The New Normal (part 1)

The timestamp on the photo above is 2nd March 2020. I think when I took it I had some idea of a post about the approach of spring, even though it was still quite cool and extremely wet out. 

The one below was taken in late February in Hammersmith - that crowned figure is actually at the rarely used entrance to Hammersmith Town Hall, and I know I had a post in mind about how the old town hall building actually makes more sense if you consider that this side - which now faces onto a motorway - was the front, and the entrance everyone now has to enter through (which connects to a bleak annexe which required, when I worked there, the public to either try and struggle up to reception on an escalator with whatever they happened to be carrying - a buggy, a broken leg, all their worldly goods if evicted - or to snag a passing member of staff who could use their pass to get them into the lifts) was actually the back. 

Anyway they're refurbishing now, and hopefully it will all be much nicer and much more accessible. 

I've described it as late February. It was actually February 29th - leap year day - which I started with coffee at the Costa at Kew Bridge, before going into the Musical museum which I had heard about but never been to before and where I had a lovely little tour with an elderly volunteer guide who set lots of the various mechanical musical contraptions off for us and finished up with a Wurlitzer formerly belonging to the cinema in Kingston. They have tea dances there in the museum apparently, and show old films. There's a cafe which I made a mental note to go back to at some point when I hadn't already breakfasted in Costa. 

Then I walked down to Gunnersbury, hopped on the tube, got off at Ravenscourt Park to have a nosey at how the Hammersmith refurb was going, took the underpass beneath the motorway and walked along the river.

It was, as I think you can see from the sky in the pictures, a beautiful, bright, cold day. The Thames Path was busy with joggers and pubs and dog walkers, and so was Hammersmith Bridge, which is closed to road traffic at the moment. There was a small display explaining how a cycle and foot bridge was going to be put in temporarily so people could still get across the river while they repaired the road bridge. 

At Craven Cottage there was clearly a match about to start - hundreds of fans outside and more on their way, walking up through Bishops Park in the opposite direction to me. At Putney Bridge, where I got on the tube again, there's a secondhand bookshop which has been in business 27 years to my knowledge, and probably longer, and which used to have a sign telling customers to post the money through the door if the shop itself was closed. I turned over a few books, thinking about buying them, but ultimately didn't. 

And then, for the third time that day, I got back on the tube and came home, agreeably tired and quite pleased, and didn't write a blog post at all. I'm sporadic at best. I had posted the day before. And most of all I didn't realise, at that time, that I had had a remarkable day. That my old normal - both on weekends and weekdays - of hopping on and off the tube, in and out of shops and museums, moving through crowds of people - was about to change. It was known that Northern Italy had been hard hit by the coronavirus, and anyone returning from those regions had been asked to isolate, and I had taken a phone call at work from a summer school who usually had a lot of Chinese students (we told them it was a developing situation, and to follow HMG advice). But at that point only one British person had died - a passenger on the Diamond Princess - and it still seemed as if it would (or could) be contained. 

The weekend after my walk in Hammersmith I met up for a longer walk with my aunt Angela. As usual we congregated at my cousin's house to pick up the dog and have a cup of tea. We speculated with her whether her mother (also my aunt, and Angie's sister) would still be coming over from Southern Italy for part of the Easter holidays, or if flights would be cancelled. There was talk of Italy being in lockdown, of restriction of movement from north to south, but flights and trains were still taking passengers.  

I think it was the week after that when my aunt came out of the big Sainsbury's in Collier's Wood (I waited outside with the dog) saying how eerie it was - the shop like something from a film, the shelves empty. She had wanted eggs and I think some other things. I had wanted toilet roll. 

So I got the toilet roll from the Esso garage near home, and gave her three of my eggs in the interim. We discussed visiting the Hayward Gallery on the Monday, and she offered to give me a charger for a surface laptop, as my manager had suggested taking mine home every night in case I needed to isolate at short notice and the charger weighed as much as the laptop. I said yes please, although there had been a compromise arrangement, where I left it in an accessible drawer. 

I was considering going to Two Temple Place on the Sunday as well (it's a beautiful building that only hosts one exhibition a year, and they're always worth seeing) but was too lazy. 

Monday, as I was leaving work, my manager rang and asked me if I'd taken my laptop. I was mildly annoyed as I was going to a gallery and was almost at the exit, but turned around, went back up and got it, and passed on her message that we were to take laptops and work from home on the Tuesday. That was because she had been watching Boris' speech. 

The Hayward was lovely, restful, and not very busy. Mondays never are, in galleries, but this was exceptional. The cafe had me and one other person in it. I remember thinking I shouldn't touch things in the shop unless I was buying them, something I used to be told often as a child but have unlearnt along the way. I think I said, for the first time 'I'm not worried about catching it, I'm worried about passing it on', as if I needed an excuse to be cautious. 

I remember my hands felt dry because I'd been washing them so much. Not only when I went to the ladies, but every time I made tea or coffee, or entered a building. 

The exhibition was about trees, and my aunt and I sat in front of a huge screen where a birch forest - or rather a good mimic of one - rustled and swayed, and the leaves budded and greened and grew brown and dropped. 

Tuesday I worked from home. I have not been back to the office since. 

Reading the 80s - 1986

I’m a day later than I meant to be with this post, for Stephen King related reasons, but better late than never. 

In 1986 I hit 13, and was much more aware of world news than in previous years. The Challenger explosion, the fire at Hampton Court Palace, and the Chernobyl disaster are all stand out events in my mind, although I’m indebted to t’internet for confirming the year for me. 

It was also the year Fergie and Andrew got married, which despite the media saturation seems to have made little to no impression on me at all – just a vague conceptual picture of a parallel world of Sloanes and Filofaxes and Perrier water and expense account lunches, from which Sarah Ferguson had sprung forth. 

Which leads me – sort of – to my first book:

  

The Theory and Practice of Lunch – Keith Waterhouse

I’ve had this book on my shelves a little while now, with no memory of how I picked it up or why, although of course I knew I recognised Waterhouse’s name from somewhere. There seemed to be a lot of this in the media when I was a teenager – white middle aged chaps that you knew were probably genuinely famous for something, but who were at the comfy expense account stage by the 80s and mostly fronting bland documentaries about unusual buildings or writing semi-amusing newspaper articles about wine or the South of France.

To the teenage me they were all completely interchangeable, but sometimes I would bother to ask Dad what such and such a one was famous for, and usually he seemed to know. 

So if I had asked about Keith Waterhouse I am pretty certain that Dad would have told me he wrote Billy Liar. And these days, again thanks to Wikipedia, I can see that he also wrote That Was The Week That Was and the film of Whistle Down The Wind.

So perhaps I’m missing something, because The Theory and Practice of Lunch seems popular online, but to me his other cultural credits only strengthen my suspicion that Mr Waterhouse dialled this one in.

I admit there’s a certain nostalgia value - a lost world of three hour lunches, cigars and brandy and cheese board, comments on steak and black forest gateau, amusing asides about one’s lunch companion and other diners, but in the end it all adds up to not very much at all. 

A stocking filler of a book.

The Blind Watchmaker – Richard Dawkins

This, on the other hand, is one of the books everyone should read – whether you agree with it, or part of it, or not, it is important to know what the argument is for evolution (or more specifically for Natural Selection) and you’re not likely to find a better written and more accessible version.

It does have its clunkier moments though, and sometimes my attention wandered and I had to go back a few pages to make sure I’d really absorbed what Dawkins is saying - in particular he lost me somewhere in the bit about crystals, and I suspect that’s when I gave up on the book the first time I tried to read it (or more likely put it down and didn’t pick it up again.) All I can say if that happens to anyone else is persist – it is relevant, honest. He does loop back and show you how. 

It would also be a good idea to pick up a more recent, revised copy. I am certain we know more about DNA now than we did in 1986, or even in 1991 when mine was published. 

As a book of ’86 – there are hints. References to RAM and floppy discs, but even more than that there is something else that I'd forgotten about the recent past, something less tangible: 

First let's note that Richard Dawkins was 45 when he wrote this book, which means he was a very young man indeed in the 60s - and yet he writes about 'pop' music with apostrophes round the word pop, and the Top 20 and Space Invaders almost as though these are artefacts from an alien culture - and the really strange thing is that thinking back, this this was quite normal for university fellows (and wine buffs and art critics in fact). They tended to write as if they were sitting in a bubble apart from mainstream culture rather than a subset within it. 

Funny how I'd forgotten that. 

On a completely unrelated note this is the view towards London 

from the top of the pagoda at Kew, which has now reopened. 

In theory you can also see Windsor through the window almost opposite - 

and maybe we did, but too far away to recognise

Kew - again.

This evening I went to Kew Gardens after work (they open late on Fridays in the Summer) to see the Hive; a new installation that feels like a cross between 'proper' art and a conceptual Chelsea Flower Show garden.

Essentially it's a giant climbing frame in a flower meadow, wrapping you around in lights and speakers. Pretty, with the buzzings and the lights changing colour, but much too serene and open and empty to be reminiscent of a real hive.

But perhaps that was because it was evening, and the bees were winding down for the night.

Of course one advantage of the evening is that it is that little bit quieter and you can stop anywhere - even bang in the middle of the palm house walkways - and take pictures without inconveniencing anyone.