At Broadstairs
I have not been more than a couple of miles beyond Spitalfields for over a year, while my friends have been on Summer holidays to China, Malta, Venice, Croatia and France. So I decided it was time to take some time off, walked down to London Bridge Station and took the train to Broadstairs. I have always wanted to go there to see the Dickens House Museum and I was not disappointed because I had a personal tour narrated by the official guide – a lady of advanced years and very dimunitive stature, who more than made up what she lacked in height with charm and volubility. At the end of my tour, she asked if I had any questions, so I asked to photograph her and as you can see, she obliged.
Then I turned north and walked along the coastline, following the edge of the white cliffs for miles until I reached Margate, childhood home of one of our most distinguished Spitalfields artists. After taking the photo below, I took the train back and returned to London, satisfied with my day out and arriving home in time for supper.
YBA (Young Brazilian Artist)
The title of this extraordinary bronze sculpture by Robson Cezar, Brazilian sculptor and Spitalfields resident, is I can’t run but I can walk faster than this. No surprise then to discover that Robson walks every day to and fro between Spitalfields and Chelsea College of Art (next to Tate Britain) where he is currently holder of a Sculpture Fellowship. You can see his most recent bronzes in the exhibition Gods & Mortals that opens tonight and runs at Chelsea until Friday 25th September. I suggest a trip down to Chelsea to take a look and then cross the road to see the recreation of William Blake’s 1809 exhibition at Tate Britain too, while you are there.
Whitechapel Market, the plums are here
The season is almost over, but I bought all these plums for a pound in Whitechapel Market. I love the culture of bowls of fruit and veg for a pound, and I can never resist the bargain of delicious ripe fruit that has to be eaten immediately. Once I have bought all this fruit, as a point of honour, I have to eat it up before it goes bad because I am incapable of throwing food away. In fact, I never ate so much fruit and veg in my life before I came to live in Spitalfields, which is a good thing. It certainly keeps everything moving, if you know what I mean – which brings me back to the plums because I couldn’t resist eating them all, so now I’ve got to run…
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!
