Squawk.

Darth Vader:

Princess Leia:

We kept seeing bits and pieces of Banksy’s stuff along the Canal, only some idiot, identified by a pathetic tag (”TEAM ROBBO!”), kept wrecking Banksy’s stuff with pointless text.

Westminister Abbey. After watching Welsh MPs rag on about issues no one cares about:

Maida Vale/Little Venice:

By the canal in Islington:

Respectable raclette from Camden:

Tyson getting his canal on:

Andy and I were talking in my parents kitchen this morning and then a pheasant with a peter-pan collar ran past the window. True story.

Cat Hammock.

Buzzfeed’s, not mine.

The other night as I fell asleep, I was thinking how cool it would be if Tetris had the equivalent of Link’s iron-clad boot. i.e. if Tetris had a ONYX tetronimoe that fell once in a while and crushed out all the gaps under the files it fell on. That would be nifty.

Sorry if this post and others have shown up on your RSS feeds a majillion times. Sometimes it’s because my internet is weird and othertimes it’s because I hit PUBLISH instead of PREVIEW (I’m starting to proofread stuff).

There are plenty of random nooks and crannies to explore in London, but it’s sortof fun to play tourist and haunt the spots everyone else haunts. On Saturday we went to Borough Market to sniff 25 year old cheese and marvel at the thousand-person queue for chorizo sandwiches. We also walked along the Thames for a while, visited the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, and then went to listen to a Baroque ensemble performing various well known pieces and movements.

Here’s some of that cheese. I don’t eat cheese unless it’s melted, mozzarella (which isn’t really even cheese, I guess) or plastic Kraft cheese (the kind that goes on hamburgers). What I’m saying is that this cheese revolted me, but I was pleased to see they were cutting it with wire. Nothing looks more satisfying than cutting cheese with wire. When I was a kid I tried to cut cheese with dental floss in emulation of the local grocer. Didn’t work out too well.

Here’s me and my goldfish-eye by the Thames:

I have this weird eye thing that makes me look like a goldfish or a pug – like my eyes are on opposite sides of my head or something. I mustn’t look in the mirror too often because when I actually do see myself, I’m often amazed at how… blanched and Mrs.Potts-from-Beauty-and-the-Beast my face looks. Nevertheless, if I insist on never being in photos and only taking pictures of Andy, I’m never going to have any proof I went anywhere. I’m turning over a new leaf.

The visit to the Tate was pretty great. On the whole, I’m not a modern art fan. I get bored easily and feel like half the artists just chuck out some obscure blob of nothing and then attribute some huge emotional significance to it. Either that, or they must be such ‘deep’ people that they can’t even buy cereal without analysing the significance of a Coco Pops malignant form. We went to the Tate solely to experience Miroslaw Balka’s “How It Is”. It’s essentially a giant cube structure with one end open. It’s pitch black in there, and as you proceed inside the giant cube you seriously lose all frame of reference. You can vaguely make out the dimming form of other people in the cube, and then suddenly you can’t see anything and you’re reaching out your hand to avoid crashing into anything. It’s an excellent experience. That is, if you can ignore the screaming children. I don’t get why parents taken tots to modern art galleries and let their tots run wild through an art exhibit at the expense of everyone else’s experience. Yes. I am the kind of person who prefers over-18’s showings of films and gets grumpy in Doctors offices when mothers are content to let their child maul you and throw magazines while screaming bloody murder. And yes. I am expecting a baby in the next few weeks.

The National Portrait Gallery was also enjoyable. I was specifically interested in the Twiggy gallery but no photos after 1969 were any good to me. We then went over to Covent Garden:

And saw this man:

It’s not a good photo because I couldn’t get too close, but he had waist-length hair, and had swooped one side of it away from his face and left the other half dangling in his eyes. It was very dramatic. Oh. Those two photos from Covent Garden aren’t related by the way. That crowd in the first photo there are gathering around a street performer, not this man’s awesome mane.

Last but not least, a stop at St. Martins-in-the-fields by Trafalgar/Charing Cross.

I’ll be honest, Andy and I were both bored by the Telemann, but everything else was excellent. The principale violinists were good, made few mistakes, and the ensemble as a whole moved well together as a team. It made me want to pick up my violin again for more than teaching TWINKLE, TWINKLE and brush up on some junk.

That’s How, for Now.

Sometimes, I’ll be part-way through saying something when I realise that I’m annoying myself.