Scheduled Engineering Works.
One of the ideas for Sunday was to go up the Jubilee Line and visit the Hindu temple that's about equidistant from either Neasden tube station, and Stonebridge Park on the Bakerloo, but a series of transport delays eat up time. Firstly, I can't get into the bathroom because Lemmy is doing his ablutions:
Any attempts to brush my teeth in the sink are meant with baleful stares and a mean left hook...
Eventually, after a negotiation on bathroom space and a fine breakfast from velvetdahlia I'm trundling down the road to find somewhere to buy a travelcard. I pick a newsagent at random and am flabberghasted to find the person behind the counter is someone I used to work with at the cinema in Fulham. There's one of those 'staring open-mouthed in disbelief 'moments as she also can't believe I've just walked into her shop in Boston Manor far west on the Piccadilly Line. There's much squealing and hugging across the counter as we just repeat each others names as though we've summoned each other by incantation - especially ironic is that I am going to met midnightxpress this morning who is also an ex-Fulham UGC compatriot. She's so flustered by my materialisation that she nearly stamps my travelcard the 14th November 2006.
London is supposedly this vast metropolis where everyone is a stranger, and yet I regularly bump into old friends and acquaintances - school-friends from Cornwall, people I worked with decades ago, people I know who don't live in London...even vodex of this parish (IIRC) was in a tube carriage with me an overheard my conversation about this art project before he found this blog...life is a series of astonishing co-incidences. I suppose that given the size of London and all the variations on chance encounter that are made possible by the sheer number of people sloshing around the city that we shouldn't be surprised at the frequency of bumping into people we know on the street, but it is still an ever-amazing occurence when you crash into someone you know from Bodmin on St Martin's Lane, or find yourself in a train carriage with an ex-boss.
Still slightly dazed, I then spend the next 40 minutes waiting for a bus, and wonderment has time to settle into annoyance at the morning slipping past. Transport woes increase when I realise that my planned route is impossible due to engineering works taking out the whole Circle line and the Edgware Road branch of the District line. Further hopes of a clever alternative are quoshed at Hammersmith when the PA system reminds us that there's no service on the H&C from Hammersmith today - so effectively any direct route into Paddington from West London is frelled. I travel all the way into Piccadilly Circus and back on myself via the Bakerloo to eventually arrive at Paddington nearly an hour late. I'm more than a little fractious, so after leaving baggage at left luggage G and I settle for a soothing cup of tea to imporve my disposition before renegotiating today's plans now that we are behind schedule and I'm in a bad mood. Tea helps...time with my friend to chat about frivolity helps even more. We hatch a new plan and set off underground to conquer a few more stations. I leave you this clue to deduce where we emerged:
Yes, there really is a pub masquerading as a Swiss chalet on a traffic island on the Finchley Road. There's been some form of Swiss Cottage here since the early years of the 19thC, but this one was built in the 60's and has now been dwarfed by high rise office blocks and the Odeon Cinema. I can't find out much about why a Swiss Cottage came to be here exactly, and then why when that one went it was felt necessary to build something else Alpine...it's one of those lovely little weirdnesses about London, like Norway giving us a Christmas tree every year. But yes, in wan February sunshine the stripy poles and wooden shutters try to look jolly.
The station itself dates from the late 30's and has a Clarice Cliff vibe to the warm cream, brown and eau-de-nil tiling on the platforms. Some of the tiles have heraldic animals. The alcoves provide much amusement. It's probably infantile, but I like peeping out from behind things...
The escalators too betray their design roots in the Golden Age of Cinema of the 30's, being bronzed uplighters. They should be illuminating starlets in satin dresses. And I just love the illuminated roundel signage.
I used to know a special effect studio that had an office that backed onto the tube station. They once caused a full evacuation of the station when an experiment with a new smoke formula went wrong and filled the station with dense white smog. These are the same people that had been working on a three-foot mechanical spider for weeks and could no longer decide if it was scary enough. They figured they were too close to the project and needed objective opinion. All very sensible one would think, except their solution was to take the remote controlled - and I say it again 3 foot spider - to the local supermarket and set it off down one of the aisles...cleared the shop in a matter of moments and the store manager beat it to death with a broom. Their reaction to the destruction of the creature was a pragmatic 'well I guess that was convincingly scary, then'.
We finish mucking about and get the train two stops up to West Hampstead. Hampstead is in my head as 'a bit posh' but the rear walls of these houses have been redecorated and not by Lawrence Llewellen-Bowen.
Outside, the brick frontage has a Germanic feel. But as we've decided to see Cloverfield back at the cinema at Finchley Road, we don't really explore further than up and down the platform.
Finchley Road is also above ground. I've been here before visiting friends who lived nearby, but had never noticed that there was a Freud Museum nearby - mostly because I was on autopilot remembering the way to A&D's place...might be worth a return visit.
There are dozens of pigeons squatting on the ledges, puffed up against the cold, squatting on the station building and as G takes pictures they all take to the air in a noisy cloud of clapping wings, dark smudges against the pearly winter sky. We walk round the corner to the O2 Centre. It's appalling; a substitute for actual culture with the escalator up to the Vue cinema built through fake rocks squirting water in broken arcs with fish tanks built into the walls...this is commodification of experience,a Situationist nightmare, if this is modern life, roll on the next Ice Age to re-glaciate this place. We avoid being stuck with cinema food by smuggling in healthier things bought from Sainsburys in the basement. Cloverfield makes me feel nauseous even though I loved it, and like something out of the 19thC G has to loosen my corset for me to avoid fainting!
We return to Paddington in time to finish the day as we started it having tea in a cafe and talking about movies...I trat myself to a Weekend First upgrade on the train home...
Any attempts to brush my teeth in the sink are meant with baleful stares and a mean left hook...
Eventually, after a negotiation on bathroom space and a fine breakfast from velvetdahlia I'm trundling down the road to find somewhere to buy a travelcard. I pick a newsagent at random and am flabberghasted to find the person behind the counter is someone I used to work with at the cinema in Fulham. There's one of those 'staring open-mouthed in disbelief 'moments as she also can't believe I've just walked into her shop in Boston Manor far west on the Piccadilly Line. There's much squealing and hugging across the counter as we just repeat each others names as though we've summoned each other by incantation - especially ironic is that I am going to met midnightxpress this morning who is also an ex-Fulham UGC compatriot. She's so flustered by my materialisation that she nearly stamps my travelcard the 14th November 2006.
London is supposedly this vast metropolis where everyone is a stranger, and yet I regularly bump into old friends and acquaintances - school-friends from Cornwall, people I worked with decades ago, people I know who don't live in London...even vodex of this parish (IIRC) was in a tube carriage with me an overheard my conversation about this art project before he found this blog...life is a series of astonishing co-incidences. I suppose that given the size of London and all the variations on chance encounter that are made possible by the sheer number of people sloshing around the city that we shouldn't be surprised at the frequency of bumping into people we know on the street, but it is still an ever-amazing occurence when you crash into someone you know from Bodmin on St Martin's Lane, or find yourself in a train carriage with an ex-boss.
Still slightly dazed, I then spend the next 40 minutes waiting for a bus, and wonderment has time to settle into annoyance at the morning slipping past. Transport woes increase when I realise that my planned route is impossible due to engineering works taking out the whole Circle line and the Edgware Road branch of the District line. Further hopes of a clever alternative are quoshed at Hammersmith when the PA system reminds us that there's no service on the H&C from Hammersmith today - so effectively any direct route into Paddington from West London is frelled. I travel all the way into Piccadilly Circus and back on myself via the Bakerloo to eventually arrive at Paddington nearly an hour late. I'm more than a little fractious, so after leaving baggage at left luggage G and I settle for a soothing cup of tea to imporve my disposition before renegotiating today's plans now that we are behind schedule and I'm in a bad mood. Tea helps...time with my friend to chat about frivolity helps even more. We hatch a new plan and set off underground to conquer a few more stations. I leave you this clue to deduce where we emerged:
Yes, there really is a pub masquerading as a Swiss chalet on a traffic island on the Finchley Road. There's been some form of Swiss Cottage here since the early years of the 19thC, but this one was built in the 60's and has now been dwarfed by high rise office blocks and the Odeon Cinema. I can't find out much about why a Swiss Cottage came to be here exactly, and then why when that one went it was felt necessary to build something else Alpine...it's one of those lovely little weirdnesses about London, like Norway giving us a Christmas tree every year. But yes, in wan February sunshine the stripy poles and wooden shutters try to look jolly.
The station itself dates from the late 30's and has a Clarice Cliff vibe to the warm cream, brown and eau-de-nil tiling on the platforms. Some of the tiles have heraldic animals. The alcoves provide much amusement. It's probably infantile, but I like peeping out from behind things...
The escalators too betray their design roots in the Golden Age of Cinema of the 30's, being bronzed uplighters. They should be illuminating starlets in satin dresses. And I just love the illuminated roundel signage.
I used to know a special effect studio that had an office that backed onto the tube station. They once caused a full evacuation of the station when an experiment with a new smoke formula went wrong and filled the station with dense white smog. These are the same people that had been working on a three-foot mechanical spider for weeks and could no longer decide if it was scary enough. They figured they were too close to the project and needed objective opinion. All very sensible one would think, except their solution was to take the remote controlled - and I say it again 3 foot spider - to the local supermarket and set it off down one of the aisles...cleared the shop in a matter of moments and the store manager beat it to death with a broom. Their reaction to the destruction of the creature was a pragmatic 'well I guess that was convincingly scary, then'.
We finish mucking about and get the train two stops up to West Hampstead. Hampstead is in my head as 'a bit posh' but the rear walls of these houses have been redecorated and not by Lawrence Llewellen-Bowen.
Outside, the brick frontage has a Germanic feel. But as we've decided to see Cloverfield back at the cinema at Finchley Road, we don't really explore further than up and down the platform.
Finchley Road is also above ground. I've been here before visiting friends who lived nearby, but had never noticed that there was a Freud Museum nearby - mostly because I was on autopilot remembering the way to A&D's place...might be worth a return visit.
There are dozens of pigeons squatting on the ledges, puffed up against the cold, squatting on the station building and as G takes pictures they all take to the air in a noisy cloud of clapping wings, dark smudges against the pearly winter sky. We walk round the corner to the O2 Centre. It's appalling; a substitute for actual culture with the escalator up to the Vue cinema built through fake rocks squirting water in broken arcs with fish tanks built into the walls...this is commodification of experience,a Situationist nightmare, if this is modern life, roll on the next Ice Age to re-glaciate this place. We avoid being stuck with cinema food by smuggling in healthier things bought from Sainsburys in the basement. Cloverfield makes me feel nauseous even though I loved it, and like something out of the 19thC G has to loosen my corset for me to avoid fainting!
We return to Paddington in time to finish the day as we started it having tea in a cafe and talking about movies...I trat myself to a Weekend First upgrade on the train home...