Cheers,
We attended a “Friends of SKD” coffee Wednesday morning and met a lovely group of people. It’s a weekly thing so we’ll see them again. And we’ll join the group because it seems the thing to do as we do live at SKD.
Today Sue and I went off to “Charity Shop” street in Pimlico and as I’d been there before it seemed quite easy to get there, no tube change at all. I will definitely try to find a shop there to volunteer some time when we return in November.
Saturday our Chinese friend Singkey will arrive. On the 25th we’ll take the train to Birmingham and help her get settled into her Graduate digs and see some of Birmingham. We’ll take the train from London and stay over one night in Birmingham.
This email is some photos from our ramblings around London since we arrived.
Ru
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Thames Festival rowing race: must have been 100 teams from lots of countries. That was the day Tower Bridge was closed because of a demonstration by Anti-immigrationists that lasted for hours and sent Randal and me back along the river to the London Bridge just to get home. |
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The Shard “The Shard was conceived on the back of a napkin at a Berlin restaurant in 2000, by architect Renzo Piano. He was inspired by the railway lines next to the site, the London spires of Venetian painter Canaletto and the sailing masts of the capital’s past. “ |
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The Gherkin …… Architect Robin Partington has the Gherkin, the Razor, the Armadillo in Glasgow and the Cucumber on his CV. "Nicknames can often reinforce the identity and branding of the building, but can also conflict with the corporate vision." A curious public coined it The Gherkin as it went up, says architecture critic Jonathan Glancey, but it started a trend. "Architects don’t like nicknames because they make their buildings seem silly but developers do because they want to maximize profits." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11838167 |
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The Pigeons One thing that will never change about London…. |
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My first walk alone I was glad to see this sign to know which way to go. |
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Lots of bikers and runner but most don’t seem to worry about the fumes : most do wear helmets! |
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You can probably buy an entire wardrobe that said “I |
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A very fun shop window! |
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…and this is also London; a giant display for Victoria’s Secret filled several windows of a huge department store. |
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“Almost heaven, West Virginia; “ even at Covent Garden London. It truly is a song sung around the world. |
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An cute little electric car recharges curbside. “16 May 2013 Source London, the capital’s electric vehicle charge point network and membership scheme, has now met the Mayor of London’s commitment to provide 1,300 publicly accessible charging points.” |
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So chic!
Not so chic; but colorful! Love her hat and his bag! |
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Color on a more fashionable scale… what fun! She was posing for a friend, not preparing to jump. According to our friend Ed, if you land in the Thames you immediately go for every type of antibiotic you can get. Doesn’t seem to hurt the coots. |
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Also colorful; and historical Digging up Roman gold in the City of London A huge archaeological dig is revealing hundreds of miraculously preserved artefacts, giving an unprecedented picture of fashion, culture and eating habits. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ |
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The Lady : “In continuous publication since 1885 and widely respected as England’s longest running weekly magazine for women.” It is relatively inexpensive compared to others and seems to run stories about women “of a certain age,” Which is rare among popular culture periodicals. I bought the issue in the middle during our first week here. I liked the cover. “In P. G. Wodehouse’s Carry On, Jeeves, Bertie Wooster finds gainful employment for the first and only time in his life by writing a feature on “What the Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing” for Milady’s Boudoir, a magazine that is edited by Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia and bankrolled by her long-suffering husband, Uncle Tom. When the tyro hack toddles off to present his copy (“as we boys of the Press call it”) he finds the offices of Milady’s Boudoir “in one of those rummy streets in the Covent Garden neighbourhood,” reachable only by “wading through a deep top-dressing of old cabbages and tomatoes.” The old Covent Garden vegetable market is long gone, but the offices of The Lady—the model for Milady’s Boudoir, according to Wodehouse’s official biographer—are still on that rummy street, occupying four adjoining town houses, and one suspects that Aunt Dahlia would feel quite at home there. Entering the narrow, wood-paneled foyer, likened by one former editor to an Irish funeral parlor, one is wafted through a time warp. When the publisher, Ben Budworth, says that a room was redecorated “quite recently” it turns out he means 1953, when it was spruced up for the Queen’s coronation. Afternoon tea is served in proper cups and saucers. Until a few years ago, when Budworth installed a hot-air dryer in the bathroom, each member of the staff was issued a freshly laundered hand towel daily. The 127-year-old magazine, like its office, is as genteel an institution as you’ll find anywhere in England. …..” http://www.vanityfair.com/ “She (Arlene Usden) was appointed editor of The Lady in 1991. Despite modernising its design, she believed in retaining its old-fashioned values, as recounted in a profile of the magazine in Vanity Fair in 2012. Usden’s vision for the magazine was outlined in a media pack issued to potential advertisers in 2001. In it, she said the The Lady “seldom panders to popular publishing trend. We don’t talk about sexual intercourse. You won’t find articles on how many organisms [sic] women should be having in a week.” After Rachel Johnson’s appointment as editor following her retirement in 2009, Usden continued to write travel, opera and beauty features for the magazine. She wrote a popular Guardian piece in 2009 – ‘Don’t call us oldies – we are Boldies’ – arguing for greater prominence for the elderly in the workplace.” |
