not so with Carla. Allegedly Germany's Angela Merkel is also not so keen along with those that have started a 'Stop Blair' website.

Then there's Vince who cabled his ideas about the rocky northern bank long before the teams of highly paid consultants concluded with the same idea. As its anathema to new Labour to nationalise things again, it will be interesting to see how long dithering Darling survives, or indeed whether Gordon makes a sacrifice of him.

And now that the '125% of property value' mortgages are surfacing and the separate Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) called 'Granite' has been used to hold all of the 'good' money from Northern Rock, it gets kind of interesting to see what is left in the nationalised shell - presumably a much smaller than anticipated number of less than 'rock solid' securities.

Perhaps Westminster, too, has also been caught short in the current situation.

its only temporary

I'm travelling this week and yesterday arrived at my current hotel around mid foggy evening. I've stayed here before and had a vague memory that the room service food wasn't very good, but it was late so I gave it a try anyway. My memory was right so tonight I'm holed up here with a carrier bag of salad dips from a nearby supermarket (there's not much else around here except a football stadium).

The thing was, as I arrived at the check-in yesterday, they seemed to know me and had all my details right down to the newspaper I'd like in the morning. The paper didn't arrive though, so I'm only catching up on the news this evening after a busy day from first meeting at 07:30 and the last one ending at 20:00.

So National Rocktastic has only just entered my thoughts, with the new excited, nationalised public servant Rockin' Ronnie in charge on £90,000 per month whilst he presides over the £55bn debt which is increasing at roughly £3bn per month. Of course the share price has zoomed south from £4+ to around 90pence over the last few months as well, so we seem to have the company equivalent of a nationalised death star in the midst of the British Economy.

The smiling Tweedledum and Tweedledee-like pronouncements from our arm and eyebrow waggling leadership restore confidence that everything is all right really, but I can't help wondering still where the money gap will end up. Now the taxpayers are directly involved, I'm sure we'll at least be forking out for the recent £100m of legal fees accrued, £55bn divided around the UK taxpayers is still quite a lot of per capita wonga.

So just as my hotel serves 'home made favourites', Gordon and Alistair are telling us that they've taken all the right decisions at the right times.

As the Northern Rock website says today: 'Business as Usual', then if you hit 'proceed', the next screen proclaims 'Catch it while you can'.

though the night is daylight-saving

I've just had three interludes with different people who have been staying up late (partying; not sleeping; just chillin'). I was marvelling with one of them at the cold crisp night and the superabundance of stars. Somehow I had a flashback to a well-known poem by Adrian Henri called 'and so we'll go no more a raving' (which is best recited with a Liverpool accent) and then I remembered this one which sort of fits the night-time too.

Galactic Lovepoem
Warm your feet at the sunset
Before we go to bed
Read your book by the light of Orion
With Sirius guarding your head
Then reach out and switch off the planets
We'll watch them go out one by one
You kiss me and tell me you love me
By the light of the last setting sun
We'll both be up early tomorrow
A new universe has begun

Made in China

There's something immensely hypocritical about the way that world powers can separate sport and politics when it suits them.

The planned Beijing Olympics is a case in point, where some recent polemic suggests that there's no connection between the host country for a sporting event and any of its other actions on the world stage.

China has been moving to the centre of manufacturing and progressively increasing its importance as a world economic power, yet it has both internal challenges in the way that it handles its own people and additionally is supporting the Sudanese government in their continued carnage within Dafur.

Over the last five years, more than 200,000 people have been killed and a further 2.5 million forced from their homes in the conflicts.

Furthermore, within China itself, elementary rights of freedom of speech, assembly and belief are systematically violated.

Journalists, academics, people of religion and varied activists are routinely detained in a gulag-like environment. The internet is censored. Tibet has had the democracy sucked out.

Steven Spielberg has flagged the problem by withdrawing his services as artistic director to the event, but it can't have escaped many that there's parallels with the German Olympics of 1936, when Leni Riefenstahl directed films whilst Hitler moved his Third Reich emblems further into prominence and hid the anti-Semitic posters which had been placed in Berlin.

Now that a strong letter of protest has been issued by a coalition of Nobel Prize Winners, Athletes and some politicians, it at least sets the stage for some close scrutiny of what is happening.

If the Olympics are supposed to be about peace and international co-operation, then China's President Hu Jintao needs to fix a bloody thing or two. China is buying two-thirds of Sudan's oil and selling weapons to Khartoum which can only further support the Dafur massacre. The silence about Dafur inside China is now being emulated with attempts to include gagging clauses to prevent discussion of the politics by athletes planning to attend the event.

UK's politicians are mixed up on this one at the moment. Olympics minister Tessa Jowell says that calling for a boycott of this summer's Games over the Darfur crisis does not serve any purpose.

Meanwhile Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, is under pressure to take a stronger line during his visit than Gordon Brown did recently in Beijing.

China wants to draw a distinction between the games and human rights by saying linking them would "politicise" the Olympics. I hope some of the politicians and the major sponsors involved learn lessons from the history of Berlin.