Dog day

Passing through Covent Garden yesterday I had an interesting conversation about the eccentricities of the Bloomsbury Group, the lives of Virginia Woolf and Dora Carrington and the suicide of Mark Gertler with a rather laconic but evidently well-educated dog ...

28th February

Nerdy frustrations with my desktop - the inbuilt card readers are not recognising my CF card, nor the external universal card reader. I don't want to download directly from camera, which I had to resort to doing with my Italian food photoshoot two weeks ago, and I have some RAW images to process. Then it's also suffering from 'white screen syndrome', rather less extreme than blue, but endlessly frustrating nonetheless, as the monitor has to be turned on and off at least twenty times at start up before it clears. The mouse is malfunctioning too. This is possibly terminal. Not a memorable birthday.

Lost

Have you see Hamish around Blackstock Road?

Cyclamens need light too

A gift to compensate for working in a windowless cupboard on Thursdays until building work is complete: finally due to start March 1st!

MA Photography interim show - private view

http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/londonmet/news/latest-news/february-2010/ma-photography-interim-show-at-the-cass.cfm

On the terrace - four cats and a fox

Unlike me, Buddy is not entertained by the recent succession of feline visitors invading his territory and has taken to marking his boundaries most fragrantly, unfortunately indoors as well as out - not that he has often ventured to put his nose outside this winter. He wants to be a Buddy-no-mates apparently, so ginger Jim from next-door and the two cute kittens from over the garden wall are banished.

Puritan shopper

I had to shop for ingredients for a food photoshoot on Monday and bumped into a time traveller in Sainsbury's cleaning products aisle. I only had my phone camera with me to record the apparition. Stupidly I could only think to ask him if there was an event nearby, a possible historical re-enactment of the Battle of Finsbury Park or the departure of the Pilgrim Fathers for New England, so his reply that no, he dressed like that every day, may have been heavily ironic. I saw him again at the checkout where his trolley was overflowing - he may have been stocking up for the Mayflower's voyage across the Atlantic, though I thought time travellers couldn't take anything with them (at least not according to the logistics of 'The Time Traveller's Wife', which I'm just reading).

From urban art to aspirational topiary

A couple of stencil graffiti have appeared at the bottom of our street by a Banksy tribute artist called T Wat. Her Majesty driving a bullet-ridden smart car has quickly been followed by a tiny white mouse and a throned policeman. I paused with my shopping and dry cleaning yesterday to take some snaps before Hackney's cleaning squad set to work and got into conversation with a young German who showed me pictures on his mobile of T Wat creating a large scale stencil featuring one of Banksy's infamous rats being led off in handcuffs by armed pest control soldiers:
http://www.artofthestate.co.uk/Graffiti/twat-banksy-rat-pow-stencil-graffiti.htm

In typical Finsbury Park style, the stencils are sited just yards from our local aspirational topiary hedges.

The second-hand shop on the corner of the street, where for decades Mr Phillips, multiple brothel keeper, slum landlord, rumoured millionaire, piled high the unsavoury junk that furnished his properties has been transformed into a small gallery guarded by two snarling Dobermans that are rather less fearsome than their real life predecessors.

From N4 to E1

My week in pictures ...

Sunday 23rd - a sky-banner celebrating England's ashes victory passes over North London.


Monday 24th - pest control destroys a wasps' nest under my roof terrace just before the heavens emptied.




Tuesday 25th - back in E1, I spot twins, identically dressed, trundling leopard skin cases along Whitechapel High Street, the redhead in red hot pants, the brunette in black, but I only manage to catch one on camera, so resort to reconstructing the effect in Photoshop.




Wed 26th - a strange configuration of birds pauses on a neighbouring TV aerial. I can't tell what species they are - too plump for starlings.

Fri 28th - a Ramadan poster on my drive to work.

Buddy update

The Royal Vetinary College was hard to find as I made the fatal mistake of taking the M1 instead of the A1(M). Duh. We were over an hour late for our appointment, having circled the South Mimms roundabout on a seemingly endless loop without finding the right exit, but Buddy was uncomplaining despite it being the hottest day of the summer. His only grievance was the hospital's taste in sculpture. He probably expected to fetch up in Wales, as the drive took almost as long. Diagnosis - hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or weakened heart muscle; and to avoid risk of further blood clots, treatment is a small dose of aspirin every third day. Almost impossible to make him swallow even the smallest tablet, disguised in treats or direct in mouth, while avoiding stress - to both pet and owner.