VANISHING LONDON 2: The bit of road on the north side of Trafalgar Square

VANISHING LONDON
2: The bit of road on the north side of Trafalgar Square

This did not get nicked overnight. Instead the Mayor put in place a long and some say tedious process to turn London’s squarest roundabout into - his words - a continental piazza. He failed. Trafalgar Square is still Trafalgar Square. Its just you don’t have to cross the road to get to it any more.

The traffic got worse of course. And then got better when every driver in London realised that traffic lights which phase for five seconds mean you will get nowhere fast. Truth was, this was exactly the case when that bit of road was in place. It was just there you would get horrendous traffic jams at three in the morning. The largest change this piece of road thievery has caused is in the night buses.

Some time in the eighties a bright spark at London Transport noticed that almost seventy percent of night buses went through Trafalgar Square. Rather than thinking this might make the stops congested, he had another idea. Why not make ALL nightbuses go to Trafalgar Square. This means you can connect anywhere to anywhere in just two buses. If you can ever get on said buses, and said buses can ever get out of the square. The nineties saw scenes of chaos as on a Saturday night, the concourse out front of the National Gallery was solid with expectant passengers, and the road four lanes deep of buses going nowhere. You ever wonder why the National Gallery was dissolving of piss? You might wait a long time for a bus. And an even longer time for it to see free road.

Now there are some nice steps, a cafe and a really swanky public toilet. And the night buses, well less visit and skirt round the bottom like old girlfriends.

(And try telling me this bit of tarmac has been moved to Great Marlborough Street as well…)

I am thinking about my favourite action movies because Midnight Run is on TV,

I am thinking about my favourite action movies because Midnight Run is on TV, clashing with No Man’s Land a Bosnian favourite from a few years back. But I will watch Midnight Run, because it is more fun than the BBC2 satire, and it has a very special place in my heart. This along with Die Hard, are probably the films for me that Tom is referring to here. These are my teenage favourites, they both come from 1988, when I was fifteen. I saw them on video with my family when I was sixteen I suppose. So are these films any good or is it just that they came out when I was 15 and was starting to make personal taste based decisions on what I considered to be grown up films?

I refuse to believe this purely is an age-based thing. Watching Midnight Run as I type, I cannot imagine a pulpy piece of schlock like this being made now. Well I can but it would be massively different. For one they would have much larger female roles, making the mistake that a large female role means an important one. But there is something late eighties about the male bonding, the contempt for authority (The FBI and police get big kickings in both) and both have really rather slow and detailed build ups.

Perhaps these themes make it work for me, these were plot touchstones that resonated with me. Are they eighties themes? I was a kid of the eighties after all. But I think my closest connection is that these were films that I saw with my Dad, and they are terrific male bonding films. We both enjoyed them, and all of a sudden, during hateful teenage years, we had something in common. So what would the fifteen year old me watch in 2004 with my Dad? The Day After Tomorrow would have amused, but he does not like disaster movies. My Dad doesn’t do superheroes, so no Spidey. Thing is these sensitive tough guy movie don’t seem to exist any more. So I’ll watch Die Hard and Midnight Run when they come on television and be damned. Is it because of me, or is it because of the films. I would like to think the latter.

The ubiquitous Banksy strikes again

The ubiquitous Banksy strikes again

not entirely sure who he’s striking agaist, we’ve always known that judges dress like this under their robes haven’t we? ooh, get you!

“Don’t play with your food!”

“Don’t play with your food!”

This stern injunction has blighted many a child’s teatime as a project for turning sausage and mash into a happy face is scuppered midway. Surely parents remember that playing with food is usually the necessary preliminary to eating it? And of course a class of food exists that turns such parents into hypocrites - food where fiddling about with it is part and parcel of the eating experience. For instance that fantastic vegetable the globe artichoke - the selection of leaves, the swirling in melted butter, the piling of residue, the plucking of the hairy bit - not only is it delicious it is good messy fun, just like food should be sometimes.

EGGS BACON CHIPS AND BEANS

EGGS BACON CHIPS AND BEANS: a blog stumbled across whilst searching for a decent café or coffee house for a non-alcoholic central London meetup. An absolutely SMASHING little blog filled of delicious pictures of fry-ups and great reviews. READ IT NOW, before the poor bloke dies of a heart attack!!

He also does A Tea And A Think, based more on, well, cups of tea.

The man can only be applauded and possibly bought a mug of Typhoo. Milk and sugar mate?

Public Inconvenience

Public Inconvenience

A big railway station in London at 9.11pm last night. I’d had a couple of pints after work, and as per usual, arrived at the station needing the toilet. I decide not to use the one on platforms 5 and 6, but the one on platforms 1 and 2 instead.

I walked in and there was predictably a queue. Gosh, and wasn’t it slow moving. Unlike the 5/6 toilet. Ho hum. Someone looked over at me. He was at the urinal. I realised my recently bought cheese and onion pasty was quite smelly. I looked sheepish and broke his gaze. Still no movement in the queue though. Then the guy next to him looked over at me. My pasty doesn’t smell that bad does it? Maybe it does. It has strong cheese and onion flavour and so now I’m now officially paranoid.

Then a small, much older man shuffles over to the hand dryer. He’s taking an age. He’s also now standing exactly in front of my neutral gazing point. I can’t look there, so I start to look around the toilet more. Suddenly a few things drop into place. It’s like a Truman Show toilet. Superficially, here were a lot of commuters relieving themselves, washing hands, using the cubicles.

But they weren’t really. The gents at the urinals weren’t doing that furtive things that people doing their business do, as they’re acutely uncomfortable with the idea of using a shared urinal space. There was no muscle twitchiness in buttocks, no adjustment of weight from leg to leg. And there were lots of people with really short hair. Shaved hair. Crew cuts. Looking good.

It was, of course, a cottage. I made my exit realising that a urinal would not become free. As I walked along the platform, I saw more crew cutted men heading that way.

And why is this here? Well, I didn’t see anything (for which I am grateful). And lets avoid the Brown Wedge shall we? And their behaviour certainly wasn’t sporting, as I was bloody desperate for the lav. I had to wait until the train arrived and I’m sick at looking at Edward bloody Pond’s Severndroog Castle.

It’s the first time I’d ever known of a place be a cottage, and certainly the first one I stumbled in on. Was it a random happening? Did a text message go out telling people the time and the place (and whatever happened to that programme? Is Mike Scott the leader of the European Republic in another dimension?) Will it be there tomorrow? If you want to find out, why not contact me and I shall tell you which station in return for donations to our Grecian Earn appeal. I’ve read about the pink pound.

Ned’s post below reminded me of a running pub conversation

Ned’s post below reminded me of a running pub conversation we’ve had over the past few weeks regarding the etymology of the word “wonk.” Fortunately I have my good friend google who offers some clues:

From here (big scroll down, hence the copying):
wonk - 1954, popularized 1993 during Clinton administration in U.S.; perhaps a shortening of Brit. slang wonky “shaky, unreliable,” from dialectal words based on O.E. wancol “shaky, tottering.” Or perhaps a variant of Brit. slang wanker “masturbator.” It was earlier British naval slang for “midshipman.”

Further examination here:
But whence comes this wonk? A good question. Britain’s Royal Navy had its wonks in the 1920s: “new cadets or new midshipmen of questionable ability.” (A possible etymology, the adjective wonky, meaning “tipsy, unsteady, unsound,” carries nuances that haven’t been fully Americanized.) Following a few intermediate unflattering turns, by the 1960s wonk was the word at Harvard for the kind of people that the late Alabama Governor George Wallace eventually decried as “pointy-headed intellectuals.” The typical policy wonk lives for policy issues likely to induce drowsiness in others.

One claiming willy wonka, and know backwards as options here (scroll down a bit)

Even this word wonk doesn’t know (he has got a cool etymology site though :)), but it does seem likely that Harvard is to blame…