The Hammersmith & City Line

Earlier this week the children and I hopped on the pink line from Paddington to Liverpool Street.

We passed easily through the station that was my nemesis in my twenties: Edgware Road.
I well remember repeatedly kicking the metal station sign there in a commuting frustration back in the day.

Nearly twenty years later the Hammersmith & City line looks as down-at-heel as I do. This is not helped, although also curiously enhanced, by taking shots with the no-flash rubbish camera on the Crapberry.

Taking photos of people feels intrusive but not so much when they are through the window, across the line and on the other platform. The Crapberry is so Crap that the potential shot that made my heart race was missed as a train rushed through in the opposite direction, obscuring my view at the crucial moment.

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Where rubbish photos can’t go, the words step in. I prefer photos to words sometimes, but they can’t do everything.

Somewhere between Baker Street and Kings Cross a boy gets on with his family, fully in the grip of a panic attack caused by Mind the Gap. He takes a while to stop sobbing, his forehead leaning on his mother’s shoulder. The fear, becalmed, kicks in again as he realises he has to get off the train. His legs, quaking under his emotional overload, look incongruous in the whitest boxfresh trainers. His parents, who look old enough to be his grandparents, treat him with a mixture of sympathy (mother), studied indifference (father), embarassment (both). His mother gives the boy and his sister a Polo Mint each, to help. The sweets are as white as his trainers. His sister wears a hat and no attack of panic.

I cannot help but feel glad that the boy is not getting off at Bank. The gap there is both high and wide, probably because the platform is, unusually, curved. I would ask my grandpa why? if he were alive to ask. I think of the Central Line on the London Underground as his, although he was involved in the extension out further east, past South Woodford. I also think of the time that I nearly lost my youngest down the gap at Bank when she was much younger and smaller.

Yes, Bank is a fearsome station. The trains come roaring in there from the distance, the shiny but furious rails scream in advance of their arrival, the warm wind whooshes in your face.

I am glad that the boy is not going to Bank; riding the Central Line is inclined to make me cry.

For our own journey we have no Polo Mints, wear muddy boots and have no front to maintain. Better to ride the tube like that if you can. There must be many other passengers that want to sob and quake on the trains these days. Who can blame them?

London bricks: encrusted with snow

Side order of icicles

Today seems like a good idea to come up with Gedankenexperiment III, featuring a cat.

Probably my cat. The cat that shat on the bathroom mat in the middle of the night… before commencing loud miagolare so that those that serve her might wake up, let her out and clear up the mess.

A great shot

the subject makes this for me.

Taken in Maldon, Essex by Lockhart Murdoch of David White (photographer of the pram sheds shot yesterday) and a man of many talents; to be found at the Beecholme blog.

Painting the pram sheds

As the world moves on apace in East London in preparation for the Olympics: they tear down old post-war housing, grotty little shopping centres are turned into consumerist Meccas and those pale ghost bikes spring up with their sad garlands of flowers, some things stay the same.

Stamford Hill is a Hasidic Jewish stronghold and some of the council housing there has the luxury of a pram shed to go with the tenancy of a flat. Of course, from time to time, someone has to come along and give these outbuildings a lick of paint.

My mind travels back to the days when mothers pushed proper shiny prams (uncollapsible in every way) and lived above ground level, without lifts. Straightaway you see why you’d need, not a garage, but a pram shed.

I am reminded of pushing my own sister round the block in one, a second-hand cream contraption, with instructions to keep going round and around until she stopped screaming, sometimes with Toby the dog for company. She was a colicky baby, perhaps. Just as well we didn’t have pram sheds in Lincolnshire, if we had it would have certainly crossed my mind to park them both in it. And close the door quietly before tiptoeing down the dyke to watch a fenland sunset…

There’s an excellent insight to life on a Hackney estate from an aesthete’s point of view at this blog.

Today

By Lee Welton (Flickr)

the tail end of autumn leaves whipped up like a small eddy on a low gust of wind; briefly lifting them up and twirling around before they went to ground, the under-the-radar breeze vanishing as quickly as it came…

All by the bandstand.

More Washing: 30 tonnes in fact

That’s the thing about it, isn’t it? You never quite get on top of the vast laundry mountain.
I think, in fact, if I ever achieved the goal of getting everything clean, dry, folded up (not ironed, I have my limits) at the same time and tried to put it away, that there would be an insufficency of storage space in any case.  The youngest child thoughtfully helps out with the problem by keeping a lot of her clothes on the floor, as do I.

I did achieve this state of everythingalwayslaundered nirvana once in my life. It was when I was very due to have my second daughter. I know they go on about the ‘nesting instinct’ as if you were some kind of big fat dormouse, but I didn’t notice that at all with the first, and with the second the ‘instinct’ confined itself to the following activities:

• Manually cleaning the rug in the living room with some mad sudsy concotion in a washing-up bowl
• Doing the laundry  like I had some kind of OCD

The ‘instinct’ only lasted a week or so because she was a little overdue in arriving. For those few days I knew the joys of an empty washing basket. For some reason, I had decided that there could be nothing worse, nothing more deleterious to a baby’s health to return home to a pile of washing. So I know that joy, and how I achieved it in a 2nd floor flat in Hackney Wick I shall never know, but as much as I moan about the washing now, I remain glad to have a small garden to hang it out in, even if it stays there all week, and even if it is, as it is now, pouring with rain.

And now I think of it, there is something deeper about the emptiness of the washing basket and its significance for me as a new life prepared to enter the world. It is a nebulous concept, totally in keeping with those hazy days of the last week of pregnancy and almost the inverse of this work by Christian Boltanski, shown in Paris and then again in New York in 2010.

The artist said of the 30 tonnes of old clothes installation pictured below and titled ‘No Man’s Land’:

You can hold onto the clothes, and even the heartbeats of many, many people. But you can’t keep anybody

Click the link to this New York Times piece for more about the installation and artist.

Tide in

Thames Estuary, from right: Isle of Grain power station, the Crowstone, a boat, Southend Pier

Work in progress

My own quick and dirty sketch of the world.

I don’t know what I’m doing, but there’s a rare freedom in that.

The Crowstone & Thames Estuary

More Foreshore

The Crowstone marks the end of the Port of London’s Authority on the Thames.

I am not sure if it’s a free for all past this point – it certainly seems that way by the time you get to the pleasure beaches…

The Crowstone's East Face

East Face Inscription

A break in the clouds

The dogs on the beach ban lifts for 6 months in October, so Rudi and went down the other day and pretty much had the place to ourselves, apart from a few cockle pickers further out on the mud.

I wanted to take the camera down there but the battery was flat and I couldn’t find the charger so I had to make do with the Blackberry. How it would have all turned out with a proper camera I will never know. Life can just be like that sometimes.

The Crowstone with dog on the foreshore