Schadenfreude

News of the resignation came via an all-staff email from the Chair of the Board of Governors at lunchtime on Thursday: Brian Roper, one of the highest paid Vice-Chancellors in the country, had stepped down with immediate effect. A red-letter day for the one in four of his staff threatened with redundancy as a result of his mismanagement. His mistakes cost the University £56m. Now action is needed to ensure that his huge annual salary - £270,000 plus before bonuses - is not paid through to December as the official statement indicated and that his pension is more of a lead balloon than a golden handshake. Smile on, Mr Roper.

Google Street View

On Thursday Google launched its pedestrian level view of 25 UK cities, to a degree of controversy over the usual concerns for invasion of privacy and a Big Brother society. Our street must have been photographed early on a Monday morning late last spring, probably in June: the tell-tale signs are the full green recycling bins on the pavement outside my house , these are invariably emptied between 8.00 and 8.30 on a Monday morning; my car isn't parked outside, so I must have already left for work - I worked from home throughout August last year and it would have been there; it was before the exterior of the house was repainted in July because the front door is still a dark glossy blue, rather than its currrent teal eggshell; the neighbouring cherry tree that bloomed in May is bare of blossom, but everything is in leaf. We are being watched ... and recorded, classified, archived. Two ordinary pictures of an ordinary street, but so much more. At every moment we leave traces of where we are and what we are doing - no need for Twitter or FaceBook.

Sticky fingers

My gardening is sometimes more successful indoors than in our London clay and this year the orchids at home and at work are blooming. This large yellow orchid has three new shoots covered with buds that are oozing stickiness - nectar I hope.

Emergency response

Late yesterday afternoon our street was blocked with emergency vehicles: rapid response motorbikes, ambulances, fire engines and police. The Virgin air ambulance crew also responded, landing their helicopter just down the road in Finsbury Park. The fire was three doors away in a recent attic conversion where a new neighbour had escaped by jumping down into the garden from a second floor window that belched black smoke, seriously injuring herself.

A Polish couple had owned the house for decades. When her husband died Stella continued there for another decade alone, finally selling up and returning to live near her sister in Poland just two or three years ago. The house was then bought by developers and converted, as are many of the houses in the street, into three flats. The top floor flat in these conversions usually consists only of the attic space with Velux windows in the roof, sometimes a loft extension overlooking the garden, and one back room on the mezzanine floor below. The only window our neighbour would have been able to jump from was this - twenty to thirty feet up at the level of my kitchen window. There are no fire escapes. The smoke blackened window is still open this morning but we have no news of the neighbour's condition yet.

Ghost bikes

For about a year now I've been noticing a growing number of white bicycles chained near bus stops or at busy road junctions around London, but only recently discovered their origin. They mark sites where cyclists have been killed and are both memorials to individual deaths and warnings to motorists to take more care. In the UK the project is the work of a road safety campaigner Steve Allen, whose friend was killed by a drunk driver while cycling in North London. The bike I photographed is at the junction of Kingsland High Road and Whiston Road in Hackney.

There's also a vandalised child's bike chained to the railings of Clissold Park at a bus stop on Green Lanes that's a regular accident blackspot with joyriders.

Kitchen sink dramas 3

This week the garden has seen a minor crime wave. The kitchen sink soap stars have been caught in the act stealing food: the fox raided the bird table, while the jays were intent on digging up my bulbs and peanuts buried by the squirrel.

St David's Day - now and then

This old photo was probably taken on March 1st 1962. St David's Day was something to look forward to and dread at the same time - a half day's holiday and morning classes replaced by an Eisteddfod. Younger girls wore Welsh costumes and almost everyone sported daffodils or leeks. What's to dread? The annual humiliation of being forced to play my viola in front of the whole school. I got third place every year without fail. Not bad? Except that there were only three viola players in the school...

The cold winter this year means daffodils are still mostly in bud, but spring is in the air at last.

Holloway Road - bird's eye views

Another Saturday and another visit to Holloway Road. From the thirteenth floor the views are incomparably improved. South towards the City:

East towards Finsbury Park:

And North up the A1 towards Archway:

Holloway Road

Holloway Road must be one of my least favourite localities in North London. Apart from Daniel Libeskind's design for the Graduate Centre at London Metropolitan University, it's unremittingly drab and characterless. Yet, pretensions are high, as evidenced by the renaming of this luxury apartment development, a refurbished Victorian schoolhouse where, until the developers moved in, you could, in fact, sign up for evening classes in modern foreign languages.

The slogan on the advertising truck for the Body Worlds Mirror of Time exhibition at the O2 seemed particularly apt on my birthday: What's your real body age? No comment.

The Orion Centre, Holloway Road, Daniel Libeskind.

http://www.daniel-libeskind.com/projects/show-all/london-metropolitan-university-graduate-centre/