Life of the marionettes
Last bank holiday Monday, I walked down to Tate Modern and passed these elegantly dressed girls doing their street performance in between St Paul’s Cathedral and Norman Foster’s Millennium Bridge. I stopped in my tracks to admire the intricate marionettes and their tiny world inside a suitcase. Neither of the girls wavered from their passionate focus upon the pair of marionettes performing “Foggy Days”. When I returned, several hours later, a large crowd had formed and the girls maintained the same implacable concentration, with heads bowed, as the marionettes continued their endlessly repeating performance miming to “Foggy Days”. I wonder who these girls are and if they recorded the song themselves? I hope we see them round Spitalfields some day soon because the intensity of their strange performance got under my skin, and I need to see it again.
Mr Pussy takes the sun
I was always disparaging of people who doted over their pets, as if this apparent sentimentality were an indicator of some character flaw. That changed when I bought this cat, just a couple of weeks after the death of my father in the autumn of 2001. My mother was inconsolable, so I bought her a tiny black kitten in Mile End – no bigger than my hand – took him on the train to Devon, arrived late at night and gave him into her care.
At that moment, she went from being a woman with a bereavement problem to a woman with a cat problem. Looking back on it, I can attribute Mr Pussy’s placid intelligent nature to those first impressionable months of his life with her. Time has passed, it is now already almost four years since she died, and this year Mr Pussy approaches eight years old himself. He has returned from Devon for good, to live out his days with me here in Spitalfields.
I understand now how pets become receptacles of memory and emotion, the reason why people can lavish such affection upon animals. Mr Pussy’s age is the time since I lost my father – as he has grown into maturity my father’s memory lives, while the cat’s personality reflects my mother’s own nature. I hold him in trust for her, and in memory and love of them both.
Along came a spider in Buxton St
I noticed this witty custom-made grille on one of the windows in John Pritchard House in Buxton Street, as I was walking past. The building is a brick fifties/sixties modernist housing block and this single irregular feature within the grid of the facade enlivens and humanizes the entire structure. All over our neighbourhood, there are hundreds of grim security grilles, but this spider’s web is a beautiful example of how the application of a little imagination can bring a some poetry to a vernacular building without compromise in function, and without imposing upon the architecture itself.
Show time in Spitalfields
On my way back from Columbia Road this morning around eight o’clock, I encountered an anxious man getting out of a taxi in Buxton Street with these Dahlias in boxes. Today is the Spitalfields Show and Green Fair. I can never resist this annual event, chiefly for the compellingly bizarre contests, longest runner bean, largest vegetable, weirdest shape vegetable, best head made from vegetables etc etc.
When I came back to Allen Gardens later, the fair was in full swing. Jill Cove, one of the helpers at the free give and take stall, invited me to take something away. So I offered to go home and find something to contribute, but “No” she begged “Please just take something, or I’ll get stuck with all this junk!”
Then, in the produce tent, I was assaulted by this image of perfection – the mathematically regular Dahlias that I saw earlier in the day, which were grown by Mr Burgess. He need not have been anxious because they won First, Second and Third prizes in their category. Congratulations!
Columbia Road Market 3
This week I accompanied my neighbour to the market, and we chose some plants for his courtyard garden. We bought these two Hydrangeas for £8 the pair, to plant in a south-facing bed against an old wall. One is a Delft blue (Teller) with interestingly patterned petals and the other is a more classic variety (Macrophylla) that turns from a soft pink through to tones of blue as the flowers mature. Also, we bought two Clematis for a fiver each to grow along the wall, a deep blue one (Viticella, Polish spirit) and a scented pink variety (Montana Elizabeth) which my neighbour plans to grow on the fence beside the gate. A satisfactory haul for £18.
Sandra Esqulant, the Queen of Spitalfields
Everyone in the neighbourhood knows Sandra Esqulant, beloved landlady of the Golden Heart in Commercial Street, sometime hula-hoop dancer, darling of the contemporary art world and the uncrowned monarch of Spitalfields. Before taking this picture, I asked Sandra to “Show me the Manet” and my readers who are artistically inclined will recognise the pose from Bar at the Folies Bergere 1882. Born just round the corner in Wentworth Street, Sandra (with her recently deceased husband Dennis) has kept the Golden Heart for us since 1977, through the lean years and the good. If Spitalfields were a tall ship, with all the residents as its crew, we should have an effigy of Sandra hewn from oak as our figurehead and know that we could sail through all the vicissitudes of life’s great ocean with confidence, with her as our inspiration and spiritual guide.
Graffiti in Sclater Street
Has there ever been such a hotbed of street art in such diversity, anywhere in the world, as we have here in the neighbourhood now? Around the top of Brick Lane, almost every corner is covered in tags, collages, drawings and paintings in an overwhelming variety of styles. This is the collective unconsciousness of Spitalfields sprayed, drawn, stuck, and painted all over the walls. I wish I could interpret it all and I feel I should be photographing it daily, because overnight masterpieces come and go. There’s a mystery here too, because mostly it seems to appear as if from nowhere. The white hot epicentre is Sclater Street (famous for its exotic bird market a century ago), where I managed to snap these three taggers at work this week in what has become our Sistine Chapel of street art. In future, I shall now be recording special pieces for you as they catch my eye.
