BB5

Well it seems we do care - spent several hours over the last couple days watching (so sad so sad).

Its all been about the Kitten and how she can manage to alienate herself with her attention-seeking-behaviour, revolution my arse - what in the hell did she volunteer to go in for - she knew the rules! Does she really think she can politically-activate the S-Club-7-Hollyoakettes?

Firm friends - Marco and Emma (bad teeth, squeeky), he loves her and calls her angel, already. Michelle (sort of bland dark hair) and Emma are bisexual (confessions late at night, hugs all round, thanx for sharing).

Vanessa and Shell - most notible for blondness so far, apart from Shell's small outburst of tears at not seeing her family and friends in the audience and her remarkable niceness - perhaps the only genuine kindness towards Kitten (offer of things from her suitcase since Kitten, with an over-whelming majority, was not allowed hers for the duration of her stay in the house - interesting task, many of the housemates seemed to fail to realise exactly what they were voting for - even Kitten might have liked to have a supply of her own knickers). Lessons Kit needs to learn: don't be shy of coming forward and cutting your nose off to spite your face etc - loss of suitcase, lacking a suitable sleeping arrangement (there may be some who would like to sleep in the same bed as Jason but she wasn't one of them).

Victor - self confessed alpha male (I mean really) so far thinks that Nadia fancies him and that he and Michelle have a connection, rather fond of a forefinger and thumb gesture that stands in for gun or phallus (which he can't stop talking about, too much time out of college, not enough action, I reckon). The other man making a bold play for dominant male being Jason - arriving in leopard print g-string, bow tie and pumped body (does this really impress anyone anymore? Or does it just shriek of some kind of insecurity like girls who like to get their tits out in the pub?).

So left with the quiet ones. Hardly a peep out of Stuart-the-Headband skateboardy-type (who can't be forgiven for having union jack swimming trunks) until of course he was throwing Michelle around covered in mud in a bikini (will she become the one all the girls love to hate because of the way she is drawn to all available men?). Ahmed, ex-asylum-seeker, older, non-drinker (methinks this could be the death of him - in a situation like this not being able to fit in with the drunken frolics could lead to his almost total alienation in a very short time), was enjoying a quiet dip in the jacussi in the nude. And then Nadia, from Portugal, already the subject of gossip between Marco and Kitten (you can't gossip with a girl like Kitten - its just not part of her make-up - far too sincere to endulge in the sharing of juice) as to whether she's a transexual or not. A most hilarious sequence of her strutting her stuff in a bathing suit all wet while most of the housemates attempted to cop a feel of her tits (are they real?). And finally my personal favourite so far - Daniel, hairdresser from Hull, sensible enough to be able to chalk up the food shopping board, not too over the top, fits in, enjoys a joke.

Phew and after all that I'm going to try not to watch for the rest of the week.

Big Brother 5

And by the time I got home the boys were bonding outside - joking and drinking beer in the way boys do. While the girls sat around inside talking about looking good, not eating too much while in BB, weight, feet, pedicures...

Boring so far then.

Cut back to the boys - the scot (Jason) is talking about how they can set up their exercise routine - circuit training in garden, Marco is telling about his new regime with his fitness trainer and training partner with a body like madonna, his fitness trainer was in the military and, coincidence, so was Jason for six years. Marco Daniel teases him about soggy biscuit, Jason claims not to know what he's talking about...(even I know what that is and I'm not a boy, nor have I been in the military).

It sort of feels like they've never been away. They all seem sort of familiar in that eager S-Club 7 sort of a way. Will there be sex? Will there be fighting? Do we even care?

Birthday in Havana

Havana, Hanover Square, that is. Not a first choice of nightclub by any means but a colleague was having her birthday there and we said we'd pop in for a drink. Its a kind of latin joint full of sleazy men and girls who can do a passable samba, lambada or can just shake their hips. Real latin girls come in vest tops, jeans and strappy sandals. Others feel they need to make more of an effort. There's a Thai pole dancer in and extremely short asymmetrical dress (extremely short on one side only) who is being taken for a spin across the floor by almost every man in the joint so far. Of the other girls the favoured dancer is the one in the yellow vest top. Passed around like a parcel from partner to partner.

Its one of those places where the men use dancing as a way to show off - like cocks in mating season, a puffed up chest, some tail feathers shaken. Its the biceps, teeshirts just curling up over them, spinning the girl and holding an extravagant hand outstretched, hips and foot movements. The Matre'd has a terrible two-tone hairdressers haircut - it sticks up like a mohican on the side, is blond on one third, brown on the other and slightly flat on the top.

Us? We were just there for the cocktails, until of course they took their toll and we had to join in. Just for a bit mind. One of my colleagues was whisked off to dance with a man who pressed his hard-on against her thigh at which point HS decided she had to eat and demanded we leave. Shame, I was just about getting into the swing of it.

My Pound Coins This Morning

As I was contemplating going to the fruit lady this morning I checked my change and found I had three pound coins. I don't know why today particularly i checked but I found I had:

• 2 that say: PLEIDIOL WYF I'M GWLAD (true am I to my country) and have leeks on their tails
• Of these 2 the writing is printed different ways up - one reads right-way-round if the leek is up, the other if the queen is up
• The other one says: NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT (nobody provokes me with impunity) and has a lion on its tail

And so off I am to the fruit lady to spend my £3.

British Pound Coins
Royal Mint

Chain Blogging

I'm playing Chain Blogging - a game dreamt up by Clear Blue Skies, 'rules' explained here. Word Association - find an idea, theme, word or phrase in a participating blog entry and write your own, while linking to the one you are associating with and leaving a comment on the post and (if you choose) with Clear Blue Skies so he can keep a tree diagram of where the chain is going.

Chain Blogging: I Love London (but I think you know that already)

I love (amongst other things):

• The view from Alexandra Palace, having a beer in the early summer evening.
• Being steeped in history, beautiful buildings, a chaotic sense of town planning, constantly changing urban cityscape.
• London's parks - not the countryside, not away but peaceful.
• The Thames, winding its way through vistas of London that are vast and juxtaposing, historic and modern, industrial and residential, with suprising wildlife. And walking along the south bank in the falling dusk chatting to friends, popping into bars on the way.
• Sitting on the front left hand seat downstairs or the back lefthand seats of a routemaster, or the front top deck seats of a new london bus in the winter.
• Not needing a car.
• Shopping in Selfridges (not even necessarily buying anything) until closing on a Friday or Saturday evening.
• That an evening out can be spontaneous rather than planned - eating, drinking, dancing, seeing something, at the spur of the moment.
• Diversity.
• Having facilities: theatres, cinemas, galleries, historic landmarks, great bookshops,...
• Parts of town - distinct, with their own specific flavours, atmospheres, fashions, people.
• That oddness is acceptable.
• Being constantly surprised by places, people and things.

This list is unending even though there are many things that I miss as a london dweller that I am in awe of when visiting the countryside - like seeing a sky full of stars, the air quality, solitude, dramatic scenery, the sea crashing on rocks. But I am drawn by an invisible chord to this city of mine. I was born here, therefore I feel safe here. Nothing is more frightening to me than the pitch dark on a moonless night in the countryside with no street lights.


This is part of a chain of posts linked together by word association. The previous link in the chain was here @ headCleaner. If you want to write another link here's what to do: Find a word, phrase or theme from this post to inspire your own and go and write it. Try not to write something that's similar to this post. That way the subject of the posts along the chain will vary. E.g. if I write about going to the doctor's, then don't talk about the last time you were ill, instead describe how you used to play Doctors and Nurses with the girl next door. Get the idea? Your post can be in any style you want. Copy this paragraph and tack it onto the end of your post, updating the link to point here, then leave a comment here that points to your new post.


And the next chainpost is: A Sky Full of Stars at Santiago Dreaming

Chain Blogging: Big Brother Starts Tomomorrow

They're calling it the Evil One. Every year I think: its crap why am I watching it, but end up getting fascinated by the crap psychology, stupidity, bickering and stuff and end up watching it regularly (not religiously - did watch tonnes of the first one but steadily watching less and less of them subsequently - now only really catch the long one with the pschologists on it and perhaps the friday eviction, so sad, so sad).

So, a quick round up, just before the next series:

BB1
Hated Craig (eventual winner), still can't stand him on that DIY programme he's on.
Wished Anna (lesbian ex-nun) had won.
Laughed at Mel's fickleness - being so drawn to Andy then swopping her affections for Tom the minute he left.
Nasty Nick - cheating double dealing b.... (made for some drama though)
Caroline's lip line
Worst outcome of the programme - Nicola's terrible terrible single.

BB2
Glad Brian won, not sure it was so good for kids TV although he fits in well there.
Liked Bubble and Brian's constant fighting and stuff.
The love affair - Paul and Helen (of the amazing I like blinking remarks).
Worst characters: control freak Stuart (pity his poor wife) and I'm so mad Penny.
Best bit - knowing about BB meant I could join in the boysy-gang at work who spent good portions of the day emailing their amateur pschological analysis to one another

BB3
Favs: Alex (dancing behind the bedroom door, peeing in the shower - horror), Sandy (Scot, older, walking out).
Least favourite: Jade (can you see my kebabs, am I minging - snivelling wreck).
Flirting - Adele & Lee until Sophie arrived and Adele ditched like a lead weight.
Advent of the great divide - rich vs poor side. I find this is now in common usage - our office has two units divided by a joining door where the other unit is the 'rich' side and our side is the 'poor' side. We spend our time bemoaning our lowly status.
Kate - first girl winner, men's cuppa tea but bland and rather boring.

BB4
Cameron, the winner - Scottish, virgin?
This one was all about The Tickle, really wasn't the same after he was chucked out.
Stupid South African swap.
The awful Lisa who was never going to fit in.
I didn't win the sweepstake at work.

And so we come to year 5 - the evil big brother. Not sure whether its going to be an obsessed year or not, yet.



This is part of a chain of posts linked together by word association. The previous link in the chain was here @ The Final Broadcast. If you want to write another link here's what to do: Find a word, phrase or theme from this post to inspire your own and go and write it. Try not to write something that's similar to this post. That way the subject of the posts along the chain will vary. E.g. if I write about going to the doctor's, then don't talk about the last time you were ill, instead describe how you used to play Doctors and Nurses with the girl next door. Get the idea? Your post can be in any style you want. Copy this paragraph and tack it onto the end of your post, updating the link to point here, then leave a comment here that points to your new post.

Burning Art

This is greatly saddening. I heard on the news that some of the works of Patrick Heron (late father of a friend of mine) have been lost, as well as works held there for the National and Tate Gallerys. Much has been made of the losses from Saatchi's collection but I fear the devastation may be further reaching than that.


Big, precious, fragile - counting the cost of art consumed by fire
Saatchi Devastated by art blaze
Up in Smoke
Art Warehouse Probe Begins

Broken Blog

Somethings busted and I can't figure out why - the images won't load up from when I did them last night to now. Is this a common problem today?

Then yesterday I also discovered this - someone has copied my blog, comments, images, everything and stuck it on to their own blog. They have submitted it to Blogshares. There is no email address to contact them and ask them to stop it. Blogger support said they never made any claim that they could stop this kind of thing (fair enough) but I thought perhaps they would be able to withdraw someone's account if they blatantly did something like this.

Someone called Bad Karma left a comment around my blog birthday saying that someone would steal something from me soon and I wouldn't realise until it was too late.

This is making me paranoid.

Monday's Life Class





A prolific week. The model who was a trained dancer returned - skinny, very muscled, showed a lot of tension in the body.

We had 15 minute warm up pose, couple of 5 minute poses, 3 two minute poses, three 30 second poses, one movement pose and a long one after 8pm until the end. Somehow I was going so slowly in the last pose that I didn't get but half finished (top right).

Candid Arts Trust: open access sessions and more formal taught courses in both life drawing and painting. Behind Angel tube, Islington - first left down City Road. Contact: The Candid Arts Trust, 3 Torrens Street, London EC1V 1NQ, Tel: 020 7837 4237.

Tales from the Dark City

In the toilet two girls are talking over the walls of the cubicles they are in. "So what kind of men do you like?". "I'm not sure really. Muscles. I like them to have some muscles".

Three ladies, fancy tops, jeans and stilettos leave the restaurant filing past the waiter who had looked after them all evening. Each of them kissed him on the cheek. He stood there stunned, slightly red and pleased as punch. Good tips! Although it won't buy him any beer later.

In the street outside Home a blond man in a full length leather coat discussing issues with another man in the middle of the road. I can't help thinking he looks like a WWF wrestler - all blond thin longish-hair and mustache (showy, no substance).

From the bus window on the way home as we pull away from the bus stop a man aggressively approaches a woman. They back into a corner. He's urging her to hurry up. She takes off a red trainer, he drops something into it and she puts it back on. Drug dealing pimp with a whore. Or perhaps a drug dealer with his girlfriend. Whatever, made me uneasy.

Food Shopping

In the supermarket on the way home three skateboard dope boys were buying stawberry milk, cadburies mini-rolls and white sliced.

Brancusi at the Tate Modern

Room 2. A room full of heads. Beautiful, subtle, tactile sculptures. Some more reaslitic than others with indication of hair, ears, eyes and nose, gradually they became more stylized and paired down until they were egg-like with groves and planes where features would be.

Choice of materials was integral to the work. White stone often, ideas worked out in plaster. Stones like marble, smoothed to the point of lustre perfection. You can feel the cold exuding off them. Limestone, texture with sparkle inside, like frost on cold day.

Sort of crushingly beautiful in their elegance and yet deeply touching. Made me feed sorrow at being so far away from my sister and niece.

Room 3. In the beginning of the world was an egg. Potent imagery of creation, birth, nurture.

Further Rooms. The plinths were often sculptural themselves, top heavy, roughly hewn in wood. Squared off blocks supporting sculptures of beautiful stones, delicately carved (how can you possibly delicately carve a hard stone - the end result belies the process of its making). Some of the wooden works had integrated plinths - all carved from one piece of wood. Other works had plinths of several pieces with the curved stone sculpture balanced on them.

The work reminded me of one of my favourite contemporary artists, Alison Wilding, who once wrote in her book that her work was about the relationships of objects to each other - on-top-ness, standing-up-ness, besideness, next-to-ness etc. This is exactly what this work felt like (seems to me he must have been a large influence on her). How does one piece sit on this small stone plinth that is resting on this larger wooden plinth? Wood supports stone. Weight of the stone bares down on the wood making it stable. Contrast of materials - texture, temperature, colour.

Finally bird in space. Aerodynamic, more like a movement than a representation, shiny brass tall thin curve, a sharp edge occurs at a change in plane. Beautiful.

And outside on the balcony in the fading sun a girl in a black leather skirt, velveteen top with the hood up and red stilettos is snogging her boyfriend as he leans against the wall.

And across the millennium Bridge St Pauls stands out magnificently on the horizon. Its ancient dirt accentuating its architectural features and statues.

Friday Afternoon

Been in a meeting with a bloke who could talk for Britain - he talked solidly for two hours practically without taking a breath. I was sitting with my back to the window and the sun was glinting off the corner of my glasses into my eye so now my eye feels burned (I'm starting to think my glasses are too wide. That adds a second problem to these fabulous glasses - the first problem is that they are sprung in the hinges so they grip on the head and don't fall off, this is good apart from the fact that they are causing dent's behind both my ears)

Tube Journey

In our carriage this evening:

A poet writing on his palm top, wearing a green fisherman's jacket.

Five men on the way back froma meeting discussing the London Development Agency. 3 black suits, white shirts and somber ties. The one on the end looked dishevelled. Couldn't really tell if he had his shoes on the right feet, they looked almost like they could be the wrong way round (something odd about the design obviously).

Next to them was a gigantic builder. Wearing shorts. Legs like tree trunks, very tanned and hairy. Paint splattered.

Long grey haired lady. Purple framed glasses on her face, sunglasses on her head. Lots of silver rings and a huge silver cuff that covered half her forearm.

And then I got off at Kings Cross.

Bus Driver Angst 8.30am

Sunny day (its true that hot weather makes people angsty).

Unlike yesterday when the convoy of 29s was pissing me off - one too full, next one emptyish but not stopping even though we were practically standing so as it had to drive over us with arms outstretched flagging it down - the bus stopped quite easily. Rasta bus driver with a long single dreadlock grey beard.

A white van driver squeezed past him at one of the bus stoops and that really pissed him off (but I always thought the job of white van man was to piss everyone off and so its pointless reacting). As we continued up to Manor House in a single stream of traffic the bus swang wildly across the carriageway lurching from side to side as the bus driver seemed to want to overtake (where would he go though? There was no empty space ahead). Eventually he swang into the oncoming traffic to pull up alongside the offending white van, opened his doors and shouted across to the van's driver, threatening to kick his head in for squeezing by in such a way because it was dangerous and could've caused an accident.

This altercation didn't help the bus driver calm down. Much use of the brakes ensued. Eventually we got to a bus lane, it was empty. We stopped at a stop and he allowed a couple of less full buses to pass him. At the next bus stop we came to a halt to let someone off behind another 29. A passenger decided to take our bus rather than the one in front. As he showed his ticket the bus driver asked him, "Why you walk pass the empty bus and get on the crowded one?". It was a rhetorical question. The passenger looked confused and mumbled something about wanting to go to Gower Street. A sensible explanation as the bus was going to Trafalgar Square while the one in front was going to Camden.

Damn bad start to the day on the bus drivers behalf, I would say. Glad to get off really.

Monday's Life Class



Shadow out of necessity because there were no working spotlights. Not such an interestnig night really. I started doing drawings without lifting the charcoal off the paper and making them an impression of what was there rather than trying to capture reality and then it became more interesting.

Candid Arts Trust: open access sessions and more formal taught courses in both life drawing and painting. Behind Angel tube, Islington - first left down City Road. Contact: The Candid Arts Trust, 3 Torrens Street, London EC1V 1NQ, Tel: 020 7837 4237.

Check-Out Chaps' Gossip

While we were at the checkout in Sainsbury's this afternoon (bad choice of time for going to supermarket but the basket-only queue was short) the check-out chaps were having a three way conversation over our heads.

"Tom, y'know Tom?"
"Tall Tom?"
"Nah, Produce Tom"
"Oh yeah, Produce Tom. What about 'im?"
"He's in jail."
"In jail?" incredulous, "but he's so innocent. What did he do?"
"Here he is" producing a copy of Hornsey Journal with pictures in. Much shock and incredulity.
"He's in for football hooliganism. You know those Charlton and Southampton fans..."

And we think women can gossip.

The Other Direction

So we rode the riverboat in the opposite direction this time up river to Kew. And then rode it back again. Nice relaxing day trip (just us and the tourists). Its sometimes good to try to see your own city from the eyes of tourists or from an unusual perspective. Different view of London altogether.







The journey upriver is very different from the one that goes to Greenwich - while the Greenwich trip goes through the city, financial and business districts, this journey passes a lot more industry, expensive apartment developments and then parts of London that look like small villages with country-style pubs. And when you get off at Kew, you're still very much in London when you walk off the riverbank.

This Blogger Business

And I'll just add two-pennies-worth on this: not keen. I keep making mistakes because I can't see the post and the edit on the same page. And I don't like round-edged graphics.

Read all about it @:
Diamond Geezer
Elsie
Oddverse
Big n juicy

!!UPDATE!! And its soooo slow at publishing now.