blah blah blah

Beautiful but boring woman overheard in coffee shop in Queen's Park saying 'I can't believe I'm a TV actress now'.  Spoke for 30 minutes solid about herself to equally beautiful man.

London's hidden enclaves

I am constantly surprised by how often I am constantly surprised.

This week, I attended the local  summer party on the square where I work.  I was surpised at how interesting, down to earth, friendly and warm the people I met there were.  I was surprised also, at how diverse they were and how, having worked in my building for so many years, I had never come across this other world.

Let me explain,  I work in a fairly grand but small georgian building, tall and thin and wholly unsuited to being an office, but designed by John Adams, one of Londons finest regency architects.  It is situated in a beautiful, rather secret regency square in London, with a small but perfectly formed garden in the middle where office workers spread out their jackets and sandwiches in summer sunshine, and foreign students chatter against the railings outside in faltering English.  Occasionally TV companies film period pieces there.  Indians from the Indian YMCA round the corner take photos of each other and once in a while anarchist squatters take over a building and create free schools (courtesy of Guy Ritchie.)

As well as varied little hotpotch of offices (engineers, magistrates, interior designers, two small embassies, an international school and a theological hospital) there are flats and houses.  A small but hidden community of (often) well to do small holders in the London's Fitzrovia prairies.   We also have a few glitterati: Ian Mckeowan, Griff Rhys Jones, Fay Maschler.

So that's it in a nutshell, and like most communities that live side by side each other in London, never the twain shall meet, until, sometimes, oddly, worlds collide in twilight crashes.

The party was catered by a lady from number 14, (and her mother who'd rushed here from france on a hastily booked easy jet flight), music delivered by a jazz trio related to someone in no 1, and dedicated to a man from who'd rented a peppercorn rent for 40 years and had just died.
I talked to his 'adopted' son and daughter in law (he was childless).  They described a man who, Betjamen like, had fought the authorities since the sixties turning a parking lot into a garden, by a restored piece of England's heritage.

I like communities.  I like London for the way it swirls up separate little groups who keep to themselves.  Where you are, as I'd recently read, defined by the title of your postcode.  It's not often you look under a stone and uncover a world.

Of course we all got very drunk and a few of tried to sing some karaoke.  But that's not for these pages...

Doing Make Up on Trains - Our London Heroines

Yo Londoners at large! There's a new class of heroine that's going unnoticed here in our city.  She's sassy, smart and has a pretty good sense of balance too.  Plus the precision of the hands of a brain surgeon. Not a measured complement.

She's the commuter I saw this morning, stood in a packed tube train, against the open window at one end (you know, where standing there is like being in a wind tunnel and you're Michelle Obama on a state visit to the UK) And what is she doing? applying mascara, eyeliner and a little touch of blusher.  Standing up.  Yes, bag on shoulder, someone else's elbow near her face, putting the fine points on her lashes.  The woman should be in the circus.  It's like painting the sistine chapel standing on a vibration plate.  Brilliant!

Oh yes, some of you may taunt.  Disgusting? No way.  She's a testimony to modern womanhood.  Not above caring about her looks enough to put make up on at all, but couldn't care less how many people there were around her to see it, and oblivious to the odd jostle from another commuter's elbow.



In Japan they regularly make up on the underground despite having that famous Japanese sense of etiquette. In fact, in 2008 they printed posters telling people not to (see Annie Mole's underground blog).  In London there aren't any posters but sometimes the odd grumble behind a copy of the Times.

Apparently it's all about denying we're not alone, say researchers.  We're just extending our personal space in a crowded city says one article in the Evening Standard... .  I disagree.  It's about confidence and liberation of course.  Well certainly according to our Make Up Michelangela this morning.

And why not.  Here's to adding make up on high speed trains as an olympic sport!  I hope though they don't have to wear the same gear as the beach volleyball girls.






(ps, in case you were wondering, yes, I've done a little bit of the art of motion make up myself.  Conclusion: overground trains are much smoother than the tube)

Gardens Rock: the chelsea flower show

Chelsea flower show is a British institution.  I mean, most of the upper class has a relative with the same name don't they?  So the chance to go was not to be passed up, even if it meant standing on a square of ground trying desperately not to squash a plant, and giving out leaflets to unsuspecting members of the public like my life depended on it.

As a famous flower girl with a cockney accent once said, 'the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated'.  So treat 'em all I did, and did a lo' of luvely talking in the process.

Ok, I'm no cockney, but it was a surprise to see just how many Karen Millen Linen dresses. straw trilbies, and very thin old women with immaculate hairdos I could spot.  They were a nice bunch though. And all  totally, totally absorbed by species of agapanthus, violas and how you pleach a plane tree to grow flat.

Soon I was into my stride, talking about heurchaneums and violas like I was born to it.  I admired the plane trees (platanus hispanica),  told middle aged gay couples and old judges about living walls, and peppered my sentences with latin like I'd stepped off a Shakespearean play.

Of course they weren't all priveleged.  It was kind of nice to see bankers on corporate hospitality sitting on patches of cardboard in a corner eating fish and chips alongside pensioners from Stockton on a day trip.  The British may be a class divided society, but it all swirls in the compost mix when it comes to  hobbies like plants.

The postscript? The woman who looked at me like I'd landed from mars when I quipped about taking her clematis spiral home on the tube.  'Well not quite on the tube...but it'll be good to get it home' .

Getting Life Write

“Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.”

Danny Kaye

Go on, slap me on my hand.  Go on.  Yup.
Thanks.  I know, I haven't written this blog for a while, and well, what can I say?  The ideas flitted by, landed on my head in the middle of a crowded tube train, and then just flew off into the sunset once I got through the door and the second helping of Vanilla Ice cream slithered peaceably down my throat.

You see life happens, work happens and practicing for a rather irrelevant charity walk happens.  But that's no excuse.   In fact, this weekend I've been thinking about procrastination and no excuses pretty often.  I've been on a free life coaching course.

Not that this little chick is about to become a life coach (well it may not be a good idea until I get a northern accent, perma tan and high heeled shoes, as all the tutors seemed to).  Nevertheless, it's not all hokum. I left feeling positive, having written a lot of goals down (they may not happen but I've written them down),  and having met the most eclectic, and in some cases inspiring bunch of people.   All of them loved people and some were genuinely nice people.

There was of course the unemployed scottish clairvoyant, who believed that the universe would provide him with a turnover of £250,000 this year.

Life coaching courses are of the moment.  They're a magnet for people who need rescuing, people looking for career change, and people looking for a shiny new nameplate for their office.  They say it works.  Others say its nothing more than a replacement for your granddad sitting you down at the kitchen table on a saturday afternoon after the football scores and telling you that you you should become an accountant because selling watermelons leads to nowhere.    Whatever, I liked it.  Roll on high heels.

The Battle of Cable Street gone Yuppy

It's not often you overflow with gratitude for London transport.  But this weekend I did just that because it meant I got off at Shadwell instead of Greenwich in East London.  And Shadwell is on Cable Street, site of a battle that basically put a stop to fascism in Britain at a at a time when Europe was going mad with it. In 1936, Jews, Socialists, Irish and an assortment of others banded together to stop Oswald Moseley's blackshirts marching on the (largely Jewish) East End. They're marking their 75th anniversary this year in fact.
(the lovely History Workshop has a great article on it)
So here I was on the corner of Christan Street (yup, real name) looking ahead at a massive flyover in the distance, newly renovated Georgian houses for city slickers on one side of the street and pastel coloured council flats full of headscarved women tending to little kids on the other.  And I wonder, would it happen here today?.  Hopefully it wouldn't have to, but if it did, would people here -or anywhere- band together?

I stop thinking philosophically and think of my stomach.  There's a sign to Waitrose and Fitness First, and down a surgically cleaned road, there's a little square with a pub, a dry cleaners, and a bijoux little chocolate shop.  I love Waitrose, but inside never quite seen anything like this.  It's like the Stepford wives. 70% of people are wearing matching clothes and reading labels of food packets    There is only one family with kids (on a Sunday), one woman with a pram, and one disabled person (who is wearing Louis Vutton slippers).   The only person bigger than size 14 is the woman on the fish counter with a broad East End accent and a young girl at the till wearing hijab.
.
Reassuringly, the old woman ahead of me in the queue farts, which reminds me of Wood Green.

I think perhaps the community here wouldn't stand on street corners in blockades if the BNP marched in Hackney, but you never know.  Perhaps it's not only poor communities where people stand together?  But perhaps not? Lots of buckinghamshire housewives did go and bake cakes and then March in the west end against the cuts didn't they?

6 reasons to love Regents Park

"Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent's Park.."  Virginia Woolf.   


I walked home through Regent's park yesterday.  There's nothing quite like overhearing snippets of conversations in a park.  There's nothing better than hearing them in this wonderful little breath of fresh air in the middle of central London.

Here are some things I loved:
1.  The row of fountains, framed by great purple round flowers that stand out like lollipops.
2.  The young pretty girl riding a bicycle with an unnaturally straight back, wobbling a bit.  She screams out 'oooh it'll be lovely in France' and  a less pretty girl runs behind trying to catch her up.

2. The fountain (right) built by Sir Cowasjee Jehangir, who was so excited at having the British overtake his country that he built an ornamental  fountain for them. Apparently he was grateful for British government protection (he was a Parsee) but I think he just wanted the hereditary title they gave him.  In a park stuffed with fountains though, it's a nice one.


3.  The couple sitting either side of a large topiary having a post lover's tiff talk.  It all brings me back....
Girl - 'but why did you say that when he left'.
boy -  'I said it because I thought you were angry with me'
girl 'but I thought you were upset with me'.  Silence, smiles and sounds of wet lips.
Three women of a certain age with bottoms of varying sizes walk past.

4. The sounds of after work footballers calling out to each other. The very pleasant sight of their legs. 

5.  The mccaws cracking out calls from the zoo, me wondering how much it actually costs to get into the zoo nowadays.

The totally English serenity of this place (populated by 50% tourists).  I love it.

.




And then I got to Camden town.  There was a man holding a stick with a little sign that just said 'Jesus'.   He looked like a tour guide.  Perhaps they have tours to Jesus in Regents' Park too.  Definitely a very spiritual place...