ambient chilled motorway driving

What with this being a Bank Holiday weekend, I'm now pleased to be sightseeing ahead of many of the motorists who will be hitting the road.

It wasn't all plain sailing though. There was a vehicle fire on the motorway which held me up for a long time.

I was one of the motorists not breaking the law during the incident. There were hundreds more who decided that they had important places to visit and so they would use the emergency lane on the motorway instead of staying in line like the rest of us.

It started with just a couple of foreign-plated vehicles (Romania and France), and then in minutes had turned into a complete flow. As a side note, I notice that some foreign plated articulated lorries also seem to be using the outside lane on 3 and 4 lane motorways, which is prohibited for those that read the highway code.

The emergency lane is really for emergencies, such as breakdowns, or in the case of a fire on the motorway it is so that service vehicles can get through quickly.

This was a case in point, where the extra lane just became a traffic jam of law-breakers and effectively blocked the access to the emergency site from the fire, police and ambulance services.

In the picture you can see an incident vehicle to my left trying to get past a row of cars which have all decided to use the emergency lane. It took them about 10 minutes to pass just three or four cars to my left and at one point they had to get out of the vehicle to direct traffic back onto the legal part of the motorway.

No spring lambs harmed in the creation of this post.

I'd better explain. The road signifies my meandering route during Thursday, on the way to meet with blog friend Debra. I decided to make my journey to the north a diagonal one through the Peak District, so that I could stop off on en route for a visit.

Our little group had arranged to meet - as usual to sort out our real names, and to go to a certain pub, which I will describe as idyllically in the middle of no-where.

That's when we found the interesting element on the menu. Turn away faint hearted or vegetarians. It was Lamb Henry. OK, I thought lambs were kind of 'Lamb 47', but this did add a different dimension. The waitress wasn't phased and when we enquired she explained that Henrietta was also waiting in the kitchen. That was until she gave the real explanation, which I won't provide here - although it is easy to google and comes with mint and rosemary.

So here's a picture from my wandering around the Peaks - Please note the spring lamb in the picture is fully functional.

And then, when I arrived at my next more northern hotel stop, I was slightly surprised to see the complementary shampoo and conditioners.

They seemed to be trying to tell me something.

the square mile

I could tell it was a posh do by the filled triangular pyramids of champagne and wine glasses stacked up in the entrance area. And as for the geometrically structured canapés! Well...It slightly surprised the wine-waiter when I asked for 'something non-alcoholic' although he produced some chilled fresh orange juice from under the counter.

It was the opening of a new exhibition at The Ark and I was there meeting a couple of friends, one of whom was exhibiting.

My question was whether it felt like 'being on duty' when it was an event like this, but I was told 'it depends'. My own experience is that it's far more demanding to be an organiser and not even get to try the canapés.

It turned out that this show had been organised by others, so it was a question of turning up and being relaxed, rather than having to hover and orbit. My friend's last show had been at another gallery where she was an organiser and much more 'on duty' making sure everyone was greeted/spoken to/schmoozed with and so on.

Instead, we could move freely around admiring and critiquing the works on display.

It was mainly hung work rather than sculptures, and had a variety of mainly abstract themes.

As this was the private view, there were a fair few of the artists around, so a certain care was needed before making pronouncements. I'm not sure what the official distance is, but most artists would stand at least 10 metres from their own work, and often would have a varied but somehow tell-tale dress code that helped them be identifiable.

There were some fine pieces on show, and some good and interesting ideas.

I enjoyed the show, and must admit to even acquiring an artwork to eventually be hung in rashbre central. Of course, for the next seven weeks, it remains on display at the Ark, with a little red dot beside it.

strung out on lazers and slash back blazers

We visited the David Bowie event at the Victoria and Albert during the weekend. The V&A have done a good job and judging by the queues it's probably bringing in plenty of first time visitors.

Fortunately, we already had access so skipped the line, which had those Disney style vanishing angles to conceal its true length.

The show was originally opened by Tilda Swinton, who described Bowie as an early muse. As she said, "The image of that gingery boney pinky whitey person on the cover with the liquid mercury collar bone was - for one particular young moonage daydreamer - the image of planetary kin, of a close imaginary cousin and companion of choice."

Indeed, an influence for part of a generation, with his frequent changes of gear and perspective. The main exhibition has a wide range of costumes, photos, posters, records, videoa performance extracts and a guided headphone experience. I enjoyed spotting things like his original 12 string guitar tucked away on the corner of an exhibit.

The exhibition is split into various eras, from the Anthony Newley like early mod period, through Ziggy, America, Low Germany and beyond.

I found some of the smaller items fascinating too, like the early written outline for Ziggy Stardust, sketching the storyline that became the album's concept.

Dana Gillespie was there and she was an early friend of Bowie. She lived across the road from the V&A in Thirloe Square and her parents' basement became 'The Bunker' where early Bowie collaborators including Angie Bowie met. She had a vast range of stories, including some best kept as memories.

The show is called 'Davie Bowie is' and on the last wall of the show was Paul Robertson's periodic table of Bowie.

Not a bad metaphor for this art who fell to earth. Here's "Heroes".

a chorus of human static

I was putting away some of the artifacts from the weekend's varied events.

Bizarrely, today saw the addition of belated Easter Eggs to the collection. I know where they will get filed.

But first I'll wind back to cover Friday evening's space invader style landing in a nearby market town. Performance art, involving towering metal tripods and rotating drones of sound, both continuous and pulsating, creating interactions and musical eddies which varied by location and height.

The trance inducing installation was digging holes in the fabric of time and space. An ambient chatter of humans formed an eerie backdrop to the strange machines which surrounded us as we'd emerged from a nearby Italian restaurant.

Breakfast in Mayfair

An early start in Mayfair today, in a fancy apartment that falls out onto Piccadilly. An ideal opportunity for a stroll around the still deserted Green Park. The City of London can be quite deserted on a Sunday, whereas this area should still, by rights, be busy.

So it surprised me that the morning brought a sleepy start to the tourists, giving an initial tranquility to the streets and other public areas. Piccadilly with only three cars in sight is a rare view, especially on a sunny morning. Even the area around Eros was quiet, although a few were posing for the statutory photographs.

As I drifted into a sleepy Chinatown, the hoards of tourists started to descend. Another half an hour and everything will have reset to normal.

I circled back, ahead of a rendezvous at 11 o'clock. As I passed Eros again, it was already busier, with groups beginning to congregate to be taken on walking tours or bus rides around the centre. It is a strange zone here, with many sets of people on different orbits, intersecting but often unaware of the wild range of possibilities within a one or two block radius.

For me, the last few days have been pretty arty, although my next proper work project was supposed to kick off on Monday. I've just heard that there may be a delay, which gives me time to get involved in another fun project that's been on my mind.

More later, as they say.

Man Ray Portraits - National Portrait Gallery

Another blog post sitting unfinished was my recent visit to the Man Ray exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. It runs through to the end of May. I've been a fan of Man Ray's photographs for a long time, but I think this is the first time I've seen a whole collection together.

There's some wonderful portraits on show, and a remarkable collection of inter war year Paris people photographed by Man Ray.

We see many of his buddy/co-consirator Marcel Duchamp (he of the subversive 'fountain'). There's a very young Ernest Hemingway, from the time when he'd just published his first novel. A wistful bobbed-hair Iris Tree, Salvador Dali at 24 years old and developing his moustache, a suitably ruffled haired Yves Tanguy. There's a beautiful and caring series of the apprentice photographer Lee Miller.

Oh, Plus Picasso, Wallis Simpson, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, Coco Chanel, Joan Miro. The list and indeed the co-operations go on and on.

The exhibition's limit to portrait photography gives a chance to drill into the emerging techniques.

The handling of focus and sometimes softness, a wide range of lighting moving to patterned overlays. Experimental tinkering with some of the prints. Pen markings. The famous violon d'ingres. Solarisation. Then there's the decision to 'come in close'. Quite a few of the pictures are very close cropped in appearance. Fortunately there's a few contact strips and test prints to look at and to see the decisions about which picture and how the final framing gets selected.

Something else struck me with some of the prints on show. Aside from some keynote pictures, others looked small in their frames. If you've seen the work in books or magazines, it will get a page. Sometimes you need to stand very close to really get the impression.

So here's my tip. Get the catalogue too. It's fantastic. Okay - its £25, but it's a superb rendering of what's in the show plus a good commentary and a section that describes more of the context of Man Ray's other art.

skip a dee doo day

The 2013 decluttering season has started and the first skip of the season turned up today. Needless to say, it was soon filled and there is again a small walkable area in the garage.

A few interesting artifacts this time included:

• The stripy sofa bed, which had to be comprehensively wrecked in order to remove it from upstairs. We really tried to get it out whole, but it just destroyed a wall again.
• A lawnmower which hasn't worked for 3 years
• The chassis from three computers, once stripped of their disk drives
• A novelty musical keyboard which, if switched on, plays continuously because something went wrong with its circuits
• A surprisingly large amount of cardboard and those bubble bags which need to be individually popped so that they don't take up too much room
• The scam Italian designer gear I negotiated at the end of that run in London. That has gone into a charity bag, actually.
• A few broken electronic devices
• A whole lot of other bric-a-brac that I can't even remember, but not anything that anyone else would want.

Along the way I found an impossibly large collection cleaning products and painting and decorating materials. Crates full of it. I think I could start a separate business as a sideline. Of course, the reason for the surplus was because the prior purchases were all too well hidden in the chaos.

I also found the snow boots I was looking for a few weeks ago, and I'm wondering why we have quite so many pairs of wellington boots.

I've also encountered a few species of spider, including an enormous house spider that I decided to encourage to go outside. The garage wasn't big enough for both of us. The foolish thing has hidden under the skip, so I don't fancy its chances if it stays there when the truck returns.

Despite its name, it's one of those spiders that looks perfectly good 'outdoors', but isn't the type I really want in the house.

And now, I think I need a shower and a fresh change of clothes.

Life after Life - Kate Atkinson

I've been reading the Kate Atkinson book that is in the pop charts at the moment. Without giving away secrets, it's the one where the main character Ursula is killed off in the first proper chapter. Then we get a recut of the same story, which develops further, until she dies again. And then a further story. Similar, but with necessary butterfly wing beats of difference.

The writing style exercises a variety of creative freedoms, building a storyline via a repeating process most succinctly described as similar to the idea in the movie Groundhog Day.

There's a big difference though, that the prior versions of living are not conveniently remembered, nor is a single actor the pivot for the whole outcome.

I found it quite like the development of a neural network, with a kind of adaptive learning occurring through each iteration of the story-telling. Less a deja-vu sensation, more a prescient awareness.

Of course, the process was having the same effect on both the character and the reader, and for me it was after about 15% of the novel that it really dropped into place. Altogether an interesting way to play a mind game through the story telling and characterisations. Also the way one understands some of the averted outcomes in the later variants.

The action takes place between 1910 and after the end of the second world war, beginning in a fair and pleasant English countryside. There's a range of often bleak scenarios that play out against this bucolic backdrop.

For me, the narrative had to be sampled across the varied outcomes and sometimes pieced together. Playfully, there are even a places where the author uses phrases like 'and so on' to illustrate that the reader probably knows a particular version well enough by now.

Altogether an enjoyable read.

My photo of the cover illustrates another reading point as well. This is a substantial hardback book complete with its single sewn in bookmark. Someone really working at the detail of the plot could probably use three of those markers to be able to compare and contrast the outcomes. It's heft can bulkily fill a bag or make a small weapon.

My own neurons firing, I consequently adapted my own approach to reading it, having learned during the first third of the book. If I wanted to read it quickly, to carry it around, I needed a compact solution.

Yes, I Kindled it.

I find I'm moving to Kindle for modern novels. For older books I'll stick with paper, and also for books with pictures, but for the simple printed word I think I've reached that cutover point to electronic distribution.

Get Britain Cycling

CTC write-up here.
Report here.
Number 10 Petition here.
Write to your MP here.

Broadchurch: a liberal interpretation of ritual

Along with around 9 million others, I watched that final(e) episode of Broadchurch yesterday evening. Overall, I found the series enjoyable and I liked the genuine next-day buzz among the coffee drinkers.

I know that there's various jargon for these kinds of series too - like 'procedural' for cop series, although this one didn't really have a procedural ending. Most of the reveal was handled out of sequence with anything discovered by the police investigation.

The off-kilter discovery of what happened was markedly at odds with another show I watched a few days ago with a serial killer working musically through 'Every Good Boy Deserves Favour' and leaving obscure operatic clues. Luckily the constable supporting the investigation was a choral singer and happened to have the right scores available. His Maigret channeling boss (expect a series) was indulgent enough to take the hunches seriously, with a suitably operatic result.

But back to Broadchurch. To be honest, I was waiting for a plot twist after perpetrator was discovered. Instead we spent time on the emotions created in the aftermath. Some of this worked well but it jarred the flow of how these series normally play out.

I'm therefore not sure about a few pieces. Why introduce that the Scottish detective had visited the village in his childhood? It got a whole scene and some fabulous camera framing so maybe it's part of a hastily designed approach for a series 2? But please don't make Broadchurch a new Midsomer-on-Sea? Instead, maybe we'll get the Tennant and Colman Detective agency?

What about those arty slow motion sequences? Definitely not designed to make the episode sluggish? Instead, why not throw in...a slug scene?

Someone will know whether it was proper procedure was to let the father of the murdered child have an unsupervised discussion through the cell's hatch, directly with the perpetrator?

And the broad ritualised beacons on the cliff edges...Could this be a further clue about the current ending?

So maybe I'm in denial, but it all makes me think there's a different ending for Broadchurch and one day we'll get to see it. I already have a cracking plot, should anyone need it.

watching the waterside wilderness of mirrors

In Westminster for a meeting today, although the gaps around it gave me time for a stroll along the south side of the Thames.

I was in that area often used in movies and TV series, that scene when spies or politicians need to meet to discuss something in private.

In US movies it is often 'The Mall/Washington Memorial/Lincoln Memorial'; for UK ones it's 'the south side of the Thames between SIS, Lambeth Palace and Westminster Bridge'.

The SIS building is quite well known, not just for its Lego-like construction, but because it's the home of the Security Intelligence Service (SI6 née MI6). It often gets a blue tinge treatment in spook shows. In practice this stretch of river may not be the best place for spies or politicians to meet, because the big spy building is just a few minutes away from Parliament.

The whole strip of the south bank from Vauxhall towards Battersea is undergoing a diplomatic makeover now, ahead of the Americans moving their London embassy from Grosvenor Square to the planned shiny silver cube Sarf of the River. Even faster than the construction of the new embassy buildings, Nine Elms is seeing emerging tower blocks of riverside residences as the dusty area becomes prime real estate.

So I guess we'll be seeing plenty more movies with spies, politicians and diplomats, cast along this familiar stretch of the river.