In view of his huge national popularity following the battle of Waterloo, the Duke Of Wellington was pressed to accept the post of Prime Minister. After his first cabinet meeting, somebody asked him how it had gone. “It was the most extraordinary thing” said Wellesley. in genuine puzzlement. “I gave them their orders. then all of them wanted to talk about it.”
When a friend told me this anecdote today it reminded of the Spitting Image sketch where The Iron Lady takes her cabinet out to a restaurant:
Laramie ws an American Western television series by NBC that was shown on BBC TV from 1959 to 1963. It originally starred John Smith as Slim Sherman, Robert Fuller as Jess Harper, Hoagy Carmichael as Jonesy and Robert Crawford, Jr. as Andy Sherman. YouTube shows the credits here in colour, though of course we only ever saw them in blurry black and white…
Although Hoagy Carmichael was dropped after the first series, I never forgot having first seen him on telly as the raddled-looking Jonesy. It was astonishing to later learn that he’d been a glamorous composer earlier in the century, responsible for hits like “Stardust”, “Two Sleepy People” and in particular the superb “Georgia On My Mind”.
Snapped at Victoria Station earlier today: a map of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway in its pre-nationalisation glory days. Also (below) the grand war memorial entrance to Waterloo station – taken earlier this year.
And talking of wartime… This is London Can Take It – an American take on the Blitz Spirit – set to beats and music by the aptly named Public Service Broadcasting. The film of this name was filed by American correspondent Quentin Reynolds and shown to audiences in the USA in order to shore up support for Britain and its allies.
Spring 1982: I was living in Hamburg on my dwindling savings, as the house guest of a German couple – and their cat – in a large gloomy apartment just north of the city centre. My whole life at the time was in German: TV, radio, newpapers, magazines, books, records and every human interaction – from breakfast conversation with my hosts – to chatting up strangers in the local sauna by night.
Being immersed in a language and culture I only half understood acted as a kind of filter that gave hard reality something of a fuzzy edge. Somehow the news that “Die beiden Flugzeugträger HMS Hermes und HMS Invincible der Britischer Flottenverband haben sich nach die Falklandinseln auf den Weg gemacht” was scarier yet somehow removed because I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. But nobody was in any doubt that war was in the air.
Germany was still an occupied country with the Iron Curtain driven right through its heart. The news that Premierministerin Thatcher had seen fit to despatch “drei große atomgetriebene U-Boote” to the South Atlantic struck my German friends with horror. The Soviet army stationed only 60 miles away was paranoid and twitchy enough, without any posturing from the British and their nuclear submarines.
Thirty years ago today as the task force was setting out, I was sipping a coffee on the terrace of the Europaischer Hof – opposite Hamburg’s central station – and fell into conversation with an elderly lady at the next table.
“And where are you from, young man?” she asked in querulous German – and when I replied “Aus England” she shook her head. “Please God let there not be another war” she croaked. “I’ve already lived through two wars. War is terrible… terrible. Please God let there not be another war…”
That’s the thing about the past – it’s fixed: looking back on history events seems somehow inevitable. But just because we got lucky and a particular outcome didn’t in fact happen doesn’t mean the danger was any less great at the time.
One major advantage of being over 60 is the wonderful Freedom Pass that offers older people – and those with disabilities – free travel the length and breadth of London. Those who reached 60 before April 2010 got them automatically – but the threshold is being incrementally increased so that eventually you’ll need to be 65 to qualify. This upper age was originally going to be reached in 2020, but last year’s government spending review plans to bring it forward to 2018.
Before getting my Freedom Pass I had a standard Oystercard with auto topup – itself a brilliantly hassle-free way of getting around the capital. Since I’m still in gainful fulltime employment, it was morally a tad dubious to take up this chance of free subsidised travel. So by way of a sop to my conscience, my old Oystercard has passed to an old friend in straitened circumstances whose travel around London I now pay for instead of my own.
After all, as that fine songwriter TV Smith (formerly of The Adverts) once put it – and as I well remember from signing on in the 70s – it’s expensive being poor.
From our recent Ikea visit… Instagram photos of track, tram and platform on South London’s Tramlink service that connects Wimbledon with Croydon and eastwards on to Beckenham Junction. The network is part of Transport For London, whose invaluable Oystercards are valid for its whole length.
It’s converted from an old railway line and a huge asset to the local transport infrastructure: a kind of South Circular rail link, if you will.
Some of its films were highly memorable – though not always for the right reasons – Dark And Lonely Water offered priceless comedy value, even at the time.
“Sensible children… I have no power over them” mutters The Spirit Of Dark And Lonely Water from beneath his dark and lonely hood.
“Oi luk, vair’s samwam en va wor-ahh!” comments Hordriss The Confuser on YouTube. ” I remember when nearly every child in documentaries or public service announcements had an estuary accent which could strip paint from steel.”
But some of the COI’s intentionally funny films were genuinely hilarious, and put their point across all the more effectively. 1945′s “Coughs & Sneezes” was an alltime favourite…
Starring Ty Hardin, Bronco was a US import to the BBC in the laste 50s/early 60s and had one of the more memorable theme songs of the era with its chorus about “tearing across the Texas plain”…
Unfortunately at that time the UK also had a brand of hard glossy lavatory paper with the same name. As a result, my chums and I used to think it was terribly funny to change the words of the chorus to: “Bronco… Bronco… Tearing down the dotted line”. My, how we laughed.
Bronco toilet paper – and the rival brand Izal usually found school lavatories – were f**king awful to wipe your arse with. Whoever dreamed up the idea of selling us non-absorbant toilet paper that was hard and shiny on one side – and fibrous and rough on the other- deserved to go out of business. Oh, hold on – they did.
Child K snapped this sportily dressed man standing astride his shopping cart in the checkout queue at Ikea in Croydon. Note the iPad lying on top of his intended purchases. I asked on Twitter if anyone could suggest what he was up to.
“Aha, Strange things happen to a man’s brain in Ikea Croydon” said @WobblyBobMusic “this is what happened last time I was there”
“Woah! Testosterone overdose” was @seanamcginty‘s reaction
“Or is he just trying to impress……………!” replied @NearsideNick
“If he’d had his legs waxed as well you’d have known immediately” volunteered @leny2010
“He’s even dressed in Swedish colours! Could be some Scandinavian pron niche of which we are unaware and cannot hope to comprehend” said @cupoftea69
“I think he’s misunderstood the whole concept of how to wear a bumbag (that is what they were called back in the 80′s I think?)” suggested @NoahSams
“Taking a photo of his bits? I’ve been to IKEA in Croydon. It’s a portal to Hell. Nothing would surprise me there…” was the last word from the well-named @bitofacharacter
You’ve got to love Twitter. A total waste of time no doubt, but all of human life is there.
The other extraordinary thing about Chris Hill-Scott’s photo (see Future Photography below) is Oxford Circus itself. In 2009, taking their cue from the “Shared Space” or “Naked Streets” philosophy pioneered in The Netherlands, London road planners removed all those stone ballustrades and metal railings you can see in his picture.
For as long as I can remember, those had herded together massed throngs of shoppers and office workers around the tube station, making every visit a stressful and wretched experience.
Rightly or wrongly, London Mayor Boris Johnson claimed full credit when he opened the new open layout in November 2009 – and two and a half years later I still marvel at the transformation. This crossroads at the heart of the West End now feels light, open and (above all) safe. Drivers, cyclists and pedestrians are now far more aware of each other, make eye contact far more often and – it seems – accidents are much reduced.
In January 2012 BBC Radio 4 broadcast a programme about the Shared Space concept, called Thinking Streets.
“A shared space scheme involves removing the distinction between streets and pavements. No barriers, few if any road markings, no pedestrian crossings, and little in the way of street signage. The result is that you enter a shared space very much at your own risk, which is the key to improving safety, traffic flow and quality of experience. The early roots of this concept lie in the work of the late Dutch traffic engineer, Hans Monderman.”Read more…
It’s easy to have so much fun in late middle age – snapping little pix with your phone and adding them to the billions already online – that you forget what truly great photography is. Idly wilfing on Google this morning I was suddenly suddenly confronted with the real thing. This photo of Oxford Circus in the snow comes from quiz.cc – the BMX photoblog of Chris Hill-Scott. Click the picture to see it full-size there.
A further search on his site for the tag ‘London’ brought up a wealth of wonderful images and stories – all shared with the world for free. You’ve got to love that side of the internet – though it’s crushing the old newspaper, publishing, music and broadcast industries as we’ve known them. When a photojournalist cheerfully publishes work of this quality unpaid, how will he (or any other future Arbus or Cartier-Bresson) earn a living in decades to come?
Incidentally HCB was notoriously camera-shy himself. My favourite story about him was confirmed in an obituary letter to The Guardian 8 years ago:
In the late 1970s, Henri Cartier-Bresson took to the streets of New York, wearing his usual inconspicuous trilby and obscuring his Leica with a big pocket handkerchief, pretending to be blowing his nose while taking photographs of passers-by on the sidewalk. A New Yorker festooned with his own Japanese zoom-lens cameras interrupted him, saying: “Who do ya think y’are … the poor man’s Cartier-Bresson ?”
Walking out with Child A for a pizza we saw a bright light beside the moon in the evening sky. It looked like a plane on its way over to Heathrow, except that it was stationary – a satellite perhaps. Learned later from Wife that the upper bright light was in fact Venus, while the normal star-sized thing further down in the sky is Jupiter – a fact confirmed by The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang.
Much as I loathe everything MacDonalds stands for, the fact that this ad got made by a major US multinational shows how tolerant Western society has become since the dark days of my early teens.
Back in 1963 gay love was still the kind that dared not speak its name – and acting on it could land you in prison. But today’s wider tolerance still doesn’t mean it’s actually easy for queer kids to find themselves and embrace their identity nowadays. The widespread use of “gay” among young people to mean useless or pathetic means the environment for coming out is far from friendly or accepting, even today.
The key message of hope all alienated teenagers need to hear is “You’re Not Alone” – and it didn’t reach my generation till our early 20s with the arrival of David Bowie:
Oh no love! you’re not alone No matter what or who you’ve been No matter when or where you’ve seen All the knives seem to lacerate your brain I’ve had my share, I’ll help you with the pain You’re not alone David Bowie: Rock’n'Roll Suicide
Macdonalds ads are likely to carry on being made and reach mass audiences for the forseeable future. Whatever other cultural subtext they may carry, at least this one is also sending Bowie’s old message to a new generation of youngsters struggling with their sexual identity.
