My Other Blog

A Chance Encounter (c1996 - 2011)

2011-07-16T14:40:00.000-07:00

A Chance Encounter is a short story that I have been writing and rewriting on and off for about sixteen years, but which I never quite finished. While I was at university I decided that I wanted to write, and set about pulling together short stories, recording my dreams and noting down ideas. Sadly, I don't think that any of those inchoate scribbles exist today, but one idea did make it through, which was the notion for A Chance Encounter. Unusually, I've never changed the title despite how long I've been writing it for (normally the original title and the final title are quite different), and the concept itself is - with a few minor exceptions - not that different from the first, incomplete draft that I still have knocking about on my hard drive. This is the third or fourth - and definitely final - version of this story, and the only one that I've completed.

A Chance Encounter describes an unexpected meeting between an angel and a victim of a horrific train crash. I can no longer recall what inspired this originally, but in the final version I wrote from scratch this year, there's a degree of cynicism about bureaucracy which may or may be a reflection of having been working for thirteen of the sixteen years that have elapsed since I started this.

You can read A Chance Encounter by clicking here.

A Canary Wharf Sunday

2011-03-25T15:04:00.000-07:00

Source: MJA Smith

Above ground, Canary Wharf's spires of commerce are a thing to behold. The cluster of tall office and residential buildings on London's former docks has a Stateside feel, evoking the design of a more clinically utopian take on Manhattan's Financial District - though the buildings are far, far smaller. Unlike the City, just around the bend in the Thames, the streets and buildings of Canary Wharf are resolutely planned; the City, in contrast, is confusing to me even after ten years of working there, the street pattern having evolved into a seemingly random and inexplicable web of alleys, short dead-end streets and passageways over many centuries. The City's architecture is more austere, mostly stone; the newer glass and steel structures provide jagged aspects of juxtaposed modernity, taller structures nestled up against older buildings, sometimes conspicuously, sometimes comfortably.

Around Canary Wharf, old architecture is hard to find, and fast disappearing. Beneath the shade of the State Street building at Churchill Place, the old Fulton umbrella warehouse is now a pile of part-demolished, twisted metal. In a neighbouring street to where we were staying at New Providence Wharf, we found a row of three of four old workers' cottages, common to nearby Poplar or Greenwich, but against the backdrop of the Ontario Tower and the emerging Swan Streamlight they just looked like vestigial appendages, long since abandoned by architectural evolution and ambition. Billingsgate Market, with its spindly spider's legs cradling the main market hall, looks dated and threatened by the bulk of the nearby HSBC tower, itself one of the few buildings at Canary Wharf with curves rather than sharp, precise edges.

Below ground, Canary Wharf is a confusing web of malls and subterranean access points to the office buildings above. Escalators, elevators and passageways are the principal means of movement here. Doors open automatically into service tunnels and further below still a network of car parks extend far under the waterline. Everything is bathed in fluorescent light and after a while you wonder what natural daylight looks like.

There are two sets of shopping malls at Canary Wharf – Cabot Square and Jubilee Place. Both have the slightly surreal effect of making you feel like you're in a vast airport departure lounge, and the shops are dominated by the upmarket brands that proliferate and thrive at international terminals. I spent some time with Daughter#2 here one Sunday in January; we were in London for the weekend, and on that day Mrs S and Daughter#1 went off to the O2 to watch Strictly Come Dancing. Faced with what turned out to be nearly four hours walking round those glistening corporate catacombs, we took the DLR and headed over to Greenwich instead, providing a welcome relief from tunnel living.

On that particular cold, damp Sunday, the main draw of Greenwich was its vast Royal Park, which I always find more interesting than Hyde Park over in the west, thanks to its rolling hills and the predominance of the imposing Observatory, to which Daughter#2 and I ascended. In this there is a beautiful irony – you escape Canary Wharf's clinical atmosphere only to purposefully take in the breathtaking view of the vast corporate palaces and sleek apartment buildings from the summit of the Observatory hill. Somewhere beneath those towers, I reflected to myself, are those malls and boutiques I'd chosen to escape from that weekend. You'd never believe they could really be there.

There is a great kids' playground in the park, which Daughter#2 thoroughly enjoyed to the point of I-don't-want-to-leave-yet-daddy-waaaaaaahhhhh tantrums that only precocious, unselfconscious two year old girls can produce. Writing this it occurs to me that Canary Wharf is almost entirely denuded of things that would appeal to children, with the possible exception of Wagamama. Heading back to the retail malls when being outdoors got too cold, and before I spent too much money at the Greenwich branch of Music & Video Exchange, we found ourselves sitting in the Jubilee Place branch of Waterstone's where their small stock of books for children distracted Daughter#2 from the abject boredom of pottering around shops we had no intention of buying anything from.

Josh & Laura

2010-12-17T12:51:00.000-08:00

Christmas is, in many ways, all about tradition. There are traditions the majority of us observe, and still others that we choose – at a family level, or on a personal level – to follow.

I wrote last year about one of mine, which is always reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens in the run-up to Christmas; that book never fails to evoke warm, positively affirming feelings in me and stops me from developing a colder heart. This year we bought a heavily abridged children's' version for our two daughters - who knows, them reading A Christmas Carol might become a tradition for them too. Other traditions in our house may prove to be temporary until the girls grow up. One is watching the Sesame Street film Elmo's Christmas Countdown (with Ben Stiller as a hapless elf) with my daughters; I try not to think of a time when they will no longer be enthusiastic about these films, try not to think that I will find it difficult to indulge my love of all things Muppet when they've grown up and moved onto boy bands, boyfriends and the like.

A tradition I started last year is to write an annual Christmas short story. Last year's – Christmas, etc – will have passed you by, mainly because I didn't tell anyone, beyond a handful of followers on Twitter, about it. You can read it here.

This year's describes a night of optimism and promise shared between two students at an end of term Christmas party, set mostly on the streets of London that I love so much. You can read Josh & Laura here. I guess you could call it a Christmas love story.

Thanks to everyone who has either voluntarily chosen to follow (or who I have coerced into following) my sporadic thoughts and musings over the past year. Have an excellent Christmas and New Year, and expect more of the same in 2011.

Žižkov Television Tower

2010-12-10T14:17:00.000-08:00

Talk of the festive season, Christmas markets and the sharp drop in temperatures always makes me think of Prague. In our relatively carefree, childless days, Mrs S and our friends Tina and Steve took a trip to Prague just before Christmas in 2003 and it was everything that I hoped it would be, and more; that city has subsequently become indivisible from my thoughts of the Christmas season.

I soaked up the festive atmosphere, the Gothic architecture and the quintessentially Eastern European modernist design of the subway platforms with unbridled enthusiasm. So what if we also had to spend a night in the airport when heavy snowfall – initially beautifully and silently draped across the city – later brought everything unexpectedly to a standstill, including all fights; so what if the tensions of queuing all night for replacement flights meant I got into a spat with a similarly-disgruntled Latvian in the early hours of the morning; so what if it was the holiday where I may or may not have drunkenly pissed in a dustbin in the hotel toilets (after taking the opportunity to gorge on the free drinks in the executive lounge all the details thereafter became a little sketchy, though I still maintain it was someone else).

The point is that whenever I think of Christmas, I think of the wintry chill and icy splendour of Prague. Whenever I visit an ersatz Christmas market in this country I think of the infinitely more authentic market we visited in Staré Město; whenever the biting cold in late December makes me crave hot chocolate, I think of the small café we four huddled in on the other side of the Charles Bridge (Karlův most) at the base of the steps leading up to the majestic Hradčany palace complex. I understand that Prague is beautiful in the summer, but that wouldn't be the Prague I would want to remember.

Much as I loved the impressive antediluvian squares, bridges, spires and buildings, my favourite structure in Prague lies some way out from the main tourist centre. Taking the subway out to Žižkov, a mostly residential area not frequented by mainstream tourist footfall and certainly not gentrified like other areas of the city; well at least it wasn't in 2003. The central reason for visiting this relatively unassuming urban area, apart from seeing rusty old Ladas and run-down apartment buildings is the Žižkov Television Tower.

The Žižkov Television Tower has a simplistic design that evokes classic Communist post-War attempts at some sort of futuristic modernity; all told, with its double layer of curved-edge rectangular pods in the top third of the main tower, and its trio of cylindrical legs (one containing the tiny lift that takes visitors to the top), it looks like something that Hanna-Barbera would have conceived for The Jetsons. Of course it looks dated now, like it no doubt did at the time of its construction between 1985 and 1992, and it certainly wasn't at all popular with Prague purists when it opened, given its imposing, high position above the city and the fact that they built the tower on an old Jewish cemetery. I like to think of it as being a bit like our dear old BT Tower, just a whole lot funkier.

The views from certain angles in the viewing galleries afford, in many senses, the best views of Prague. Tourists may well elect to view the city at close quarters from, say, the Malá Strana bridge tower or Old Town Hall in Staré Město, but for me the Žižkov Television Tower gives a greater context and long-range perspective on this city.

If you recall the Saturday evening British TV sci-fi series The Tripods, you'd be forgiven for getting a slightly fearful sensation at the sight of the external profile of the building, a feeling which is altogether heightened by David Černý's permanent Miminka art installation from 2001 – ascending upward on the legs of the tower are several statues of crawling babies. It's quirky and not altogether right, but once you transcend the oddness (and recollections of a certain withdrawal scene from Trainspotting) it's fun.

As I've said here before, tall buildings are divisive, much more so in a city where the only other tall buildings are sacred and centuries-old religious structures, but whichever way you look at it, the Žižkov Television Tower is delightfully contrarian and wonderfully strange; a perverse thing of otherworldly elegance in a city with abundant charm already.

A Snowy London Thursday

2010-12-02T12:28:00.000-08:00

Source: MJA Smith

I've never liked snow. I hated it as a kid, though I'm sure I must occasionally have had some fun at some point. Chiefly I associate snow with having to wear wellington boots, which I detested; detested so much that during the bleak snow-filled winters we seemed to have every year in England in the early to mid-Eighties I'd occasionally find myself choosing to be one of the kids who didn't have wellies with them, thus being forced to spend breaktime and lunchtime in the classroom with the kids who had colds or ear infections, or who were being punished, rather than pelting my school friends with snowballs. That and the memory of the trek up the road to my school with my mother, past gutters from which foot-long stalactites of icicles would dangle; a sort of weird Narnia in the heart of the Midlands, past the old man's house with a different Meccano model in the window every day like some sort of out of place Lapland toymaker.

It's snowing in London today. I'm passing through Barbican Underground and there is something peaceful about the undisturbed snow on the disused platform; however everywhere else the snow is already becoming dirty as progressive commuters tramp their cold way to work. That I'm even on a Tube seems mildly amusing – checking the TFL website on the way to Euston, the Circle, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines that I rely on to get me to the office are all suffering with severe delays, though I somehow managed to catch a half empty Met Line service no had than I stepped on to the platform at Euston Square.

I spoke to a native New Yorker this week who couldn't believe how poorly Britain copes with extremes of weather, and it is true. A colleague who lives near Horsham hasn't been able to get in to London the past two days as train services into London Bridge have all been cancelled. He and I were both supposed to be in Edinburgh from Tuesday to Thursday, but Edinburgh Airport has been closed most of the week. The New York guy said that in Manhattan life just goes on as it did before. The Lithuanian guy who works in our building's Starbucks concession also said that back home snow just doesn't bother them, their tyres having chains to prevent slippage. Here, it's complete chaos. News reports tell you how much a day of snow costs the economy, yet nothing changes. Roads go ungritted. Electricity supplies get cut. Intake of hot chocolate increases. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose as they say.

Somehow I managed to get to the office and home both days I've been into London this week, travelling from one of those serendipitously placed corridors north of London where business has carried on reasonably as usual. That said, I could have done with not looking like a complete tit wearing a beanie hat I picked up at some outward bound course somewhere in darkest Surrey a few years back.

Still, there's always the excitement etched on the faces of my two little girls to warm my cantankerous attitude towards the snow. We had the barest dusting of snow at the weekend – literally a millimetre at a stretch – and they were bouncing off the walls with joy, asking to make snowmen and have snowball fights, lying on the carpets and making snow angels. They don't mind wearing wellies either, so no chance of them being the grumpy kid choosing to sit with the naughty and sick kids in the classroom at lunchtime.

As I was trudging across the brown slushy mess that adorned the pavement, I began to wonder why I was even bothering going into the office, given that I only had a bunch of conference calls that I could very well have done from home; then I got to my floor in our office building and took a look outside, and when I saw the City spreading out in front of me covered in a delicate blanket of white snow, I realised that's why I bothered.

Dirk Benedict

2010-11-18T23:51:00.000-08:00

Dirk Benedict is appearing in the Milton Keynes Theatre panto production of Dick Whittington this year, alongside Joanna Page (from Gavin & Stacey). Originally it was going to be Jason Priestley from Beverly Hills 90210, but he pulled out and therefore the aforementioned Benedict heroically took on the part.

I'm not going, mainly because the very thought of pantomimes fill me with the sort of abject dread that I used to feel whenever Christopher Biggins appeared on TV, or when my mum announced she'd bought tickets for the local amateur dramatic society's annual production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. There is also a secondary reason, which is that Amy Winehouse may be in the audience; the irrepressible chanteuse was gracelessly thrown out of the Milton Keynes panto last year after hurling cursewords and abuse both at the stage and the theatre manager. Then again, she's probably still banned. I'll therefore leave it to Mrs S and Daughter#1 to go this year and I'll find another decent excuse this time next year.

Benedict last appeared on our screens in one of the many long-winded series of Celebrity Big Brother, rarely without a cigar in his mouth. With the addition of the passing of time, this made him look more like Hannibal than Face, his character in the A-Team.

Face was always my favourite character in the A-Team, for two reasons. First, he had a really cool car. It was a white Corvette with a red stripe and it was way cooler than BA's chunky black van. I don't know much about cars, but when you're ten years old and you have a choice between a sports car and a van, which one are you going to choose? Exactly. The sports car wins every time.

The second reason is because Face was rarely without some stunning pneumatic blonde model in the passenger seat of the aforementioned Corvette; whereas Murdock was known for being mad as a box of spanners and BA renowned for raw meat-headed aggression and a fear of flying, Face was the guy who always – always – got the girl. And I liked that – I had my first crush on a girl the when I was ten, and Face's antics thus made it seem perfectly normal; remember that up to that sort of age girls were odd, alien creatures, best avoided in the playground for fear of contracting a love of dolls or My Little Pony.

My classmates, who had over the years given me plenty of stick, mostly for my head of ginger hair, thought otherwise. I thought having a crush on a girl would somehow mark me out as mature and they'd somehow respect me more for my reasons for liking Face the best in the A-Team (surprisingly deep thoughts for a ten year old come to think of it). Alas, boys can be unpredictable and cruel, and instead they branded me as 'gay' for fancying girls. That's right, as a boy, I was branded gay, for fancying girls. What's that all about?

Anyway, I'm not, Face is still my favourite character in the A-Team, and I still occasionally think wistfully about that girl I first had a crush on (for the record, it wasn't reciprocated and I won't be tracking her down on Facebook). So perhaps that's the deep underlying psychological reason for not wanting to go to this year's panto.

Euston Platforms & Big Issue Salesman

2010-11-13T13:59:00.000-08:00

Source: geograph.org.uk

I have never become sick of commuting by train from my home to London. I complain about the cost whenever it comes to renewing my season ticket, but I don't really feel that I should gripe too much as it's effectively my choice to spend almost three hours just travelling to and from work. That season ticket has literally been my passport to London's wonders for the best part of a decade and, though expensive, it feels like money well spent. It's really only when power lines fail or someone tops themselves on the line (always at Harrow and Wealdstone) that I moan about commuting.

But there is one aspect which is starting to grate, and that's the terrible layout of platforms 8 to 11 at Euston, specifically platforms 10 and 11 for a period of two minutes after my train pulls in.

The 06.34 train from Milton Keynes Central generally arrives, nice and prompt, into platform 11 at 07.20. I'll then join my fellow passengers in racing to the ticket barriers as quick as possible, because, at around 07.21 a London Overground train will arrive at platform 10, decanting its cargo of passengers onto the already-full platform. Most days the gap between the trains is sufficient enough for me to already be at the barriers when the squeal of the Overground train's brakes gets louder and I'll be well up the incline to the main concourse as the doors are opening. However, just lately my train and the Overground train have arrived at precisely the same time, the effect being several hundred extra commuters hitting the platform together, thus ensuring complete gridlock, pushing, crushing and an unnecessarily unpleasant start to the day as the throng of people tries to squeeze through a tiny bottleneck into the barriers.

Still, it's an annoyance that will be alleviated by the redevelopment work being undertaking to widen the exit, and mercifully it usually only lasts two minutes, after which I'm forced out of the crowd and through the exit barrier like a cork from a champagne bottle. And it's an irritation quickly forgotten when I head past Eduardo Paolozzi's lumpen Piscator sculpture and down the path leading to Euston Road. For somewhere between that sculpture and Euston Square Underground station, rain or shine, wind or frost, will be a person who cheers me up without fail each and every morning.

He sells the Big Issue and is probably the single most upbeat individual you're ever likely to see that early in the morning; animated and unfeasibly effervescent, engaging enthusiastically with the hordes of focussed commuters trudging past him, encouraging them to part with the £1.75 that a copy of the Issue costs these days.

He's rarely without a smile, never tetchy when people blank him and gushingly grateful when you buy a copy from him.

His welcome infiltration of my morning introspection is another reason why I'll never tire of commuting to London.

Trois: Luxembourg City

2010-09-23T10:20:00.000-07:00

Source: Go Ten website

I visited Luxembourg City for work last week. Although much-maligned, it's a place worth exploring, as I found myself doing during a rare period of down-time. Here are three places that caught my attention.

1. Restaurant Pizzerie Bacchus
I took visiting Luxembourg City seriously, and bought just about the only dedicated guidebook that exists. Finding myself with an evening to spare and thinking that the hotel's in-room selections a bit limited (five types of omelette, five types of sandwich, expensive fish dishes), I flicked open the Bradt guide, found the 'cheap eats' section (I am a responsible corporate citizen when travelling on expenses; plus our nightly dinner allowance is of the McDonald's Happy Meal side of punitive) and settled on Restaurant Pizzerie Bacchus.

This is a great pizzeria serving beautiful pizzas baked in an authentic wood-fired oven. The staff are friendly (expect a heartly farewell and a handshake from the manager) and the restaurant itself is superb. I elected to sit on the covered terrace (which could do with some repairs) and enjoyed a quiet romana pizza and a glass of a bitter orange drink which could only be described as being how I'd expect Campari and Irn Bru to taste like.

For €15 it was a steal, and probably the best pizza I've had since John's Pizzeria in Greenwich Village.

32, rue du Marché-aux-Herbes

2. Go Ten
There is a bit of a online furore about the lack of a Starbucks branch in Luxembourg City, which is something of a surprise given how many expats there are here. This isn't in any way a bad thing as it encourages you down the non-chain route. Walking back to my hotel I chanced upon this trendy, sleek, dark bar-cum-noodle restaurant with a pulsing electronic soundtrack and pretty waitresses.

Avoiding mid-afternoon cocktails on the basis of principal I elected for a coffee and a chance to chill out in the funky surroundings. I would have stayed there all afternoon if it wasn't for the small inconvenience of my flight home.

10, rue du Marché-aux-Herbes
www.goten.lu

3. CD Buttek Beim Palais
This tiny, cramped shop caught my eye after I'd left Bacchus for an evening wander around the city. More specifically, the Neu! boxset in the window caught my eye, so after Go Ten I made a point of popping in before I left for the airport. I'd describe it as being like a record fair stall inside a shop.

The shop had good jazz and ambient / electronica sections and middle racks stacked to the rafters with vinyl from every genre imaginable. I settled for a Pete Shelley 7" before temptation got the better of me.

16, rue du Marché-aux-Herbes
cdbuttek.oyla.de

Source: MJA Smith

Starbucks, 90-94 Old Broad Street, The City, London, EC2N 1DP

2010-09-23T05:25:00.000-07:00

Source: MJA Smith

I am having professional coaching at present, and one of the things my coach has drummed into me is that I shouldn't hang on to the past. It's a familial trait that has oftentimes prevented me from moving forward, professionally and personally. So it seems rather out of keeping with that counsel to write about the past, but so it shall be.

Walking to a meeting from our offices along Old Broad Street, at typical full speed, I happened to glance across at the branch of Starbucks at 90 - 94 Old Broad Street, on the junction with London Wall and Wormwood Street. The building in which it's situated (I believe it’s called Boston House) is one that I have always adored, fashioned as it is from grand red brick with lighter coloured embellishments, a carved mural just above shop-front height. I've always thought it to be one of the most elegant – if slightly careworn – premises in the City, a reminder of days gone by when compared with the sleek, glass edifices now sited majestically on the immediate horizon. Only today, when I looked across, the familiar signage had been removed and dark blinds adorned the windows. And then I noticed the 'branch closed' sign on the door, and I felt thoroughly dismayed.

This branch of Starbucks has been there as long as I've worked in the City – a whisker off a decade – and has been the scene of one pivotal moment in particular. In September 2002, our department head was killed in a car crash. Coming into work on the Monday, and hearing the news, we removed ourselves from the cloying atmosphere of the office during the morning and regrouped in the below-ground seating area of that very branch of Starbucks to share some collective, mostly silent, grieving.

It was also the scene of many informal business meetings, friendly catch-ups with people who went from being clients or colleagues to good friends, mostly because of the relaxed conversations we'd have in that branch of Starbucks; it was where one of my later managers would proffer his accumulated business wisdom to me over black tea and a 'bun' (his individual, quaint way of describing the assorted pastries and muffins on sale). For a time, it was also a place I'd sneak off to occasionally during the mornings for quiet contemplation and reflection, watching City workers file past, absorbed in their own thoughts, pressures and stresses as I sat on one of the high stools in the window.

Of course, there are Starbucks ten-a-penny in the City, and there are still two branches within a two minute walk of our office; then there's the anti-capitalist lot who despise the very sight of the now-familiar round logo. But me, I'm going to miss this particular branch. London's psychogeography is built upon the ghosts of people and events from the past, accumulated and passed-down memories, blue plaques commemorating famous residents of buildings (despite often being forgotten across generations), other plaques advising of buildings that were demolished centuries ago; for all the memories I have, this branch of Starbucks will loom large in my own personal psychogeography of the City.

Ten: Brighton

2010-08-28T16:15:00.000-07:00

Source: MJA Smith

1. Hotel Seattle, Brighton Marina
Okay, so it's not in the heart of the city (it's around a 30 minute walk – or see below), but it's a beautiful, modern hotel right in the heart of the Marina and thus escapes two major issues common to hotels in the city centre – noise (unless you dislike the sound of boat masts clacking) and lack of parking (there's a free carpark nearby). More info at my TripAdvisor review.

2. Volk's Railway
This small electric railway runs from Black Rock next to the Marina all the way to the aquarium – 1.5 miles in all. The 1883 concept of Magnus Volk, an inventor not dissimilar to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's Caractacus Potts, the journey is a fun, kid-friendly way to get from the Marina to the main city attractions.

3. The Pavilion
Brighton's Indian-styled stucco-smothered pavilion was the folly of the Prince Regent and has become a major tourist attraction and landmark. Behind the Pavilion is a buzzing park and café, where a jazz trio was playing the day we sat on the grass for a picnic. Cool sounds in cool grounds.

4. Resident
So you're in Brighton and you want to buy some records; you usually shop at Rough Trade in East London and you want somewhere with the same aesthetics. Where do you head? The answer is Resident. Situated in the North Laine network of narrow streets and wonderfully unique independent shops, Resident could be the Brighton outpost of the aforementioned RT with its eclectic jazz / alt.rock / electronica focus. Brighton also has a rich supply of good second-hand record shops, if looking through racks of old vinyl is more your thing.

5. Lick
It's the seaside, so ice cream is de rigueur, right? Well, Lick (also in the North Laine) sells ice cream, naturally, but the main draw is its frozen yoghurt. Out-of-this-world-delicious is an understatement.

6. Zoing Image
'It's my boyfriend's shop,' she explained, carefully applying initials to the mounts that would soon frame a range of monochrome photos for sale in the shop. 'He started out selling pictures in the street. From that to this.' Zoing Image sells prints, small canvasses and various photo products including magnets and coasters, mostly comprising photos of Brighton, as well as Lomo cameras, books and photo-related miscellanea.

7. Eco Logic Cool
Want cufflinks made of circuit boards? Or coasters made from recycled coffee cups? Then point your environmentally-friendly compass here. And don't miss the fish in the tank underneath the till – a cheap alternative to Brighton's tedious (though structurally beautiful) aquarium.

8. The West Pier
The tragically dismembered West Pier has, over the years lost out more than once to the nearby Palace – now Brighton – Pier, first in terms of popularity, and then in terms of its very corporeality. Eerily bleak, the most tragic sight is the retrieved posts stacked up in a metal mass grave beneath the surviving pier buildings shore-side.

9. The World Famous Pump Rooms
Just east of the West Pier is this popular beach-side café, selling ice creams and locally-made coffee. Expect convivial chatter, Italian accents and great coffee. You'll feel like buying a Vespa and getting all Quadrophenic.

10. Architecture
Fans of Regency stucco-faced splendour will not be disappointed by Brighton, and its sense of preservation of these monuments to the Victorian era of UK holiday-making is impressive. Occasional civic planning inconsistencies aside (most notably Richard 'Centre Point' Seifert's Sussex Heights, a 24-storey, horizon-changing tower), Brighton's elegant cliff-top promenade is the place to head for building fans.

Advantage In Height: The Hub, Milton Keynes

2010-07-30T11:39:00.000-07:00

Source: Glenn Howells Architects

Call it force of habit, but on a summer's Friday night, when I've completed the last commute home to Milton Keynes from London for another week, I like to drive along Witan Gate past The Hub. There's just something so convivial about the people sat drinking outside the Living Room, the waiting staff arriving at the back doors of restaurants in the throes of gearing up for busy Friday nights, and just the general sense of people kicking back after a week at work; all of this helps me with my transition from corporate life to family life.

The other reason – the main reason – I like driving past The Hub is one of personal aesthetics: I love tall buildings. I think towers are graceful and elegant. Don't get me wrong, I am appreciative of architecture generally, both modern and historic, but tall buildings in particular have always fascinated me. Trips to Birmingham as a child were all the more thrilling for the views of the Rotunda looming over the city, while sporadic visits to London found me simultaneously intimidated and intrigued by the likes of Big Ben. I didn't have enough Lego bricks in my box to build skyscrapers, but I'm sure I would have done if I could. During the first year at university, I resided in one of the lower floors of a brutalist brick tower; while it was clearly not in any way 'beautiful' in the traditional sense of the word, I thought the simplicity of the repeated floor patterns and the hard vertical lines scaling the height of the tower were nevertheless pleasing to the eye.

Back to The Hub. Designed by the London / Birmingham firm of architects Glenn Howells, the elegant main tower (Manhattan House) is fourteen storeys tall. That would be positively diminutive for London, let alone Manhattan. But compared to elsewhere in Milton Keynes, the principal tower at The Hub is a giant. Surveying the topography of this young city, buildings have rarely ever had more than three or possibly four storeys. They aim at bulk rather than height. Examples would include the dense, brick-clad Santander building on Grafton Street which occupies an entire block. It's vast, but only three storeys tall. Another example is the office of the Inland Revenue on the corner of Witan Gate and Silbury Boulevard. The only exceptions to this are Xscape – a landmark entertainment destination housing a ski slope, gym, multi-screen cinema, bars, restaurants and shops – and Mellish Court in Bletchley, which is an archetypal Sixties residential concrete mass rising seventeen storeys.

The Hub consists of various buildings, all of mixed use and of varying height. The ground floor of each is let to popular restaurant chains, cafés and shops, while the upper floors are all residential. In total, the complex consists of 408 apartments. The buildings are arranged around a large central piazza (Mortimer Square) which occasionally hosts public events, and which also includes a sequence of fountains flush with the paving – popular with toddlers who, defying their parents, love getting drenched in the jets. Each of the buildings has a name which aspirationally links the development to Manhattan. In its own way, this is nothing new – Milton Keynes already has a high-speed variation of the New York grid, and the nomenclature of The Hub appears to be an attempt to develop a quintessentially Milton Keynes version of its buildings too, sporting the names Manhattan House, Brooklyn House, Staten House, Carnegie House, Metropolitan House, Dakota House and Chelsea House.

The latter contains Brasserie Blanc, Raymond Blanc's mid-priced chain brasserie; in defiance of the sleek modernism evident across The Hub's design, the incontrovertibly traditionalist Blanc replaced the flat entrance to his restaurant unit with an old wooden revolving door salvaged from a Brighton hotel; outside it looks awkward, uncomfortable, but from the inside makes complete sense.

Source: MK_Tom / Panoramio

Apparently there was a degree of negative public reaction to the design of the buildings, as there often is to tall buildings generally. The positioning of The Hub towards the top of a hill makes it visible from quite a way off the centre of the city; but, unlike London, there are no views of St Paul's to obscure. This is a city that has existed for around half a century and all of it could thus feasibly be described as 'new'. To my mind anyone complaining about another modern facet to the city is a hypocrite in my book. The buildings required the removal of one of Milton Keynes' coveted underpasses, and unlike anywhere else in the city the buildings are situated right on the edge of the surrounding gates and boulevards, eschewing the usual grassy banks and wide walkways evident elsewhere.

The Hub's inclusion in the city is, to me, more than welcome, and certainly long overdue. But it is also disappointing. When a new tall structure appears on the horizon, it should signal a broader acceptance of such buildings, paving the way for more similar-sized schemes. Sadly, with the exception of the beautiful and chunky Pinnacle, which rises nine floors and has a roof design that references Hugh Stubbins and Associates' Citicorp Centre in New York's Midtown, other new buildings on the cards see a return to the squat, derivative structures abundantly available already in the city: the new National Rail offices, on the site of the old hockey stadium, will be a sprawling 'groundscraper', a design which is all the more disappointing after the advances of The Hub and the Pinnacle.

Greenlet

2010-07-22T14:13:00.000-07:00

Those who know me personally, and those who've seen my Twitter feed, will know that I love making cocktails. I went on a cocktail making course earlier this year at Shaker Bar School in East London, which I'd recommend to anyone who has the remotest interest in combining drinks together.

The gimlet is, along with the martini, the Manhattan and the Collins, considered one of the classics. The drink consists of Plymouth gin and Rose's Lime Cordial. According to 2500 Cocktails by Paul Martin (my go-to guide for all things mixology), the gimlet was 'the product of two ingredients that came together by geographical and medicinal circumstance.' A gin distillery was established in the British naval port of Plymouth in 1793, while Rose's Lime Cordial, created by Lauchlin Rose in Scotland in 1867, was considered a medicinal cure for scurvy; given the disease's prevalence among sailors, it was almost inevitable that the cordial would find its way to Plymouth.

This cocktail is a variation on the gimlet, but replaces the lime cordial with Bottle Green Ginger & Lemongrass cordial (available from Sainsbury's), so I called it a greenlet

Greenlet
- 50ml Plymouth gin
- 25ml Bottle Green Ginger & Lemongrass cordial

Shake the ingredients, together with a scoop of ice, and strain into a chilled martini glass.

Cornwall Diary (Part 1)

2010-07-15T13:17:00.000-07:00

7 July 2010

We set off from Milton Keynes at about 6.20 and reached Tehidy Country Park just after 1.00 for a picnic. The Tehidy estate was once owned by the Basset family, one of the most powerful western Cornish families and whose family name adorns streets and pubs in the nearby Redruth and Camborne area.

Source: www.cornwall-aonb.gov.uk

The park consists of 250 acres of natural woodland and nine miles of paths, and is centred around a serene swan-filled lake, and also has a small café and information centre. We hunted Gruffaloes (we caught six, according to Daughter#1) and befriended at least three pairs of very tame squirrels.

For the second year running, we were staying at Gwel an Mor, a five star collection of wooden lodges just above Portreath, with tranquil views across the sea. We have always struggled to find good quality, child-friendly accommodation in Cornwall and consequently find Gwel an Mor to be a welcome breath of fresh air. This year we stayed in a 'Tregae VIP' lodge which had the upgrades of a wood-burning stove (low likelihood of getting used in the summer), a hot-tub (yes, I am Hugh Heffner) and a midweek maid service; the latter was the clincher for us – with this being ostensibly a self-catered holiday, when we stayed here last year the place really felt like it needed a clean midway through our stay, and given that we were on holiday, we were relatively disinclined to do that much cleaning.

Source: www.maturetimes.co.uk

The lodges are quirky yet homely – lots of wood throughout gives the place a cosy Scandinavian feel (the Hemnes bedroom furniture from Ikea also helps), and it doesn't take long to get used to the three bedrooms being downstairs and the lounge / kitchen being upstairs in the roof.

Dinner on the first night came courtesy of the fish and chip takeaway on nearby Portreath beach – they're not the best we've ever tasted, and not even as good as last year, but decent and good value nonetheless.

8 July 2010

This being England, weather is of course distinctly variable – even in usually dependable Cornwall – so when we saw the forecast for sunshine today, we decided to head to the beach; the beach, in this case, was Sennen Cove, near to Land's End and rightly regarded in surveys as one of England's best beaches.

Popular with tanned young surfers, sunbathers and families, Sennen is a truly wonderful place with a wide sweeping sandy beach, dramatic cliffs, good waves (if that's your thing) and, in the Beach one of the best restaurants we've ever been to in Cornwall. The restaurant has a good menu, and an excellent selection of unfussy children's dishes. Daughter#1 enjoyed a perfect soft poached egg with soldiers, while #2 had soul goujons; Mrs S had the same goujons in a wrap while I had roasted Mediterranean vegetables from the grill.

Sennen, like many Cornish towns on the tourist trail, has galleries (for buying, not just viewing); in its case, Sennen has two, both housed in the unusual round, slate-roofed building next to the RNLI station. We visited the upstairs one (the Round House), as we do whenever we visit, and came away with lots of pretty ceramics and pictures by local Cornish artists.

Source: www.round-house.co.uk

Heading back to Portreath, we stopped in at Trengwainton for a stroll with my sister and my six-month-old niece. Trengwainton is a serene tropical garden just outside Penzance that's managed by the National Trust. The gardens were given to the Trust in 1961 by the Bolitho family, another of Cornwall's powerful families.

The gardens in Cornwall and manifest, and beautiful, and the tropical climate allows plants unusual to these shores to grow comfortably. My days of being a keen gardener are well and truly over, and I couldn't tell you at all what's growing in our own back garden (apart from weeds), but we love exploring Cornwall's gardens, mainly because they are such fun for kids. At Trengwainton, Daughter#1 hunted for clues as part of a kids trail, which centred mostly around the walled kitchen garden, built to the dimension of Noah's Ark for no discernible reason. Last year we climbed right to the top of the gardens, where the tropical foliage gives way to stunning views across Mount's Bay. My sister often visits the modern tea rooms here, which have an excellent array of lunches and cakes, while the sloping lawn in front contains giant kids games like noughts and crosses; perfect for letting them entertain themselves while grown ups have a natter.

9 July 2010

Ah, St Ives – I'm just not that into you. After a soggy day out there last year, we should've learned our lesson. The place is a tourist Mecca and the narrow main street – Fore Street – should really be pedestrianised. I admit it's not without its charms – much of Fore Street is beautiful, and there are no major high street chains – but it's way too busy for me, and I grew up in a tourist town so I should have a high tolerance. Plus it was drizzling, and I spent most of the morning stood outside congested shops getting wet while trying to deal with a very grumpy Daughter#2 (most shops are pushchair-friendly, but if you have more than one stroller in a shop at any one time it's usually a nightmare). Mrs S hit Cath Kidston and Joule and the unique Chocolat! (chocolate shop) and Fabulous Kids (toy / clothing shop for children) while I had a look around the the Digey's deli section. I looked at some local Cornish liqueurs from a gift shop to make some unusual cocktails. Cornish Smugglers liqueurs are made down near the Lizard and include brandies, fruit cream drinks and other localised variations of popular spirits.

St Ives may be pretty, but it's strangely not blessed with an abundance of places to eat; when we came last year, the rain made the few places that it does have far busier than we'd expected, leaving us eating pasties in the rain while fending off an aggressively insistent seagull on a bench near the Tate. This time we were determined not to endure the same fate, and so we booked a lunchtime table at the Seafood Café before the soggy hordes cottoned on.

Seafood Café is a bright, modern restaurant with an abundance of fish dishes on their menu (and given its location why not?), the waiting staff are nice and friendly and the food is excellent. I ate crab linguine which was delicately flavoured with chilli; Mrs S enjoyed a fish pie while the girls had fish and chips where you could choose from grilled or fried fish.

The best thing about going to St Ives is the journey. Rather than driving and negotiating the paucity of parking, we took the Bay Line train from St Erth which costs £4 per adult. The journey lasts around fifteen minutes and offers stunning cliff-top views of the bay. From 10.00 the train departs at 11 and 41 minutes past the hour, and parking is a very reasonable £1.50 for a full day at St Erth.

After St Ives we headed down to Penzance to hook up with my sister. We had enormous cakes and tea at Penlee House, a white Victorian house which is now the home of an art gallery specialising in the work of the Newlyn school of artists and also the original Penzance market cross, a much-moved historic carved stone cross. We'd intended to have our first cream tea of our stay, but they'd run out of scones; if the enormous doorstep cakes and slices we had were anything to go by, it's not hard to see why.

10 July 2010

We spent most of the day at Trebah Gardens, just outside Mawnan Smith near Falmouth, which is a valley garden designed by Charles Fox. Between the various Fox siblings, the family developed no less than six tropical gardens in the area, their ownership of a international shipping business allowing them to easily transport seedlings and rare plants from around the world in order for them to grow comfortably in the local area's sheltered climes.

Source: www.gardenvisit.com

Trebah slopes downward to a private beach on the Helford river. The route down takes you through rhododendrons, camellias, giant gunnera, a bamboo maze and all manner of plants and trees you would struggle to imagine growing elsewhere in England. Trebah has endured something of a torrid history following the Fox ownership, including a requisitioning of the Helford beach by the US Navy during the second world war as an embarkation station for the Omaha landings; during their stay, the US concreted the beach and stuck in a new road. Thanks to the work of one owner – Donald Healey, the former racing driver and car designer – the beach is now largely restored to its former pebble-filled glory.

The modern visitor centre and restaurant is excellent; during our stay in Cornwall we ate at the restaurant three times. Their Trebah flan with Mediterranean vegetables and Cornish brie is amazing, while their fish cakes beat anything we've eaten in modern gastro pubs hands down; for kids the selections include fish finger sandwiches, and more unfussy and popular dishes. Even if you can't face the steep walks in the gardens, the food alone is well worth making a visit to Trebah for.

The Life And Times Of Milton Keynes Gallery

2010-06-11T14:30:00.000-07:00

Mark Leckey, Untitled (MK:G model with green screen), 2010 (detail)
Image courtesy the artist, Cabinet Gallery and Milton Keynes Gallery
Photo (c) Andy Keate

First off, let me say that I don't 'appreciate' art. I see things I like, and like them because I like them; I don't necessarily see what a piece of art might be trying to portray, convey or otherwise, and so I don't attempt to understand it or explain what I see. That said, I still like art and visiting galleries, but for me to enjoy something I have to feel a principally visual, rather than visceral, connection to what I see.

I took Daughters #1 and 2 to Milton Keynes Gallery on Saturday to see The Life And Times Of Milton Keynes Gallery. I'd resolved earlier this year to take them to each new exhibition here, mainly because they do seem to enjoy galleries and looking at pictures and the like, but also because I think trying to culturally enrich their minds is important from as early an age as possible. Plus I think having their imagination stimulated by means other than the TV is even more of a requirement of parents in the modern age. Daughter#1 loved the linear images of the last exhibition we went to see, of Nasreen Mohamedi's works, and both girls were really excited about visiting again.

The current exhibition, organised by artist Mark Leckey and director of London's Cabinet Gallery Martin McGeown spreads across the four principal ground-floor spaces and is intended to act as a celebration of Milton Keynes Gallery's tenth birthday, an event which you'll be forgiven for having missed given that a far better known gallery, Tate Modern, is celebrating the same auspicious anniversary this year.

The clinical, large concrete spaces should have provided ample room for a major retrospective or something more weighty than the slightly tongue in cheek line-drawn renderings of cubes, ears and animals drawn on large curved hanging sheets of paper by Viz cartoonist Lee Healey. These were to be seen in the Cube Gallery either side of what was supposed to be a projection of the revolving pink scale model of Milton Keynes Gallery being filmed in real-time against a green screen; on the projection, images of hypothetical architectural concepts were supposed to appear behind the moving pink gallery image. Except that the camera seemed to be out of tape, leaving just a static blurred image on the wall.

The Middle Gallery featured more Healey images and a video of what could be a computer-generated rendition of the interior of the gallery (From The Long Via The Link To The Middle To The Cube by Tim Bacon). The organic monochrome line drawings and the fast-moving video seemed incongruous together, and like so often with art I couldn't see the point. The room just felt clinical – and not in a good way – and sparse.

Probably the best part of the exhibition was the display of miniaturised excerpts of exhibitions past stuck to the wall in a messy mosaic style in the space known as the Link Gallery. Here was colour, variety, interesting and arresting images. I asked Daughter#1 which was her favourite. 'This one,' she said, pointing at a skull. It was that sort of morning.

The Long Gallery contained a video projection with rapid jump-cut imagery and a booming, computerised voice, all of which felt like a Burroughsian nightmare or a scary wartime propaganda educational film. If it wasn't for the girls getting slightly freaked out, I'd probably have enjoyed it.

So, once again, I've probably totally missed the point of this exhibition, but in my limited frame of reference all I will say is that it felt a bit narrowly-focussed and could have been much, much more than it was. But what do I know? I buy frames from Ikea after all.

The Life And Times Of Milton Keynes Gallery runs until 27 June 2010.

A Farewell to Stratford-upon-Avon

2010-06-07T13:53:00.000-07:00

Source: MJA Smith

I was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon and I called it home until I was nineteen, though I didn’t realise until three years later that I’d actually moved away forever. I left the quaint market town in Warwickshire for the concrete topography of the University of Essex in Colchester, not fully aware that I wouldn’t be moving back to the town of my birth once my degree had finished.

But that’s exactly what happened. I met a girl, got a job on a bank's management trainee scheme that needed me to based somewhere that wasn’t either Stratford or Colchester and quietly, almost without me realising, I moved out of the family home. It’s probably only in the last few years, with the introduction of children and the putting down of definite roots, that I’ve finally stopped calling Stratford ‘home‘. It’s only taken 14 years.

A home, of sorts, it remained until recently, upon the occasion of my parents selling up the house they moved into in 1983, the house where I lived out my pre-teens and teenage years and all the essential experiences and rites of passage that coming of age brings. I know for them it was an emotional departure, as it would have been for me also were it not for the fact that they have moved to Milton Keynes and are consequently just a few minutes’ drive away from us (as is pretty much everyone and everything in Milton Keynes come to think of it).

We went to Stratford last at the end of their residency, toward the end of September last year, and it was a predictably moving experience. Wandering slowly round the town, all of a sudden I grasped how little detail I had actually taken in over the years. All of a sudden the buildings I thought I knew had features I'd never before recognised and buildings that I'd never even taken any notice of before jumped out at me for the first time and seemed to scream for my attention. The feeling was dismaying, almost as if the town itself was telling me that I'd neglected its nuances my entire life.

I came away from the town perplexed at how I could have been so blind to Stratford's subtleties all those years. I'd never visited any of the principal tourist haunts, with the notable exception of Holy Trinity Church, out of principle. Like many residents, I'd elected to ignore the things so obviously important to the town's fabric but so crassly touristy, if not forever then certainly until an unspecified point in the future. Now I have no idea when I might visit those places. It's now, at nine months, the longest I've ever gone without visiting the town of my birth.

Like most towns, Stratford is undergoing changes, some of which remove some of the things I remember from childhood, forcing those memories to become like a sepia-tinted dream. The most significant of these is the remodelling of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre on Waterside, a building which seemed unassailable, far too precious and historic – despite being, at less than one hundred years' old, one of the town's more modern structures – to be tampered with. The new design, retaining features from Elizabeth Scott's original Art Deco design with new elements was intended to appease actors who find the theatre's backstage area cramped and dated, but also to offer a more appealing vision to tourists. One can only imagine how divisive the 1930s design was at the time. Improved it may well come to be, but it's not the theatre I will remember.

Source: MJA Smith

Another change which caught me off-guard in September was the conversion of the Island Café at the junction of the Birmingham Road, Henley Street and Windsor Street. The café was empty for the entire time I lived in Stratford, falling slowly into a greater and greater sense of disrepair. Its prime location at the main entry point for coaches of tourists entering the town should have made it opportune premises for any business looking to cream foreign visitor spending, but in spite of this, one day the owners locked the doors and it stayed closed, with movement occasionally visible behind the grime-encrusted windows with their crumbling frames and moth-eaten curtains. (In one of the short stories I began writing for a creative writing class, I imagined the interior of the café from the perspective of a dusty old glass left behind on one of the cafe's shelves; perhaps I'll get around to completing that some time.)

The last time we were there I was amazed to see that the café was no longer in a dilapidated state but that it had been renovated and converted into a smart restaurant called Bernadette's. All my life I'd wanted to see inside that building; I'd even had a teenage daydream where I tried to buy it with my sister and converted it into a swish vegetarian eatery where I'd also DJ an eclectic mix into the small hours. And yet here, on my last trip to Stratford was a completed altered Island Café. I was gob-smacked. I went inside, ostensibly to collect a business card, but also just to say I'd been inside. I think a small part of me rather preferred the ruined state it was in before having seen such a seismic change in a relatively short space of time. I just hope Bernadette's stays open long enough in these straitened times for me to get to visit properly, whenever that might turn out to be.

I did finally get to the bottom of one Stratford puzzle that had bothered me for years – the purpose of the building, pictured at the start of this post, sandwiched between the library and what is now the abomination on Henley Street that is Subway. For years I've walked past this building, a slender Victorian construction done out, in keeping with much of restored Stratford, in a mock-Tudor, half-timbered style. The solid, imposing wooden door to this building was perpetually closed and the diagonally-leaded windows were cloudy and revealed nothing of what secrets might be behind.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'd spent a long time imagining what this building might be, but suffice to say that thanks to a childhood diet of reading wizard-and-goblin fantasy books I became convinced it must be a shady meeting place for a secret Masonic guild in the town, possibly dating back to Shakespearian times or even further still. Something about the antiquated door and lack of signage or numbering seemed to lend itself to the remote, and slightly sinister, possibility. The air of dark mystery I'd afforded this reasonably inconsequential, comparatively hidden building over the years has made it my favourite building in the entire town.

Sadly, as is often the case with the truth, the reality was far more mundane. Thanks to the support of the Stratford Society (of which I am a paid-up member), I was put in touch with town historian Robert Bearman, whose book Stratford-upon-Avon: A History Of Its Streets And Buildings had sat, unread, on my shelves for about two years. The answer was squirrelled away in his text all along. It transpires that the building was designed by Arthur Flowers – of the local Flowers' Brewery family – as a technical college with the very laudable aim of providing Stratford boys with vocational skills to help their employment prospects. The college later moved premises, finally settling on the Alcester Road, adjacent to what used to be my High School, itself having since been demolished and replaced. I'm just glad I finally found out what it was originally for. The building is now nothing more than part of the library next door, but in my imagination still the place of illicit guild meetings.

Stratford's historic nature means that it is considerably better preserved than other towns in this country, and the scope for needless and excessive modernisation can thus, hopefully, be avoided. That said, in a town not renowned for changing – because of its historical heart – any small change is therefore likely to feel much larger than it might otherwise be elsewhere. I only hope I recognise the place when I go back, whenever that might be.

Romantic Movies

2010-06-04T12:40:00.000-07:00

Source: IMDB.com

I have two favourite slushy, romantic comedy movies (I can't bring myself to write 'romcom'; it just doesn't feel right).

The first is Serendipity, starring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale. Set principally in Manhattan, the film concerns itself with Beckinsale's firm belief in fate and Cusack's intensifying quest – prompted by his impending marriage to someone else – to track down the woman he met briefly, for a single night, but who left him with no details of who she was and where he could find her. To test her belief that, if they were supposed to be together, then, come what may, they would be, Beckinsale's character writes her name in the inside of a book at a stall, and Cusack writes his name on a dollar bill. The test is that if those objects worked their way back into the other's possession, they are meant to be together. The name of the film clearly refers to the fatalistic theme of the story, but also the patisserie on East 60th Street with the same name, where the two characters share ice cream. It's frustrating, and ludicrously far-fetched, but I love it. The fact that it has New York as a backdrop is just a bonus, frankly. It was also an influence on the name we chose for Daughter#1.

The other is the significantly more successful Richard Curtis movie, Love Actually. It's a favourite, not for the over-exposed Hugh Grant-dancing-to-Girls-Aloud scenes; nor for the cringeworthy Bill Nighy / Rab C Nesbitt relationship; nor the crushing effect Alan Rickman's affair has on wife Emma Thompson; nor the ridiculously far-fetched notion that the hapless guy from the BT ads is able to bed not one, not two, but three hot girls in the States; in fact I can't stand most of the characters or the attempts at clever, casually interwoven plot lines.

My love of this film applies solely to the relationship between Andrew Lincoln and Keira Knightley. Their story, for me, is the only reason to watch this film, and is all the more interesting given that they hardly feature in the plot at all; for me it is perhaps the most moving aspect of the whole film. And it's not because I had a crush on Knightley; her character, yes, but not Knightley herself. Okay, maybe a little, but I'm over it now.

Lincoln is the best friend of a character who gets wed, to Knightley, early on in the film. Throughout the wedding, Lincoln films the proceedings avidly and grimly; we sense some jealousy on his part, and we assume it is directed toward the girl who has stolen his best friend, and possibly the object of his affections, from him.

Later in the film, Knightley arrives at Lincoln's studios unannounced, claiming that he has been ignoring her calls; he is dismissive, casual, and off-handed; she asks to see his wedding video which he tries to prevent her from doing, and it is only when she begins watching the close-up shots of herself that Lincoln has captured on film does she – and we – understand that it is actually Knightley who is the object of his desires.

As a portrayal of unrequited love, I regard it as second to none, particularly in the strained, knowingly hopeless way that Lincoln silently attempts to convey his love for her toward the end of the film.

And it's for those two characters, and these three small segments of this ponderous film, that I regard it as being one of my two favourite romantic comedies of all time. Call me a thwarted romantic or a desperate fool if you will, but you won't change my mind.

Staycation (Part 2)

2010-05-30T13:07:00.000-07:00

In part one of this post I documented our family's trip to London following the cancellation of our foreign holiday owing to the volcanic ash cloud that disrupted flights in mid-April. This post documents the second leg of our staycation, in Worcestershire.

Source: Google Images search

I always thought of Worcestershire as being something of a 'non-county', with little to recommend it. As a child growing up in Stratford-upon-Avon, we occasionally crossed the county border into Worcestershire, but generally to somewhere like Redditch, which as an urban sprawl has few reasons to visit beyond an ugly covered shopping centre. That said, we also very occasionally visited the Malvern Hills, which are of course beautiful – more on that later – or Broadway, tucked just inside the Cotswolds, but generally my over-riding impression of the county was of being unimpressed.

So it was with this mentality that when Mrs S gave me a choice between Von Essen's hotels in Suffolk and Worcestershire, I elected to choose the former. Suffolk I knew from my time at university in nearby Colchester, and my over-riding memory of that county was one of tranquil beauty. I forget now how it was that Suffolk was nudged into second place, but looking back I'm glad that it was thus.

Von Essen are an upmarket hotel chain who own a number of beautiful properties, including the historically-important Cliveden. What's pleasant about the chain is that they have a dedicated sub-collection, Luxury Family Hotels, which are just that – family-friendly hotels which appeal to those seeking the luxurious bells and whistles that often get eschewed in normal child-friendly hotels. Why should you not enjoy high standards, the theory goes, just because you have a couple of kids in tow?

We arrived at The Elms Hotel in blazing sunshine, the sort of weather we had become accustomed to that week. Driving from the M5 passed places like Chateau Impney near Droitwich Spa and the mysterious, imposing Abberley clock tower sat within the rolling Worcestershire hills and woods, I began to feel my youthful impressions of the county recede into embarassed silence. 'This county is beautiful,' I mused to myself.

Source: Andrew Mawby (Flickr)

And so was the hotel. The Elms was originally built in 1710 and rebuilt following a fire in 1927 which left only the front walls of the house standing. It is a magnificently grand, stone property with a imposing central staircase and domed stained-glass skylight. With the room not ready for a few hours and our two girls fast asleep in the car, we ditched the cases and decided to take a drive to Worcester, about ten miles away.

Source: MJA Smith

Going to Worcester was a big disappointment. In spite of the bright sunshine, which in most cases can render even the most ugly topography positively, the town has an absence of character. There are some nice buildings, most notably the Guildhall (whose architect, Thomas White, a Wren pupil, also designed The Elms), and the cathedral has an obvious draw, but the main streets are filled with the usual high street names as well as poor quality independents; there is also an abundance of buildings of unsympathetic and dated design, which to my mind have destroyed the basic character of what should be a pretty county town. After a thoroughly depressing lunch in Marks & Spencer where all the patrons seemed to just want to moan and gripe about illness and the poor state of everything, we decided to leave before we too started feeling miserable. We chanced upon a shop called New England Country Store on which was filled with cute home-ware products from the likes of Cath Kidston and Poppy Treffry, spent a small fortune, and decided to head back to The Elms.

Whether it was the disappointment of spending time in Worcester or a residual disappointment that we should have, at that time, been sat round a pool in Quinta do Lago in Portugal, but when we reached our room we weren't terribly impressed. We had selected an 'executive' room, as this was what was described as being most suitable for two adults and two children. The practicalities of the space, however, made movement around the room nigh on impossible. Daughter#2's travel cot only had one possible home, which was in front of the wardrobe, making it difficult to open, while Daughter#1's camp bed lay along the width of our bed, further reducing the space which was pretty limited to start with. The other thing, which is completely out of the control of the hotel, is that the furnishings are befitting of a period property; given that we favour, and are accustomed to, modernity, it took a while to adjust to this form of 'luxury'. All of this said, we swiftly climbed out of this funk and I can honestly say it was the only low point in that whole week.

One of the reasons was because The Elms has a superb, modern kids' club called the Bears' Den; I've always been quite reticent about putting our girls into these types of places, and Daughter#2 – at two – is generally too young for most crèches like this. Not at The Elms, where Ewa, Vicky and Sue had the pleasure of our children's company while we took a lovely afternoon tea (with the hotel's own delicious Abberley tea blend) each of the three days we were there. The girls loved the Bears' Den and were crushed when they had to leave.

Also modern is the Aquae Sulis spa, which has no restrictions on the times kids can use the pool, so the girls loved that. Mrs S took herself off for a massage one day, while I sat in the sun on the terrace doing some writing. I found the whole set-up really conducive to relaxing and unwinding, which I duly did. The gardens at The Elms are lovely also, and unlike other grand houses, aren't off limits for curious kids. In addition to a large sloping lawn, there's a secret garden, play area and tennis courts.

Service wise, across the stay we did receive some little inconsistencies from one day to the next, most of which were just minor irritations more than anything else. Getting peas with the kids' fish and chips meal one day and not getting them the next; having a slice of cucumber in my Hendricks and tonic one day and not the next; getting talked through the breakfast buffet and egg options each of the three days, by the same waiter, in a hotel with fewer than 30 rooms even though he recognised us and acknowledged me by name; signing for our meal in the Pear Terrace on the last night and realising that we hadn't signed for anything else the entire time we were there. That sort of thing. Whilst nothing individually disastrous, they were basics we expected a £300 per night hotel to get right without making us even notice them.

On the Friday we took a drive to Great Malvern, with the intention of walking into the hills. That didn't happen, mainly because we spent so much time wandering, slack-jawed, around the town itself, marvelling at how well preserved the town is, and also at how well it has maintained – mostly – a focus on independent retailers (Worcester take note). Even a high street chain like WHSmith has been here, in the same spot, for decades and retains features from yesterday such as the mosaic picture below. We bought bits and pieces for the house from Ipaetus Gallery and had a picnic in the serene Rose Bank gardens, marvelling at the views across the Midlands and the cascading town tiered below us. I think it's fair to say that I did rather fall for Malvern in a big way that day.

Source: MJA Smith

The following day we headed for the Cotswolds, an area I seldom visited enough as a child but where I have had many, many happy times with Mrs S since. We started our mini-tour at Broadway, spending far too much time and money at Cotswold Trading until the pull of having a cup of tea in the sunshine outside The Broadway Hotel was too great. From there we drove through the countryside to Bourton-on-the-Water (cheating slightly here as it's in Gloucestershire), possibly unwise given its status as a tourist hotspot; we were also running out of time, so literally stopped there for lunch at The Croft, where we sat on their sun-drenched terrace and observed the combination of arty types and foreign holidaymakers passing by. The Croft has a really good, simple menu, and also offers good, healthy choices for kids.

The following day, after checking out, we drove along the road to Witley Court, a ruined house and lakeside garden destroyed by fire in the 1920s (was burning down the house a past-time on this stretch of road in the early part of the last Century I wonder?). Managed by English Heritage, I found the sight of an historic property gutted by flames strangely moving, while the girls loved the adventure of exploring the hollowed-out rooms, spotting the fireplaces halfway up walls where formerly the upper storeys would have been. To add insult to the house's injury, prior to the fire, all of the major fittings and fixtures were stripped and sold by the then owners.

Source: Google Images search

One of the core attractions of Witley Court is its fountains. To complete this sad tale of a mournful building, the piping used to pump water to the main fountain was removed during the second World War, presumably to be melted down for weaponry. Since refurbished, the fountain is now in full working order and is demonstrated at set intervals in the day; the central plume of water is capable of shooting a majestic 100ft into the air. No trip to an historic property would be complete without a trip to the tea shop, which is here attached to the remarkably-undamaged church which adjoins the main Witley Court house. Fine home-made cakes and scones ensued before setting off for home.

That completed the second leg of our staycation. It left me feeling like we'd only scratched the surface of Worcestershire's rich spoils, but at least it managed to redefine my – false – impressions of the county. Thank you, Eyjafjallajökull for serendipitously allowing that to happen.

Staycation (Part 1)

2010-04-30T13:49:00.000-07:00

Source: Business Week

I was sat at work two days before setting off for Portugal with Mrs S and the girls when a colleague came in and pointed out that we might not be travelling after all thanks to the cloud of volcanic ash drifting toward the UK from the erupting Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland. In my usual, news-oblivious way, I hadn't heard anything about it. 'Don't worry,' he said, seeing my look of concern. 'It should be clear by the time you're flying.'

My colleague's news awareness alone was of course not the same as being able to see the future, and by the time our flight to Portugal was scheduled to leave – 8.25 on the Saturday morning – the punitive restrictions on UK airspace had already led to our flights being cancelled, but only after a day of nail-biting concern as to whether we'd have been notified of the cancellation the day before, or whether we would be among the mugs you saw on TV waiting anxiously at the airport for interminable hours anticipating news that wouldn't come; the idea of doing that with two toddlers couldn't have filled me with more dread.

By the end of that Friday evening, Mrs S had already scoured the web and booked alternatives for our break. A day later than we'd been scheduled to depart for the Algarve, we were on our way to Canary Wharf for two nights at the Radisson at New Providence Wharf.

The Radisson New Providence Wharf is a hotel that we've become very familiar with, having stayed here – both with the girls and without – numerous times over the past couple of years. A suite here provides very good value for money for the amount of space you get – a main bedroom, a lounge with fold-out sofa bed for our eldest daughter and plenty of room for a travel cot for our youngest.

Source: MJA Smith

As with any stay in London, the hotel is largely just a base from which to go exploring, and that's exactly how we treated it this time around. Within half an hour of having checked in we were sat in Jubilee Park (above Canary Wharf Tube station), gazing up at the sleek glass curtain walls of the office buildings and eating a picnic in the sunshine. From there, a Tube ride to Baker Street and a wander to Marylebone High Street where we browsed the Conran Shop and Mrs S and Daughter#1 bought bits and pieces from Cath Kidston. A sleeping Daughter#2 and I sat in the Garden Of Rest opposite, a small oasis of tranquillity amidst the clamour of nearby Marylebone Road.

Further down Marylebone High Street Daughter#1 and I bought old postcards of London and a book called Pen Paper Pause by Richard Watkins at a pretty store called Caroline & Friends, before purchasing Lauren Child books in Daunt. Daunt, an independent bookshop, has a beautiful stained glass window on the back wall and a great range of travel books in the gallery upstairs and basement. While Mrs S and Daughter#1 hit the Little White Company shop, I found a rare Inspiral Carpets 12" single in the Oxfam next door. It was an afternoon of turning up such treats.

Source: MJA Smith

From Marylebone High Street to Hyde Park, escaping the touristy clamour of Oxford Street in favour of Wigmore Street, though still finding ourselves crossing Hyde Park Corner along with everybody else. It was no surprise that the park was busy with the obligatory sunbathers and footie-playing lads, given that it was a warm Spring Sunday afternoon. The girls ran about while we had a much-needed rest. Again missing Oxford Street via a walk along Grosvenor Square, we caught the Tube from Bond Street back to Canary Wharf and had a poor Wagamama experience in Jubilee Place, including Daughter#1 barely eating, me throwing food down my t-shirt and after 20 minutes of waiting, the discovery that the waiter had forgotten to order my yasai chilli men; when it finally arrived it was so spicy I fully expected to pass out eating it. But he did deduct it from the bill.

The following morning we walked from the hotel to Canary Wharf and had breakfast in Kruger at Cabot Square; it wasn't cheap and the service was a bit off, but the food was nice. From there we caught the DLR to Island Gardens to pass under the Thames using the Foot Tunnel into Greenwich. The lift was working on the North bank, but not the South, which meant I had to lug our buggy up the stairs – I lost count of how many there were after about forty, but the burly lift operator on the North bank reckoned gruffly there were 'about 'undred'.

We hadn't been to Greenwich before, but it lived up to all the expectations we'd built up from people who had told us about it, and, if we hadn't had plans for the afternoon, I'm sure we'd have stayed there for longer. Instead we made a beeline for the park, had a drink at Cow And Coffee Bean and let the girls have a run around in the kids' play area. As if dragging the buggy up the steps from the Foot Tunnel wasn't exhausting enough, pushing said stroller up the hill to have a picnic at the top very nearly did me in, but it was worth it for the views across Canary Wharf and the City alone.

That afternoon, we took the sleek and graceful Thames Clipper to Bankside Pier and visited the fifth floor of the Tate Modern, figuring that the displays of Cubist, Vorticist and Futurist art would appeal to the imagination of two toddlers, and were proven correct. Daughter#1 loved the Warhols, Ruschas and Lichtensteins, whereas Daughter#2 gravitated worryingly close to the sculptures until a packet of raisins persuaded her back into her stroller.

(c) 1984 Ed Ruscha

We headed back to the hotel via the Cafe Rouge at Hays Galleria, which is a reasonably safe bet for kids' food, and Tower Bridge. Tower Bridge with a stroller from the South Bank requires a lengthy detour along Tooley Street, which is almost as long as the walk across the bridge itself. But it does offer some great views along the length of the bridge.

On the Tuesday we schlepped across to Covent Garden and were there before things really got underway at 10.00. With the sun shining and few people around (compared to normal), such parts of the West End are so much more alluring than they are at busy times, giving you space to appreciate the architecture and elegance of the area without constantly bumping into other people engaged in either the frenetic act of getting somewhere or just ambling about cluelessly.

Source: Fopp website

We passed Kiefer Sutherland on Earlham Street en route to Fopp. Fopp used to be an independent record shop until it went bust and was salvaged by HMV. The Earlham Street store has kept the Fopp branding, and also the more liberal-minded approach to its stock compared to its more universal parent. I bought CDs by Brian Eno and Television; for Mrs S it was Grizzly Bear and Ed Harcourt. For Daughter#1 it was just fun to look at the CD cases and picking out the ones she liked the look of.

A dash back across the Jubilee Footbridge to the London Eye brought us sharply into touristville, but mercifully our pod on the Eye was almost empty. Mrs S and I had been once before, on a cloudy Autumn morning. On this April Tuesday it was bright and sunny – and plane-less, naturally – which allowed for far better views than we'd had before. The experience of seeing the whole of London laid out was only marred by Daughter#2's insistence on tearing around the pod and having a major terrible toddler tantrum; the two combined caused me to experience vertigo for the only time in my life so far.

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Source: unknown

So, that concludes part one of our unexpected staycation in the UK, and a trip to London that included more traditional (child-friendly) tourist haunts than I'd normally elect to go to. Okay, so it wasn't as relaxing as Portugal would have been, but that's to be expected when you go to London.

Coffee

2010-04-29T12:30:00.000-07:00

I have given up coffee.

I've had intentions of doing this before, and have managed a week at best. In total I have drunk coffee routinely since I was thirteen, or twenty full years out of my thirty-three. That's a lot of stimulant.

Except that my consumption was never excessive, and in comparison to other people was positively non-existent. I'd go so far as to say it was lightweight, wimpy. I can probably think of no more than three times where I've drunk more than three cups of coffee in a day; latterly, since I started commuting into the office from my home in Milton Keynes, a decent cup of coffee was required just to get the day at work started. Just one, mind. This is contrast to people I met recently in Geneva, who would drink five or six espressos in a morning just to be able to face the day. For me it was a milky americano at about 7.30, occasionally followed by another toward the end of the morning if the day was proving especially draining.

Coffee has on occasion done some strange things to me if I stepped outside of that one, maybe two cups a day range. I recall drinking two huge lattes in a café in Colchester that was trying to capture the whole Central Perk-esque, relaxed and convivial vibe of Friends. That was at about 10.30 in the morning. Despite not having anything else caffeinated for the rest of the day, thanks to that injection, I was still awake at 3.00 the next morning. And that's the thing that was most surprising about the event that led to my withdrawal from coffee; usually, coffee would have an effect on my head, not my body. I'd come away from a strong coffee feeling light-headed and not really 'with it'.

I read an article in Esquire last year detailing the negative side of coffee drinking but despite being worried to death by what it had to say, and despite a concerted effort to start drinking coffee every other day, I failed miserably. But still I never stepped outside that one or two cups a day range.

And then, a month ago, I went round to my parents' house and had a cup of Joe; nothing too hardcore, just from a jar. And then I went home and found Mrs S making one, so I thought I'd have another, again just from a jar. I wouldn't normally have two cups so close together, but I didn't think it mattered. Remember that two cups in a day, even if they're close together, isn't in any way excessive.

So it was a surprise to me that from the moment I finished that second cup, at about 11.30 that Sunday morning, through to when I went to bed, twelve hours later, I'd endured half a calendar day's-worth of heart palpitations so relentless and intense that I thought I was either having a heart attack or about to witness my own heart break free from the confines of my chest and bounce about all over the floor of my house like some sort of psycho Space Hopper. I was petrified, and couldn't see that coffee alone had prompted this feeling.

I don't know how I was able to sleep, but I did. However, when I woke up for work at 5.00 the next day those racing palpitations were still there, so I decided to call the doctors and get an emergency appointment. By the time I got there, my heart felt almost normal again – typical – and I was just left with an equally-worrying tightness in my chest.

I told the doctor about the coffees of the day before, at which she nodded sagely, doing that semi-sympathetic, semi-patronising smile medics are so adept at, and as she explained that caffeine had likely provided the trigger, I felt stupid and sheepish. And just as I was about to slope away apologising for wasting her time, she asked me if I'd been feeling stressed recently.

The answer was that I had. A week or two before that Sunday I'd experienced some of the most frantic, busy and stretching days at work I've ever endured. She said that the coffee may well have been the trigger for the palpitations, but that the stress had provided the conditions for my body to react differently than it would normally have. The trigger for the trigger if you like.

I was genuinely surprised. Up to that point I thought I'd managed stress in my life reasonably well. The impact of that Sunday was to make me rethink my approach to complexity and uncertainty generally, and I've (mostly) been more calm and balanced since then; more like how I've been told I appear on the surface perhaps, less internalising problems. In addition, I decided to give up coffee. Completely. Cold turkey.

A month later I haven't been tempted once to order an americano at all; not once. The physical effects I experienced that Sunday prompted such a fear of what something seemingly so innocuous could do to you that I just needed to cut it out completely.

So there you are; that's why I'm no longer drinking coffee.

Every Book

2010-03-26T13:50:00.000-07:00

Go to: Audio Journal :: Documentary Evidence :: twitter.com/mjasmith

Every book naturally tells a story; second-hand books often have the capacity to tell a totally different story to the one contained in the printed pages, but it is a story without narrative, with only the reader's imagination itself to determine the characters, plots and events in the story.

I bought two second-hand books from a café at a farm in Bedfordshire; the nominal amount of money they cost was donated to the Haiti earthquake appeal. The books were Breakfast At Tiffany's by Truman Capote and Walking On Glass by Iain Banks.

Inside Walking On Glass, at a seemingly random interval in the book was a white envelope, slit open crudely along the short edge; on the front, in pencil, the words 'WED 10.00'; on the reverse, in Biro, a few small doodles, a stylised star and the name 'Christina'. There was also a credit-sized cardboard advert for the Cineworld complex in Stevenage.

In the inside front cover, a red ink stamp proclaimed the book to have been withdrawn from the stock of South Tyneside library and sold for 20p.

On page 59, a reader had circled the page number with a blue Biro. The page, part of a sequence where one of the three main characters (Graham) falls deeper in love with Sara ffitch, is mildly moving, but nothing fundamental to the story compared to any other page in the book.

The objects, scribbles and circlings prompt questions: why did the book get sold? How did it find its way to Bedfordshire? What was so significant about page 59? Who is or was Christina? What happened at 10.00 on that Wednesday? Was it a date between the book's owner and the mysterious Christina? Did the date go well? Did they marry, move in together and decide, during a disposal of their combined individual possessions, to rid themselves of this book? You quickly move from seeing the clues as not independent items but part of a broader narrative that runs in parallel to the mystifying, curiously unreal and detached theme of the book itself. Just like the three apparently separate strands that run throughout the book, they coalesce into a semblance of a unified story.

My own additions to the book's story I am more sure of: I used the cover of a torn box of matches from Brasserie Lipp in Geneva as my bookmark, for no other reason than it was lying on the desk in my hotel when I was reading the book. In the back I put a torn corner of a page of an MC Escher desk calendar bearing the word 'Tokyo' and a folded yellow Post-It bearing a mobile number for someone I called weeks ago; both were lying on my desk at work and got swept into the cover of the book when I left the office for the day.

I'm tempted to keep them all in there, hand it into a charity shop, let the next owner find them and construct their own story about the book itself and its previous owners, a story that moves from South Tyneside to Stevenage to Geneva to Tokyo. It might mean nothing or it might nurture one of the finest pieces of modern literature; the point is we'll never know.

Travelodge, Hayle

2010-02-18T12:04:00.000-08:00

Go to: Audio Journal :: Documentary Evidence :: twitter.com/mjasmith

I don't think I understand the concept of 'no frills'. My understanding was that a no frills service or product retained the usefulness and core functionality of a more expensive equivalent, but did away with any unnecessary add-ons or peripheral additions. Think Ikea furniture versus Habitat – often very similarly-styled items only made of materials that perhaps won't endure quite so long, but in essence designed to fulfil the same principal use.

We stayed at a Travelodge at Hayle in Cornwall when visiting my niece in Penzance at the weekend which has turned my comprehension of a no frills service on its head. I've stayed in a Travelodge near Heathrow once before, and endured a thoroughly miserable night's sleep owing to the comings and goings of noisy travellers along the corridor throughout the night. However, that was pre-credit crunch and the corresponding rise in popularity of brands such as Travelodge and Premier Inn. I figured, mistakenly, that with that rise in popularity had come a rise in standards; more basically, I assumed that the Heathrow experience was just the product of its proximity to the UK's foremost airport, not a damning indictment of the chain per se. This trip wasn't our main holiday, and with a scarcity of accommodation around Penzance catering for families with small children, plus those hotels that did having family room rates of around £120 per night, we decided to go for the Travelodge at Hayle where the total stay for three nights was around £125.

Travelodge's ethos, according to the creased and stained literature in the room, is to make you feel better off, and in this regard they succeeded. And judging by the prevalence of Audis and BMWs in the car park it's a marketing strategy that's paying dividends. Paying for three nights what I'd have paid for one elsewhere was of course a big saving, and I did feel like I could afford to spend more generously elsewhere. I didn't; I decided that I'd do similarly uncharacteristic things like go to McDonald's for breakfast and stopping at a Harvester on the way home. Perhaps that makes me sound like a snob. Perhaps I am.

It's the sheer basicness, if that's a word, of the place that first surprised me. The furniture and set-up was nothing short of utilitarian – a simple desk, some hanging space for clothes, some open shelves and a bed, plus a sofa bed for our eldest daughter and plenty of floor space for our youngest daughter's travel cot. The bathroom, though tiny, had a decent shower. It was clear from the layout and lack of ornament that the room was designed to serve one solitary purpose, and that was for sleeping. You wouldn't – couldn't – choose Travelodge for a romantic break. Sleeping is really all we did there; we'd get back from my sister's house and go to bed, get up, get clean and get out. With only a curiously over-priced to-the-door breakfast available we were out early as well. I wonder if it's still cheap if you work out how much it costs per minute you're actually prepared to be in the room.

Still, so far, no major gripes. We saved money and slept, if not well, then at least enough to be able to start the day with at least a vague sense of feeling refreshed; also, the room seemed clean, but then again the carpet was of such a nauseatingly dense Seventies pattern that you'd have been hard pressed to tell. But there were some things which were beyond basic, and were instead just plain wrong. First, the bed had no support and left Mrs S – who hasn't got the best back at the best of times – feeling all sorts of aches and pains; the duvet cover was literally the same size as the bed, which meant – because of the inadequate storage heater (on all day, off all night) that we spent the night in a perpetually chilly duvet tug of war with one another; the duvet cover itself was open down one side; the mattress cover on the sofa bed was torn and hole-ridden and there were some dubious stains on the mattress itself; the back of the sofa bed literally came apart when I tried to make it up; towels were thin and threadbare; the sink had a crack in it; the room, in spite of being non-smoking, smelled of a combination of decades-old fags and contained a faint whiff of damp dog etc etc. Need I go on? Getting the picture?

It is possible, through staying at a Travelodge, to deduce what the chain must believe to be the 'frills' we can live without, and whether you agree or not that's tough. For example, a lock on the toilet door? No need. Buttons down the side of the duvet cover? Superfluous. Toiletries? Bring your own, cheapskate. Curtain hooks along the full length of the curtain rail? Come on, they close don't they? Quit complaining. You get what you pay for.

The last point is, I suppose, crucial: you get what you pay for. Michael O'Leary of Ryanair is the most prominent exponent of the 'pay peanuts, expect shit' mantra. We paid less than a third of the price for three nights that you'd pay at somewhere like The Soho in London for a single night, a place whose rooms are so stuffed with frills of all shapes and hues that you could be mistaken for thinking you were sleeping in a large doily. But that's really what I want from a hotel. Well, maybe not doilies, but hopefully you get the picture. We all deserve a little luxury when we travel, I say. I don't want to stay somewhere that's less luxurious than my own house. Sorry if that's not the credit crunch spirit.

If I've learned one thing from this stay, it's 'pay more, get more', and that's exactly what I'll be doing next time.

The Roter Ochse, Heidelberg

2010-01-29T12:44:00.000-08:00

Go to: Audio Journal :: Documentary Evidence :: twitter.com/mjasmith

Source: Zum Roten Ochsen website

'I really want a proper German meal this evening,' announced Martyn as we boarded the train at Frankfurt Airport headed for a couple of days of meetings in Heidelberg.

Cruising toward Mannheim Hauptbahnhof on the plush and punctual Deutsche Bahn ICE service, ruthlessly efficient as most things German tend to be, I contemplated the prospects of actually finding anything to eat on a menu which to misquote Henry Ford, allows you to have anything you want to eat, so long as it's meat. Perhaps, I thought to myself, I'd suggest just heading downstairs to the Marriott restaurant where I knew the menu would be slightly more accommodating.

At the Marriott Heidelberg reception Martyn asked if the concierge could recommend a good traditional German restaurant in the town. He suggested a place which made Martyn's face light up – a good restaurant that brewed its own lager on the premises. What the hell? I thought. After all, the last time I was in Germany was 1994 and I figured they must have embraced vegetarian dishes by now.

After sitting on our posteriors all day in various planes, trains, taxis and meeting rooms, we decided it would be a nice idea to take a brisk walk to the restaurant, perhaps seeing a bit of Heidelberg while we were there, rather than just ferrying ourselves between hotel and meetings like we'd usually do. The concierge handed us a map, drew the route with a Biro and told us it would probably take about half an hour to walk, so off we strolled food-wards, along a wide boulevard dominated by nineteenth century architecture with subtle Gothic details and interspersed with sleek modern hotels.

Along Hauptstrasse in the old town we commented how well they had integrated modern store fronts with the old buildings and tried to avoid feeling disappointed at the prevalence of brands we'd be used to on high streets in the UK and feeling somewhat surprised to see two brands we regard as defunct (Woolworths and C&A) still open for business.

Further along Hauptstrasse the modern shops were replaced by more classically old German pubs and restaurants, any sleek and trendy places standing out as incongruously as our attempts at pidgin German to ask directions when we acknowledged we didn't have a clue where we were supposed to be heading, the map suddenly offering no clues and the wan glow from the street lamps making it nigh on impossible to read it anyway,

With every seemingly traditional German gasthaus that we passed, and with growing appetites, Martyn would growl 'If this place we're heading to is modern, we're going to that place,' and as we rounded the corner finally into Leyergasse and saw the place we'd been recommended, all bright lights and atmosphere denuded of tradition we backtracked and ducked into the Roter Ochse, whose signage proclaimed that it had been built in 1703.

The signage also said that this was a traditional student pub, which initially brought back uncomfortable memories of the Union bar at university, though this was dispelled almost instantly when we opened the door and the sound of a raucous piano sing-along filled our ears. We took the end of a table, taking in the low ceiling and walls, every inch cluttered with photos, memorabilia and all manner of other ephemera from the pub's past.

Over a couple of local beers we perused the simple printed menu, finding to my horror that acceptance of vegetarians hadn't progressed that much in fifteen years. We ordered some potato soup, and I found the singular meat-free dish on the menu (a rich mushroom stew with a single dumpling and pickled side-salad), both of which were full of rustic flavour. As we talked and put the world to rights, the pianist, Rudi, rested his newly-refreshed steiner on the top of the ancient upright piano and hammered out a combination of familiar German songs and Broadway show tunes, occasionally leading his friends at the front of the pub to engage in rapturous baritone singing. Every time he picked up his beer and headed back toward his friends, one hand signalling very clearly that he was done playing, grunts of dissent made him head back to the stool, grinning, clearly enjoying his moment in the spotlight.

The music and sporadic laughter, combined with a place more full of character than I think I've ever been to before, leant the place a conviviality that I suppose I wasn't expecting when we set of for the town that night. As we left, at a relatively respectable 10.30, we realised that we were the only customers left. Apologising to the landlord, we found ourselves being told about the history of the Roter Ochse. Amazingly in this world where tradition is all too often usurped by commercial ambition and the seductive nature of the profit margin and the bottom line, we discovered from Philipp Spengel that the pub had been in the same family for six generations since it had opened.

The history is well documented on the pub's website, but by way of short précis, the Spengel family ownership of the Roter Ochse began with the purchase of the premises by Albrecht Spengel in September 1839, and became a firm favourite among students under the stewardship of Albrecht's son Carl; later, as other descendants took the reins the guest book was filled by numerous luminaries from the arts world and science disciplines. For us, it was just a great place to eat, drink and talk.

Sated, both in terms of sustenance and ambiance, we headed back to the hotel, pausing briefly to consider getting a cab before agreeing to hit the pavements again instead.

A Yule Blog

2009-12-22T07:39:00.000-08:00

Go to: Audio Journal / twitter.com/mjasmith

Copyright: Penguin Classics

It has become customary to brand those who either cannot or will not enter into the spirit of Christmas as a Scrooge, after Charles Dickens’s most celebrated ne’er do well. Christmas, according to Dickens, is all about upholding tradition, and one of the rituals that I have undertaken the past four years, and which I intend to continue for the rest of my days, is reading A Christmas Carol every December. This year, for the first time I began to see the good in Ebenezer – not in the changed character that we are presented with at the end of the book, the man suddenly able to embrace the festive season and all the values good-natured people have, but the mean-spirited, cantankerous fellow we are first presented with.

Ebenezer Scrooge is indeed one of the most misanthropic characters ever created, but he does have some good qualities which wouldn’t go amiss in most people today.

For starters, he may be extreme in his distaste for charity and goodwill to all men, but he also sees through the false way that people go about their business at Christmas. He simply cannot abide the way people see fit to descend upon those they have taken no interest in at any other point in the year, bestowing pleasantries and forgiveness that will be quickly forgotten once the festivities are over and done with. Fair weather friends have no place in Ebenezer’s world.

Secondly, Scrooge’s tightfistedness and frugality are values which would do well to find their way into many households this Christmas. The gods of capitalism and Government-sponsored borrowing excess seem to have replaced the son of the deity Christmas is meant to celebrate. The sums of money households have expended for one day are often frightening, and one can only hope that these straitened times give rise to a restoration of traditional values at Christmas going forward.

Indeed, if we surmise that Scrooge’s name ‘being good upon ‘Change for anything’ and his residing in the City of London connects Ebenezer to the financial heartland of the United Kingdom, we should celebrate Scrooge’s miserly ways and extreme prudence in his professional ethics at the very least. For those of us presently employed in financial services, facing either an unhappy unemployed Christmas or an uncertain 2009, a bit more of those traditional principles wouldn’t have gone amiss these past few years. Gordon Gecko’s mantra of ‘greed is good’ isn’t that dissimilar to Scrooge’s belief in absolute parsimony. Except, where Gecko would flashily spend his millions on art and other signs of wealth, Scrooge is happy to live the most austere of existences, using barely any fuel to heat his modest home and eschewing elaborate food in favour of simple gruel. Although I can’t abide his wanton grouchiness, I can’t help but feel that Scrooge would have the right strategy for dealing with today’s downturn. Certainly the impact of rising fuel and food prices over the past eighteen months would have barely bothered our Scrooge.

**********

I only recently remembered the letters we used to write to Father Christmas each year and the letters my sister and I would get back, written in a hand curiously similar to my father’s. I remember the tinsel on the family tree, the silver and purple baubles that looked like disco balls, the advent calendar depicting a sweetshop administered by cute elves that would be retrieved each and every year; the brass candle holder where the heat from the candles pushed an angel blowing a trumpet around in perpetuity, each circuit accompanied by a chiming sound from the bells positioned underneath her; I recall the family meals with my maternal grandmother, now several years gone, and the way she’d always greet the arrival of the food with ‘I’m never going to eat all this,’ but would nevertheless manage it anyway, and the way my father and I would drive her home in the evening with two carrier bags on the floor of the back car seats, one containing a pair of slippers and the other containing the carcass of the turkey wrapped in foil for whatever macabre purpose she required it for; I remember the excitement of opening a box of liquorice Allsorts, the increasing complexity of my list throughout my teenage years and the increasing sense of confoundedness that my selections were greeted with by my mother.

I recall the intense joy of looking over the presents I’d received in their little pile in my parents’ lounge and the way I’d want to keep them so piled for as many days as possible to stave off the inevitable putting away and the rapid onset of a new school year that followed; I recall my sister and I sitting impatiently on the top step for my mother to come back up to offer confirmation that Father Christmas had indeed been, and the increasing frustration at how long my father was taking in the bathroom since, without him, we weren’t allowed to head downstairs to tear into our presents; I recall the disappointment at having grapefruit and mandarin as a starter before roast turkey and the joy at the times we had prawn cocktail instead; I even have a pleasant feeling recalling the pain in my nose from trying to clip on those nasty little plastic moustaches you’d find in your cracker; I recall, back when I ate meat, loving the salty taste of turkey sandwiches that would be prepared in the early evening of Christmas Day and the feeling of intense gluttony that I went to bed with; later I recall sadder times, absent family members and the onset of illnesses, adult arguments and relationship breakdowns. The clarity of these memories in totality is greater than many other recollections from years gone by.

Christmas evokes in you so many memories of yesteryear. Few other times bring forth the recollections of your earlier years so readily. I only hope that our children sit here in thirty-odd years with the same vividness of memorable festivities, with so many pleasant recollections of Christmases past and the anticipation of Christmases yet to come.

An extended version of this piece originally appeared on The First Days Of My Thirties blog in 2008. A Happy Christmas to all My Other Blog subscribers.

A Wet London Monday

2009-11-30T12:53:00.000-08:00

Go to: Audio Journal / twitter.com/mjasmith

Source: Rory (Flickr)

Like most places in the South East of England this morning, the square outside Euston Station was lashed by wind and rain; it's usually a ersatz wind tunnel but today you could feel the gusts and swirls inside the station building well before you stepped outside.

Out along Euston Road I passed the upturned skeletons of about five dead black umbrellas. It was like the place where umbrellas go to die; an umbrella graveyard if you will.

Watching the Met Line train pull onto the platform at Euston Square, it was so steamed up with condensation that it was impossible to tell how busy it was until the doors opened, while on the train itself the floor was so wet you couldn't put your bag down.

Just by the Dashwood building there was a stripped skeleton of an umbrella that looked like it'd been ravaged by a wild beast rather than what they're calling, in typically understated fashion, 'inclement' weather. Inclement weather simply sounds mildly irritating, not like the type of weather to wash Cumbrian towns slightly closer to the south.

At the queues for the lifts there was a young woman in a skirt that was shorter than her jacket (which wasn't exactly long in the first place). There was me soaked to the skin and wrapped up for a blizzard whereas she was dressed for a night out in Newcastle.

In the café on the floor of our building the barista moaned that the weather meant he was going to be rushed off his feet because people who would usually go out for coffee would go to him instead. Someone else in the queue pointed out that it's still possible to hold an umbrella in one hand and a coffee in the other, but the barista – looking increasingly deflated as the queue got longer – just shrugged dejectedly.

Woughton Centre, Milton Keynes – Accident / Incident Frequency Report

2009-11-17T13:29:00.000-08:00

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Source: MJA Smith

M and I took our eldest daughter to her first dancing exam on Saturday at the Woughton Centre in Milton Keynes. I’ve taken S here for one of her lessons, and several years ago went to a gig here at the Pitz (Client supporting Mick Jones and Tony James's Carbon / Silcon; click here for my review of Client). It’s not a terribly auspicious place, but the dancing school is good and S enjoys it, and that’s the main thing.

Whilst waiting to go in for the exam, as S was busily putting on her jazz shoes, I noticed this printed piece of paper, which I found a bit strange. It basically seems that the Centre – either by law or entirely voluntarily – needs to list the number of accidents that have occurred during the last half of the year.

I can’t possibly think why this might be. Is it supposed to enable some sort of Which?-style comparison between leisure centres for safety records? Surely not. However, as with all statistics, it’s all relative and unless you’re able to make a meaningful comparison there is often little value in simply showing absolute numbers. On this measure, what a terrible month May was – at seven, the highest number of individual incidents of the past half year. A grave month indeed, for both staff and customers it seems. I blame the onset of Summer.

The best of these incidents, or worst depending on your viewpoint, must surely be ‘violence’, which is defined beneath as ‘fights and violence towards staff’. Why on earth would you even think about advertising this to customers unless you absolutely had to? And in only seeming to selectively show violent incidents toward staff, what about violence among customers? Doesn’t that matter? And what do they classify as violence anyway? Murder? Bringing a machete into the changing rooms? Biting thy thumb at thee for beseeching thy Nike‘s? What?

I also especially like the fact that there are three incidents described as ‘bumps incurred through moshing’ during Pitz events. When I think of moshing, not that I’ve ever been known to throw myself willingly into a moshpit, I hardly think of ‘bumping’ – kicks to the shins and punches in the face perhaps, but never ‘bumping’, which to my mind sounds awfully polite and rather pleasant if you ask me.

A London Saturday

2009-11-07T14:39:00.000-08:00

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Source: www.all-hotels.com

This post comes to you from the Radisson Edwardian New Providence Wharf Hotel after a long day spent trekking the mad streets of our capital with my wife and two daughters, all three of whom, incidentally, are fast asleep. M has just fallen face-first into today’s Times but I’ve whisked it out from her just in time to prevent newsprint transferring amusingly verbatim to her skin.

The occasion is that M and my eldest daughter are off to see Disney Princesses On Ice at the O2 tomorrow, and we thought we’d make a weekend of it. We’ve stayed at the Radisson Edwardian before, and its location is ideal for the O2 (you can see that squat arachnid-esque form just across the water) and Docklands generally. Plus it’s good value: we’re staying in a suite for no other reason than it gives the girls their own room, and it will set us back a reasonable £199, with breakfast included. Not bad.

My TomTom didn’t think so on the way down. Many a time will I rue being too miserly to upgrade the map software, for the postcode to the couple-of-years old Radisson isn’t in the version I have, and I only found this out to my detriment on the way down. Consequently the journey here involved travelling down both sides of the Blackwall Tunnel and me getting extremely stressed every time the landmark building next door to the hotel receded further into the distance.

We had no sooner dropped our bags in our room than we set off for Canary Wharf whereupon we enjoyed a simple, fussless meal in Café Rouge. Nothing special, but always good for the kids. I had quiche champignons, which was a touch too rich, while M and the girls all had fishcakes which were thirst-inducingly salty.

It’s been a clear, fresh day in the capital today with not a cloud in sight, which made for perfect conditions for inching slowly around the West End along with everyone else. We took the Jubilee Line as far as we could thanks to engineering works, alighted as the train terminated at Waterloo, then took the Golden Jubilee Bridge to Charing Cross, past the skateboard graveyard occupying one of the concrete bridge supports and on to Trafalgar Square, Haymarket and Piccadilly Circus. All major tourist haunts of course, but the girls loved it, and I found the buggy pretty useful for carving my way through the hordes of slow-moving tourists. If anyone reading this was on Regent Street at about 4.00 PM and is nursing a sore ankle from someone ramming their pushchair into your legs, that was my fault, but I’ll stop short of apologising.

Source: Diggers Abroad / Flickr

Just off Regent Street is a small, serene little arcade of individual shops called Quadrant Alley, where right now – and until February – you will find a funky little pop-up shop for all things Marmite. Though we didn’t venture upstairs, it sounds like there is some sort of ‘love it’ or ‘hate it’ type exhibition thing going on up there. As we were buying our Warhol-esque Marmite plates, fridge magnets and postcards (such suckers for needless ephemera we are), the cashier asked me if I loved Marmite or hated it. Saying that I liked it, for I do, earned me a big ink stamp on the brown paper bag showing the world my Marmite-loving credentials. She asked the same question of S, my fussy three-year old eldest daughter, and was greeted with the wrinkled nose and sour expression of distaste that toddlers are so often to be found proffering.

Source: http://www.marmite.co.uk/

From there we edged our way to Hamley’s, which we’d built up into a massive thing for the girls, and which – on a busy Saturday on the approach to Christmas – was a waste of time. I waited fifteen minutes for a lift, only to emerge out onto the third floor (girls toys) where I couldn’t actually move. I spent longer trying to get to the floor than I spent looking at toys, and besides, S was too bewildered by the sheer volume of people to actually enjoy it anyway. Far better it seems to eschew the touristy crush of Hamley’s in favour of your local Toys R Us, where you can actually breathe, and where everything is at least 10% cheaper.

Seeking to escape the madness of Regent Street, we ducked into Fouberts Place and thence to Carnaby Street, the two interconnecting homes of the sixties Mod menswear revolution whose mad, hippyish Christmas lights put the staid minimalist grandeur of those on Regent Street to shame. A pavement table at a Starbucks on Great Marlborough Street offered solace, hot chocolate, a chance to rest four pairs of weary feet and a great view of Centre Point and a mural on the side of one of the buildings.

Source: MJA Smith

Taxis often offer the best views of London, and so it was with the cab we caught from Soho to Canary Wharf, whose route treated us to views of some familiar London sights – St. Paul’s, Tower Bridge, the Tower of London – and some of my personal favourite buildings along High Holborn, including the Waterhouse masterpiece Holborn Bars, built as the headquarters of the Prudential.

Source: EZTD / Flickr

08:50 - Pot Noodle Time

2009-11-06T13:08:00.000-08:00

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Source: www.team-infused.com

As I’ve become older, I’ve become less able to accurately discern the age of other people, particularly teenagers. That was my first thought as the three teenage girls got on the train at Swindon and enquired if they could sit in the three empty seats around the table where I was working, all of which were clearly labelled as pre-booked, a fact they would have gleaned if they’d bothered to look. For the record, and because it may help to illustrate this story better, I’d say they were fourteen.

My second thought was ‘Please let them only be travelling to Chippenham’ as I had a few pieces of work I needed to get done during that morning’s journey. They stayed on past Bristol where I alighted from the train, and so I was thus stuck with them for about forty-five painful minutes.

I don’t expect to ever fully understand the minds and motivations of teenage girls, though all I will say is that in a decade’s time I truly hope neither of my two female daughters turn out like these three makeup-caked and sewer-mouthed girls. It takes a lot to shock me, but not much to disappoint me, and so it was that after a mere ten minutes of them being sat around me I was less than inured to their open discussion of sex, smoking and underage drinking. Don’t get me wrong, I know that some of this is standard rite-of-passage baggage that comes with being a teenager; it’s just that they seemed, well, so young to be talking about it. And certainly far too openly for 8.30 on a Wednesday morning. We’ll leave aside why it was that they were going on holiday together without a parent at that age, or indeed why they weren’t at school, but I’d imagine there may well be a whole sociological melting pot of questionable morality going on there.

One of the girls, in her best West Country accent, muttered the words ‘I’m well hungry,’ to which the other two nodded solemnly in acknowledgement that they too were, ahem, ‘well hungry’. From beneath the table, and with what looked like rehearsed synchronicity, each girl produced a Pot Noodle.

Mistakenly believing that Pot Noodles were truly only purchased and consumed by impoverished students in dingy digs with no money left over after the requisite excessive alcohol consumption (or was that just me?), I was surprised that three young girls – none of whom were what could be described as overweight or unhealthy-looking (yet simultaneously not exactly in close proximity to radiance) – would elect to eat such things, if for no other reason than making a Pot Noodle actually requires some effort; I mean, it’s practically like cooking compared to buying junk food from the hot plate. I briefly wondered how they were going to actually get some boiling water to make the things, but these three enterprising young things took themselves off to the buffet car whereupon they were given the single necessary ingredient to transform the snack from arid powder and dehydrated lumps to the worst imitation of ‘food’ imaginable.

They then briefly panicked that they didn’t have any spoons to eat the snacks with, until one girl pointed out that, duh, you couldn’t eat a Pot Noodle with a spoon, and produced a set of forks she’d appropriated from her home before leaving that morning.

As each of them set out the ministrations of stirring, breaking up the noodles and generally impatiently waiting the few requisite minutes it takes for a Pot Noodle to become ready to eat (if indeed it ever could be described thusly), and finally when they were ready they collectively bent lower over the table to minimise splashing – considerate I thought given that I didn’t really want either my laptop or freshly-pressed suit to get covered in gelatinous gloop – and settled quietly into a adolescent girlish version of the earnest, high brow dinner table conversations that Woody Allen is so fond of throwing into his films. A certain peace and decorum descended upon our area of the carriage, albeit only briefly.

‘What’s this?’ asked one of the girls, lifting something pale out of the pot.

‘That’s chicken,’ responded another, mid-mouthful.

‘No it’s not,’ replied the third girl. ‘There’s no chicken in these.’ An astute observation, I thought to myself, for indeed there is no chicken in a chicken Pot Noodle.

‘Then what is it?’ asked the first girl, slurping a noodle through her teeth.

‘It’s a noodle,’ came the response.

A noodle? A noodle? Are teenagers unable to discern a lumpy piece of textured vegetable protein from a flour-based noodle? I briefly considered wading in at this point and educating the girls on what they were actually eating, but I changed my mind. You never know with teenagers these days. One of them may have been carrying a Big Mac.

‘I’m thirsty,’ said one of the girls.

‘Didn’t you bring a drink?’

‘No, my mum didn’t give me any money for one.’

‘Do you want some of mine?’ replied her friend, charitably, producing a bottle of Coke from under the table. Coke and Pot Noodles at 8.50 AM? Really? Had they just finished the night shift?

‘I don’t like peas.’

‘Do you like the sweetcorn? I do,’ said another, prompting emphatic affirmative nods from the other two. As anyone who’s ever eaten a Pot Noodle will testify, the sweetcorn in these white plastic pots has the texture and taste of cardboard, except that a piece of cardboard wouldn’t taste like it had been entirely denuded of any nutritional significance.

‘Burp,’ burped one.

‘That’s disgusting,’ replied the other two in unison, shattering the seriousness and quiet with one single bodily emission. True enough, it was a foul thing to do, but surely eating a Pot Noodle at this ungodly hour was many, many more times deplorable? ‘That’s gross, babe,’ one of the girls added. ‘You’re not sharing any of my fags now.’

‘I don’t want your stupid fags, babe. I’ll get some off my auntie. I’m still hungry,’ said the burping girl, simultaneously producing a bag of crisps from the Mary Poppins bag of provisions beneath the table, snaffling the fried sliced potatoes in mere seconds, washing the whole load down with the rest of her Coke.

The train pulled into Bath and one of the girls asked me whether they would still be allowed to sit in their seats. I nodded, though really I would have much preferred it if the passengers who had actually did book those seats valiantly reclaimed them. In fact, at Bath an elderly lady paused by the seats, scanning the seat numbers and looking down at her ticket, saw the thousand-yard stares of the girls and moved down the carriage. She’d shouldn’t have had to do this as the girls should have been more respectful, but there’s teenagers for you.

Ten minutes later I got off the train at Bristol Temple Meads, still feeling slightly disorientated by the intrusion of these teenage girls into my working day with their attendant abysmal diet and conversations about promiscuity and getting ‘well hammered later, babes‘; I was also slightly concerned that I probably reeked of the noodle sauce, thus prompting curious glances from the clients I was due to meet later that morning.

We all go through phases of waywardness and rebellion as we grow up, and I was certainly no different; it was just something about the way these girls were talking implied that these things – smoking, sex, but mostly snacks at unusual times of the day – were not acts of rebellion, but the norm. I’m not saying that they are typical of all teenagers, as I know that can’t possibly be true, but in its own way it felt like a mini indictment of societal decay.

Station Square, Milton Keynes

2009-10-13T12:37:00.000-07:00

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Source: propertymall.com

Only the most imaginative mind could possibly conceive of Station Square in Milton Keynes as a thing of beauty. The Square is a large and uninteresting grey plaza bordered on three sides by sheer squat glass office buildings – Phoenix House, Elder House and MK Central – containing retail units, restaurants and the concourse and entrance to Milton Keynes Central railway station.

In that last fact, Station Square is at least half correctly named. On the downside, as far as I can see the area isn’t square at all, but rectangular, but these of course are mere semantics.

Station Square represents to a large extent the personality and character of Milton Keynes – the ‘city in the countryside’ as clever marketing types have dubbed it – distilled into a single concept. The Square includes two large open and well-maintained raised grass areas, an abundance of space, modernist architecture in the reflective glass offices that are repeated elsewhere in the city, and that thing that Milton Keynes loves so much: concrete. Thus, the greenery that is in much abundance in this city clashes with the necessary grey ingredient that Milton Keynes has celebrated and paid homage to throughout its boulevards, bridges and walkways.

That concrete is represented here in the form of thousands and thousands of paving slabs, most of which have seen better days. They are of a mottled grey texture which reminds me of cheap pork pie meat when you get those slightly dubious dark spots in the meat.

I believe that plans exist somewhere for a wholesale redevelopment of the entire Square, but I’m not aware of what that entails. I do know that many residents of the city and fellow commuters have expressed concern at the notion; personally, I think any sort of redevelopment would be a very good thing. The Square completely lacks character and seems to have forgotten its purpose. There are flagpoles without flags, sporadic tree plantings laid out in a strict and very Milton Keynes formation and the whole thing seems like a waste of space. In this it does remain a perfect counterpoint to the now very dated modernist-style office buildings, but if someone pulled the lot down tomorrow and started again I wouldn’t be terribly disappointed. The most interesting feature is the round modernist clock atop a pole (reminiscent of those outside the Reuters Building in Canary Wharf), behind which you get a view of the majestic Pinnacle Building, the most adventurous design to have been realised in Milton Keynes for many years.

Source: The Mark, Flickr

A couple of years ago the ground floor reception areas of the office buildings were redeveloped to allow retail units to move in, presumably to capitalise on those finding that their train has been cancelled because London Midland failed to organise any staff for Sunday services, as well as those commuters who want to grab a quick ready meal after another gruelling day in the Smoke. And so we now have a Costa, a M&S Simply Food and a Subway. We also have a mortgage broker and betting shop to complement the cosmetic dentist, Indian restaurant, newsagent and Richer Sounds that have been here for much longer.

The fact that a few of the retail units have remained unlet – both before, during and as we emerge from the recession – is perhaps indicative of how businesses feel about moving to this relative outpost in the city. A swanky bar (Blueprint) opened up recently, offering decent food and cocktails, its windows draped with stylish voile panels and its chairs and tables significantly more adventurous in style than anything else in the Square. For a while, I wondered if anyone actually went there, then noticed the tell-tale notice stuck to the door that suggests that the bar has gone under. I had always intended to go there as well. Bugger.

Occasionally the Square gets used for events and happenings. In late September, as a conclusion to the Celebr8 diversity march, the square hosted a gay, lesbian and transgender pop-up disco here, and we’ve had things like a man-made beach and mini concerts before, but none of this was ever done with gusto or major promotion. The central area of the Square was used a couple of years back as part of an art installation from MK:G, the city’s principal art gallery. In this installation, artist Wolfgang Weileder and a team of building students built, dismantled and rebuilt a scale model of different sections of the gallery, the theme purportedly linking the impermanence of existence with the more defined permanence of architecture.

A permanent piece of art on a raised grass plinth can be found in the Square. The sculpture, which again looks like it was hewn from a lump of concrete, is called ‘O, Wert Thou In The Cauld Blast’ by Ronald Rae. As part of the FingeMK city-wide arts festival, the sculpture was converted into a temporary art installation by someone calling themselves ‘Mrs Smith’, in which the two lumpen depictions of people were given a cosy blanket and some mad fluorescent pompoms for eyes.

Source: MJA Smith

The Square does seem to have begun a faltering transformation, or at least a few preparatory steps toward some sort of change. Sleek new bike racks were installed, and a model of the 1009 Wolverton locomotive that was displayed here – and which provided a logical thematic connection to the station itself – was removed a few years back. For trainspotters, the geograph.org.uk website had this to say: ‘It is a replica of a LNWR Bloomer class locomotive, designed by McConnell in the early 1850's. She was one of a later series built in 1862 at Wolverton works, just a short journey down the line from Milton Keynes.’

Source: Martin Addison, geograph.org.uk; usage requested

However, just when it felt that the Square was being geared up for a radical redevelopment, in the past few weeks the council have installed new tourist signage to help the dazed people emerging into the sunlight from the station concourse understand which direction they need to point themselves in. Whilst the colourful pillar sign immediately opposite the station entrance is welcome, it’s an indication that the town planners are more keen to tinker with the original brutalist expanse than undertake anything more challenging. And that is perhaps the biggest disappointment of this tired and depressing expanse.

A Long Piece About a Short Walk: Stephenson Way, London NW1

2009-09-18T14:12:00.000-07:00

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Source: MJA Smith

The 6.55 train from Milton Keynes Central arrives into Euston around 7.30 and, in the vast majority of instances, will pull into platform 17. Platform 17 is on the westernmost edge of the station, and it’s one of the platforms without ticket barriers. It also has a neat short-cut exit out from the station onto Melton Street, meaning you can get out of the station without needing to bother yourself with the morning crush of the main concourse and its fairly typical mix of sleepy tourists and business people heading north.

Melton Street, at least the part that I walk along, is nothing much really. One side is taken up with the station’s perimeter wall while the other has a mix of offices, small and very run-down houses and an Ibis Hotel on the corner of Drummond Street, the only interesting aspect of which is the large electronic display detailing the best rate available for that night. This has been as low as £90 on days I’ve walked past, and has gone as high as £125. What determines the rate I’ll never know. I’ve been inside here once, joining a crowd of similarly slack-jawed commuters watching the bombings of 7 July 2005 being confirmed on televisions in the bar.

There are two buildings on Melton Street which are of interest. One is what looks like an abandoned Tube station entrance on the opposite side of the junction with Drummond Street, once upon a time providing access to the Euston Underground Northern Line station, before this was merged with the Piccadilly line station in a single subterranean home beneath the sprawling 1960s Euston redevelopment. It’s well preserved, the brown tiles still retaining some of their original ceramic lustre, but it’s depressingly inaccessible. The other building is a modern, sleek unit appearing to be the showroom for a trendy, and no doubt expensive office furniture firm, Senator. Maybe it’s the time of day, or maybe its an indication of recent economic malaise, but whether it’s morning or evening I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone in there.

Source: MJA Smith

I only really touch Melton Street to cross the road onto Euston Street. On the corner of these two roads is the offices shared between TSSA (a transport workers’ union) and Age Concern, a derivative and bland concrete block devoid of anything remotely attractive. It was in the doorway of this building that I sheltered while making frantic calls of reassurance to my family as terrorist activity spread across London‘s transport network in North London. Later that morning I walked the length of Melton Street into Camden, and from there to Kentish Town where I caught one of the few trains actually still running that day.

I’m also only on Euston Street for the briefest amount of time before turning onto Stephenson Way. Before I turn, I invariably glance at the Bree Louise, and think of a story my friend Paul once told me. From the outside it looks reasonably inviting, and if you‘re into real ales it recently won an award from CAMRA. Paul said that he once took a client in there on the way back to Euston, and when he walked in it became a caricature of that scene in Straw Dogs where all the locals turn menacingly toward Dustin Hoffman as he walks in; in short, it‘s a locals’ pub.

I’ll also look up at the high-rise off-centre cruciform structure of the Euston Tower – now part of the sleek Regent‘s Place development – an impressive if lonely skyscraper on the outer edges of the West End that clearly owes a clear debt to Mies van der Rohe‘s or Fazlur Khan’s modernist style. At thirty-six storeys it might be up there among the UK’s tallest structures, but compared to something like Khan’s 100-storey John Hancock Center in Chicago (which was also completed in 1970) it’s diminutive and lacking in attractive adornments to say the least.

Source : skyscrapernews.com - thanks to James for permission

On the corner of Euston Street and Stephenson Way there’s a small hotel, the Cottage Hotel. To call itself a hotel might be a touch aspirational, as it looks from the outside to be a B&B or hostel. I don’t know who the clientele of this place would be, but suffice to say that it gives a whole new dimension to the word shabby, and the signage proclaiming that it‘s open twenty-four hours lends a certain seediness to the premises. As I pass by the half-glass wooden door I can see a grand old lamp like one my maternal grandmother used to have in the lounge of her flat. Today there was an old man looking out menacingly from behind the glass; if it was uninviting before, it was positively threatening today.

Source: MJA Smith

I’m no historian, but I presume that Stephenson Way, given its proximity to the station, is named after Robert Stephenson. If so, you could argue that a more ill-fitting honour could not be bestowed upon the engineering pioneer. Stephenson Way consists of a short section that runs parallel to Melton Street, followed by a 90-degree turn to run along the back of Euston Road. It is a nondescript nothing of a London street, its principal architecture being the backsides of the buildings that line Melton Street and Euston Road, the various service exits and delivery entrances necessary for the smooth operation of daily office life. However, it also happens to be one of my favourite streets in London.

For one, it’s cobbled, which seems so incongruous compared to the dual carriageway clamour of Euston Road less than a hundred metres away. Secondly, its quiet, almost to the point of eeriness. Again, compared to the frantic traffic along its neighbouring streets, Stephenson Way represents something of an oasis of calm in NW1. There are parked cars along the left hand side of the street, but whenever I walk along here at 7.30 in the morning the only vehicle in motion I see is a Camden recycling wagon which collects waste from the back of the old Wellcome Building on Euston Road, and occasionally a fold-up bicycle. Similarly, it’s invariably the same pedestrians walking along Stephenson Way at that time in the morning, all of us seeking a short cut to Euston Square Underground without having to join the crowds traversing the wide and uneven pavements of Euston Road.

So quiet and free of cars is Stephenson Way that I almost always walk along the middle of the road until I get to the junction with North Gower Street. In London this feels rebellious, dangerous even, but it is done – strange though this might sound – out of a desire for security. Sometimes sleeping homeless men can be found in the rear doorways and alcoves of the offices that face out on to Euston Road, and the very quietude of Stephenson Way that attracts them there can quickly feel threatening, especially on winter mornings where daylight is slow to bathe the cobbles.

The threat is of course, utterly remote. It comes from a piece of fiction I wrote at a school on the subject of fear. For that story I imagined a pair of school friends who take a trip into London one Saturday from the suburbs. The lads fall out, and one storms off, leaving the other – the narrator – to find his way back to the station without the aid of his London-savvy friend. He finds himself walking down a darkened street, not dissimilar in my mind’s eye to a more dangerous version of Stephenson Way. In that story, unseen things seem to be moving from under garbage bags and a booze-addled drunk began harassing the boy for change, hence the fear aspect of the story.

If the left hand side of the street is entirely utilitarian and free of ornamentation bar a crest or two next to doorways, the right hand side is more obviously commercial. The ominous Wolfson House, a UCL building, straddles the right angle turn, a nasty 60s or 70s edifice of dirty glass, concrete and brick with a pleasant ‘Hazchem‘ notice affixed to a wall. As you turn the corner the four-storey buildings on the right become more elegant, though anything would appear elegant against Wolfson House or the backs of the buildings opposite.

One of these is the smooth-fronted façade of The Magic Circle, the magic club founded in 1905 by a group of earnest magicians. The only clue to what this building is are the characters arranged in a circular pattern on a bass plaque to the right of the door and the flag between the first and second storeys; that flag, because of a complete absence of breeze along the street, remains bunched and unfurled against the smooth façade. I used to think of this building as mysterious, mystical and vaguely sinister, the lack of obvious identity lending the place a secretive, Masonic quality. That was until I Googled the society and discovered that you can hire the venue for conferences and parties. From their website, the interior looks pretty much the same as any other corporate venue, and I can’t look at the building in the same affectionate – and slightly fearful – way now.

Source: flickr

Next to the Magic Circle is the offices of the Royal Asiatic Society, whose large logo with its inchoate elephant adorns the facia of the ground floor. The Society was founded in 1823 and received its Royal Charter from King George IV the same year 'for the investigation of subjects connected with and for the encouragement of science, literature and the arts in relation to Asia'. Engendering a degree of competition with their magical neighbours, apparently you can hire the facilities here too for corporate events. The Society also shares the building with the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, a foundation for ‘knowledge-generating‘ researchers with global offices in much more glamorous locales than Stephenson Way.

Sources: Society websites

The Directory of Social Change has its bookshop and office on Stephenson Way. The Directory provides information and training to voluntary and community sectors worldwide. With the exception of the Directory, the rest of the right side of Stephenson Way is taken up with small office buildings let to various tenants, include an arthritis charity and relationship counsellors.

The buildings become less interesting on the right as you get close to the junction with North Gower Street, while on the left an ancient and peeling hoarding and a black steel frame interlaced with buddleia indicates a construction site that never got close to completion. At the junction you meet fellow commuters who’ve taken another shortcut. Turning the corner toward the direction of Euston Square Underground you catch a glimpse of the BT Tower rising above the vast clinical modernity of University College Hospital. You then pass the Euston Square Hotel and a small café with its nauseating smell of grease and the cigarettes of the hungry punters at the seats spilling onto the pavement, before descending the steps to the Tube.

In all, the journey from Euston to Euston Square takes no more than a couple of minutes, a significantly shorter amount of time than I expect it’s taken you to read this. There’s just something about the walk along Stephenson Way that completely captivates my attention, confirming for me that even the most apparently insignificant little back road in the capital throws up all sorts of compelling sights. My day would certainly be less interesting without this tiny stretch of cobbled street.

9/11 Recollections

2009-09-11T00:20:00.000-07:00

Source : WTCOutline.com

As another anniversary of September 11 2001 swings into focus, thoughts inevitably turn to the events of that incredibly tragic day. Documentary accounts of the day fill the TV schedules and the familiar topography of New York City catches your attention all over again; both majestically bold and strident before the Towers collapsed and naked and weakened after, never has the image of a city been so etched into the minds of so many people. Thoughts turn, too, to whatever you were doing on that day.

On September 11 2001 my wife and I were enjoying the second week of a holiday in Florida. I say holiday and I say wife, but in fact we'd gone to the States to get married, at DisneyWorld, where we were also staying; we'd been married for precisely six days. On that particular day, we were headed to Busch Gardens in Tampa with my new in-laws for another theme park excursion.

We heard the news coming in on the radio station we were listening to in the car as we traversed the interstates to get to the park. My in-laws had been to New York before, had been inside the World Trade Center. It wasn't until later that day, long after the Towers had collapsed and while we watched the news, that I even realised that the buildings that had been targeted were the Towers so familiar in the background of any number of movies set in New York. The word 'terrorism' was bandied around, a word whose resonances we'd forgotten in the UK after a period of IRA dormancy.

The second plane hit while we were in the queue to get into the park. An elderly American couple in front of us, both wearing headphones, turned to one another as they simultaneously heard the news from the radio station they were listening to and exclaimed 'We're being attacked!' and fled the queue. I'm ashamed to say that we looked at one another and thought they were exaggerating.

Inside the park, we wandered around, none of us wishing to admit that something just didn't feel completely right about being at a place so obviously about fun when things that no-one really wanted to believe were playing out on the south-western tip of Manhattan.

The second tower fell while we were looking at some monkeys in a shady area of the already-baking park. We heard the news coming from a radio in a staff area nearby. At the precise moment in time a bird decided to deposit the contents of its bowels on my new Paul Smith t-shirt. It's strange what you elect to remember.

We were evacuated from the park within a couple of hours. My overriding memory of this, logically, was one of fear, tinged with a sense of the exaggeration we'd felt toward the old couple in the queue. At the exit of the park, British tourists were to be found hammering on the ticket booth windows demanding refunds for not being able to enjoy the rest of the day in the park. Fear turned to shame as we picked up the rumours and stories floating from people pressed against us trying to exit the park as quickly as possible. Shame turned to shock in the car back to a similarly-emptied DisneyWorld as the estimates of deaths and the word terrorism became ever more prevalent in the news reports.

I called my mother from a payphone at a Pizza Hut just outside Disney. She immediately asked me if I was okay. From the way she was talking, way back home in England, I could sense that she was on edge. I tried to reassure her, to which she simply said 'You need to turn the TV on.' Something in the way she said this made the events of the day coalesce in my mind and we duly headed back to our room in the Contemporary Resort where we all sat, glued, to CNN, no-one saying a word at the horrors being displayed there.

Later, my wife and I took a walk to get away from the TV. The Disney resort was eerily empty and there was no-one around at all. We retreated quickly back to our room, whereupon once again - as we would many times over the next few days - we sat silently watching the TV.

Everyone's lives changed that day. We were all affected in some lasting way by those events, even for those of us many hundreds or thousands of miles from the area that became known as Ground Zero. My lasting response has been to develop an incredible deep love for Manhattan and all its many facets. It is the only positive thing I can find in that entire experience.