Pete Ashton's Weblog

So I'm sitting on the bus wondering why I'm having trouble writing a fricking blog entry about my weekend in London when it occurs to me that, other than the gig (which I intend to write about separately later) I didn't actually do that much. This could be a damning indictment on my ever-so-exciting life these days that a weekend not really doing much in a different city to the norm is such a radical thing that I feel it must be blogged about at length. I was even contemplating a series of posts.

So here's my weekend in point form.

Friday

Arrived at Marylebone 5pm. Took tube to Whitechapel. Kath isn't home yet so go buy bagels on Brick Lane. Kath comes home, have dinner, Kath goes out on date, I go for walk around City and riverside at night taking photos.

Saturday

Get up around noon. Go to Spitz to help set up gig, pausing to take some photos around Spitalfields. Discover they don't really need my help so go for another walk through City, over Millennium Bridge and into Tate Modern to check the Rachel Whiteread exhibition. Like this a lot, but then I have a thing for cardboard boxes in absurd quantities. Spend about 10 minutes there and go back to gig.

Gig occured. It was great. More later.

Go home, chat with Kath about stuff and she introduces me to the frightening concept of using two points in the Photoshop Curves tool to create an S curve. Brain explodes. Can't sleep due to work shift patterns and got to sleep about 5am.

Sunday

Walk to Angel for Flickrmeet at 12.30. Was meeting Anna but she was late. Thought I spotted the actual meet itself but turned my back at they'd all gone. Give up on Anna and phone Andy Konky Kru, arranging to meet at the British Museum. Anna arrives and locates the Flickrmeet which has decamped to a pub due to the weather. Since Andy is mobile-free can't cancel so set up a proxy meeting with Anna for later.

Meet Andy in the Great Court. Pop over to Gosh!, the comic shop, for an hour or so, discovering that cartoonist John Chandler works there now. Realised I'm terminally out of touch with what's out in comics and could easily spend a grand in there just on graphic novels and reprint volumes.

Anna turns up and we go to the pub for a bit. Turns out Ade Brown has a spare ticket for a Jeffrey Lewis gig on Monday which Anna's also going to so make more proxy plans to go. Go back to Kath's flat, forgoing my strict walking rule and taking the bus as it's raining and I'm getting tired.

Monday

Got up and felt a bit lousy. Wondered what I would do before meeting Anna at seven or whenever our proxy meeting might happen. Realised I wasn't going to arrange to meet anyone else and was about to spend the next few hours moping around the cold empty house so decided I wanted to go home. I was missing Birmingham. I was missing my flat. Thought this somehow significant.

Got bus to Marylebone, got on train, felt a strange sense of rightness about arriving in Birmingham, got home about 6pm. Spent next 36 hours in Photoshop.

And that, dear friends, was my exciting weekend in London. As you can tell, it was mainly spent taking photos and I really should just let them speak for themselves, so here they are (first 26 in this set).

I really fucking loved living in London. From 2000 to 2003 I made my home there, gradually moving from Finchley in zone 3 via Mile End in zone 2 to a flat near Waterloo Station in zone 1. I remember once when Jez was down from Brum for some work thing and we met up for a drink. At the time I'd split up with my fiancee, was taking anti-depressants, would be shortly signed off work for stress and was drinking a fair amount and Jez asked something along the lines of "do you think it might be London that's the cause of all this?" The thought had never occurred to me. How could this be London's fault? This city is great!

And three years later I still stand by that. Whatever the many causes of my woes London wasn't one of them. Living in London, especially living right in the centre of London, is brilliant because you can walk everywhere. Bankside was on my doorstep, Soho a 20 minutes walk over the river and the City half an hour away. Because you're walking you can stick to the back streets and avoid the crowds and walking is the only way to see London properly. And when you start seeing it properly you start to appreciate the stupendous history of this place. London, frankly, rocks.

The thing is, while I still have a great fondness for London I'm 100% a Brummie these days. This is how my brain works. When I move somewhere new I pretty quickly become a native, probably because I don't have a "home town" like most people. I'm not really "from" anywhere so wherever I happen to be, that's where I'm from. It's all very Paul Young. Birmingham is where my passions lie at the moment. I've adjusted to the pace and the character of the city and gotten interested in the history and current culture of the place. Birmingham, too, is brilliant and I fucking love living here. The scale of the place, especially when you bring in the Black Country and Solihull, is massive yet it feels small and cozy (thanks in part to the disproportionally tiny city centre) and while it has a lot to be proud of in it's relatively short history the people are modest and self-depreciating, in a good way. It's a top place to live. And I know that if I ever moved to Manchester or Liverpool I'd initially be skeptical but after a year or so I'd be shouting from the rooftops about how wonderful it all is. I'm just like that.

I started writing about the weekend and this came out instead. It doesn't go anywhere and it's not about the weekend but what the hell. I'll see if I can write about the weekend tomorrow...

Ooh, I did a lot this weekend, and I'm going to tell you all about it, brain-fart style.

In the pub after the Thing, the topic inevitably turned to public transport (as it tends with with annoying regularity) and Andy R mentioned a coach service that got him to Bristol from London for a quid. A quid? How and who? Turns out there's a new player on the inter-city coach market called Megabus who, no doubt in an effort to break the National Express monopoly, are doing stupidly cheap deals starting at £1 depending on demand. It's London-centric on the whole, which is slightly annoying since I wanted to use it to get to Bristol from Birmingham, and is owned by Stagecoach, so if you have issues with Brian Souther's anti-gay leanings you might want to bear that in mind, and I would rather use the train for environmental reasons. However, with inter-city public transport getting more and more expensive and fucked it's worth bearing this loss leader in mind while it's running.

Plans to radicaly redevelop Camden Town tube station are getting off the ground, and for some reason I feel quite strongly about this. I used the Northern Line for a year or so when I lived in Finchley often changing lines at Camden and I think I actually liked the fact that it was a shitty dive of a station. Tube stations tend to reflect the area above them and Camden Town does that so well.

Then again, Camden isn't the place it used to be. Every generation says this, I'm sure, but I think I caught the last of it when I lived in London. When I got there it was still a pretty interesting place to go but by the time I left I wasn't even able to buy a pair of crappy combat trousers for the farm. New developments had cropped up and the whole place seemed to be getting, well, just too clean. And that wasn't right.

Camden always struck me as a necessary dive, somewhere messy and fucked up and full of danger. I don't think it was really any more dangerous than other parts of London but it had that sense about it, and part of that was the journey out of the tube station and into the vibrant hubbub of freaks and weirdos. You can be as jaded and cool as you like but there was always something exciting about exiting Camden Town tube.

I guess Camden's time has passed and this new station is a part of that, but it'll be shame to see it go.

While I was working at the bookshop in Leadenhall Market I noticed that the building site over the way was in fact giving birth to the fabled Gherkin building and so I decided to record its growth on a daily basis with my little wee l'espion camera. For some reason I never did anything with the photos until now, so here they are.

A daily, well week-daily, missing a few days where I forgot and to be honest a bit patchy towards the end, photographic account of the construction of the Gherkin tower in the City of London from 20th September to 30th November 2002 in 56 photos (1.1meg). Bear in mind I had no viewfinder.

[Update: Two Quicktime movies: Slow Fades (1.4m), Jerky Stopmotion (686k)]

Just had a mail from my O'Reilly source (woo, look at me!) saying that they're installing a WiFi point at Foyles bookshop in London. So that's your breaking WiFi news from pa.c. You're welcome.

I have a mate who needs a favour - he's been given a month's notice to move out of his room in Camden and is urgently looking for somewhere to live in London up to £100 per week. He's clean, sensible and Canadian and I can pretty much vouch for him as a nice guy.

Anyone can help please contact me and I'll pass it on.

The Real Underground is a great flash thingy that morphs between the original 1933 London Underground map, the current version and, most interestingly, how it really looks compared with street level. (via Weekly Incite)

This Flash Mob, coming to London August 7th, is pretty intriguing. The organisation tactics of a 90s illegal rave with some Reclaim the Streets thrown in, harking back of course to Operation Mindfuck and the Situationalists. Probably. Shame I won't be there for it. (via LMG)

[Update] I'm suddenly getting hundreds of hits to this page from google searches for "Flash Mob' - y'all wanna go here.

You're welcome.

It's been a while since I raved about a new blog on the site. Going Underground's Blog is not only wonderfully specific (a blog about travelling on the London Tube) but also very well written with a good turn of phrase. No mean feat either when you consider how dull it could be.

Today I was unfortunate enough to get on the Piccadilly Line that had come in from Heathrow, where there seemed to be the annual convention of backpackers from Oz reunion. I have never seen such large backpacks and they proceeeded to congregrate on the floor in front their owners taking up the space of four adults or at least ten small children.

One of the owners of the backpacks whistled to it and it leapt upon his shoulders as he left the train proceeding to stamp heavily on my foot as he left. I left after him and watched him nearly concuss half a dozen people as he made his way upstairs.

The image of a large Austrailan whistling to his obedient Afgan Hound of a rucksack will stay with me for a while...

(link via LMG, because I'm lazy...)

Another place Dave C and I went to on our long wander around London was the Playlounge toy shop. Aparently (and this ain't confirmed) it related to the Magma bookshop chain, and it definitely has this feel about it, as well as sharing some of the stock range. Progressive in it's outlook, sharp in it's design and lovely to be in. Soundbite would be "it's like one of those toy shops with trays of stuff priced at 10-50p, only here they're priced from £5 to £50".

What I liked about it was all the stuff in there was stuff I'd love to have but would only be interested in for five minutes. So I'm able to have the stuff in my hands for five minutes without actually owning any of it. Result!

It's on Beak Street, off the bottom end of Carnaby St. Well worth half an hour of your time.

These photos are much better than they look here - something went wrong with the photoshop processing but it's too late to sort it now. I'll try and fix it later, plus pick out some of my favourite banners. In the meanwhile, here's thumbs for all 63 photos linking to larger versions.

Later: fixed them. All nice and higher-res now!

A week or so back there was a wee 60 second firework display outside Tate Modern on the Thames. I went there with my camera...

Here's the photos from Greenwich Park with Matt and me riding down the hills on a plastic bag. Woo! I was going to crop some of them but the backgrounds are pretty keen so I've left them all as they are. I'll do some crops in a different post.

On the way to Greenwich for sledging we drove through some pretty slow traffic. I took photos.

The trees along The Old Kent Road were covered in snow making them seem like they belonged in a manor house garden, not on the edge of a housing estate. Quite beautiful

Looked out of the window and it's snowing, like, really heavily and that. Woo! So I got dressed and went out with the camera on a round trip via Blackfriars Bridge, onto the beach of the South Bank, back up past the NFT and RFH, past the London Eye and down past Waterloo Station. Here's the photos!

Was just chatting to Rob in the kitchen and I looked out the window. What the hell is that, I exclaimed. By the gods, it's been snowing. And it's settled.

Snow very rarely settles in Zone 1 of London because the temperature is a few degrees higher than the rest of the city. So it is definitely significantly cold today!

When I lived in Mile End, in East London, the flat was on the top floor and overlooked the city. As the sun set in the west we sometimes got the most incredible sunsets. Here's four of them.

I went out looking for inspiration along the south bank of the Thames between Blackfriars Bridge and The Golden Hind. I didn't find much. I wonder if I'm getting disillusioned with this patch of London or if it didn't have much to offer to begin with other than a way to get from one part of London to another with no traffic. I thought that a rainy Sunday morning with nobody around would help it to reveal something interesting but it didn't. At least not to me. I kept thinking that the side roads I walk down every day to work were more interesting.

Anway, here are thirteen of the photos I took.

Just had a firework go off during the day outside my window. And so it begins - you'd think we were in need of a good war zone or something. No sleep til mid November. (I love fireworks, by the way!)