London Fashion Week, London Buses, branding madness, civilisation and drunken London cabbies

Elena and I had tickets for London Fashion Week, so off we went by bus to Somerset House, the main venue for this year’s event.
The London bus service is a pleasure to use - we never seem to wait more than ten minutes for one to come along. They are bright, shiny and clean and they whine, whir and hiss reassuringly as they glide and jump through the traffic. 

Buses in London, were originally called omnibuses, which name originated in Nantes, France, where a man called M.Omnes punned on his own name in Latin for a slogan for his business, a shop in a terminus for public horse drawn carriages : Omnes Omnibus, which translates from Latin into ‘ all for everyone’
Londoners soon dropped the omni and it was officially dropped in the 1920’s to leave just the bus.
The London Passenger Transport Board - a bit of a mouthful, appeared in 1933 as the first regulatory body, and this name was replaced by London Transport some time later, which name was inexplicably and wastefully replaced by Transport for London in 2000.( perhaps an echo of its French roots or sheer pretentious brand consultant claptrap? - you decide.) )

Another bizarre example of wasteful rebranding is that of London Zoo, which has recently disguised itself under the new monika ZSL, which has to be translated by the stop announcers on the tube backinto the recognisable proper noun London Zoo!

Talking of names and their provenance, one that may surprise you is Hackney Cab, which is the formal name for the black cabs in London - it comes via horse drawn Hackney carriages in 16th century London and arrived there from France with the word for an ambling old nag of a horse ‘ haque-nee’ 
By the way, those little, green wooden houses that you sometimes see on London Roads that have a row of black cabs parked outside are cafes especially for the use of cab drivers - they were established by a mid 19th Century philanthropist who was concerned by the widespread and notorious problem of drunken cab drivers.

Only soft drinks are served, and there aren't many of them left.


C’est vrais!



Now what’s all this got to do with London Fashion Week and civilisation?

As we sat next to the catwalk, our hearts beating with anticipation, surrounded by the glitterati  and the fashionisti, many of whom stared at us as if we were creatures from a planet without the concept of fashion, the world around us was beatified by a sudden marching column of colourful cranes bedecked and arrayed more wonderfully than Solomon with all his riches could have been.

They appeared from the catwalk portico, behind which shone a heavenly white light, as an apparition from the clouds - “behold, these are my creations, in which I am well pleased”, seemed to sound as a sentence uttered by a disembodied designer God from somewhere skyward.
Each crane, each on its splendid and spindly crane legs, marched with eyes set rigidly ahead in military concentration, but each well sculptured face could barely suppress a smile at the brilliant irony of taking themselves so seriously as to march like a soldier and stare ahead as if heaven itself was just over the horizon, behind the camera at the catwalk end, upon reaching which they halted, wiggled their tiny hips, about turned, and marched back to the land of white light from whence they had mustered.
Each was indeed a thing of beauty, draped in crazy colours and patterns that would lift the hearts of the most wizened old cynic on a City of London street who had just lost a bonus of a million pounds.

And the civilising connection with London buses is that this fashion is rapidly available to everyone in Top Shop and Primark up and down the land, affordable by virtually everyone and worn by virtually everyone and virtually everyone travels on London buses nowadays.
So there you have one link.
And civilisation?
You need peace, industry and a big and prosperous leisured class to have a thriving fashion business that makes its benefits available for everyone.
And that means nearly everyone has to be in that class, and that means you will find them on the buses too if you invest in them and if you can stop governments from shooting at their own citizens or other governments’ citizens.

Which reminds us that one of the most important oxymorons in the world is an important pop song, and that there is one - it is John Lennon and Yokos’ ‘All we are saying, is give peace a chance’

In the week that a legless South African runner shot to death his girlfriend, for what reason we may never know, and in a world in which Russia’s Kalashnikov armaments company sells 80 per - cent of its famous machine guns to private individuals in the United States, we need to heed this message more than ever.

Good on you John, rest in peace.

Fashion is like the arms industry in that it has obsolescence built in, but even Vivian Westwood never killed anyone with her creations. Maybe Jimmy Choo did with some of his loftier heels.

A Blackfriars day out in London, comics at the Tate, comics running the country, Kate Middleton and Dexter Dymoke's new sculpture

Off to Blackfriars on a bitterly cold day, down the Blackfriars Road, out of Southwark tube station - what a mess the German bombers made of this part of London, but our town planners have built on their work of destruction, destroying all sense of community to create a cold higgledy piggledy discombobulation from Blackfriars Bridge  out to Canary Wharfe and then down to the bottom of the Blackfriars Road.
Astride the Thames, crabbed looking monsters that once lived in the deepest ocean trenches hunch, sipping from old Father Thames and wondering how they got so lost. 

Occasionally, a shiny new alien being arrives, such as the Shard, which intended to land in Dubai, but an onboard navigation problem forced it to settle in Southwark, where it stands bemused, looking down and around at the midgets and dwarfs it has for company, glancing across at the few other lost souls that tower over London in the City.

But the tenacious history of London thwarts the best laid plans of planners and alongside modern monstrosities lie brilliant incongruities from former ages : the Palastra building, a multi- coloured glazed block eleven stories high with a protuberance, some kind of outgrowth, perhaps a cancer, staring down from the top three floors, has abutting into it a graceful arching bridge from a more sensitive time. 

As we push against the cold down Blackfriars road we pass a proud and lonely sentinel which still guards against our pleasant vices : The Sons of Temperance building, which must have represented the savings of a generation of abstemious Victorians who aimed at saving their souls and heading soberly into heaven.

Talking of heaven, much later that same day, we passed the Headquarters of The Salvation Army, which is housed in a new glass and steel tent on the walk up to St Pauls from the river.
On the window are the words of Jesus : “I am the light of the world.......etc.
We are both always vulnerable to words, and again wonder at our atheism.
But consider these words : “ All that you are, you are through me; all that I am, I am through you alone”
Comparably compelling.
These are the words of one A. Hitler, spoken to his S.A, the Nazi militia.

Beware of words, especially when they are spoken by men seeking leadership positions.

At the bottom of Blackfriars Road we arrive at the ASC gallery, where we will see the new sculpture of Dexter Dymoke, an artist who represents new ideas in London that he expresses in ingenious and incongruous materials which adopt bizarre, sensuous and sexy shapes.

The gallery is housed in a building as ugly as Socrates, but we are intrigued and absorbed by the sculpture on display, which compels attention and asks to be bought and taken home. The shapes and materials defy explanation, but so does life itself, so there is a mysterious attraction at work.

From this cutting edge gallery we are off back up Blackfriars Road to the Tate Modern to see the Roy Lichenstein exhibition.

This is entertaining art. It makes you smile. It is therefore serious and important. But eventually one stops reading comics and starts reading novels and that’s how you feel by the time you get to the end of this show - it’s time for more substance. Roy fills you up like a Chinese meal, half an  hour later you are hungry again.

We are grateful for the Tate though, it really is an asset the country.
David Cameron, the Prime Minister of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party and very likely to be the next Prime Minister, have announced that Kate Middleton is a ‘ huge asset’ to the country’, this in response to a novelist who had described her as a ‘ plastic princess designed to breed.’
What creeps our politicians are sometimes - ever so ‘umble.
If Kate Middleton is a huge asset, what are Tim Berners-Lee or James Dyson or the many others who do useful work that pays the country’s bills?
Words are one of the currencies of politics (pictures are the other and more important) and politicians should be masters of them, but our comedy duo are debasing their currency in their rush to flatter our monarchic mannequin.

We decide to take refuge in drink and head for the Black Friar pub on Queen Victoria Street, just down from St Pauls. It’s the only art nouveau pub in London and dates from about 1870.

If Dave and Ed pop in for a pint we’ll have a go at them, and sort out a few other things that need sorting out, but politicians don’t do pubs, too risky, they might find out what’s going on in the country.
The atmosphere in the Black Friar is warm and inviting. It reminds me of the brilliant TV ad for Courage that my old agency once made. It was written by the late John Webster - an advertising genius.

Manet in London, Jazz at the Hippodrome Casino, SARS, Chocolate heaven and a hard rain's a gonna fall

It is, of course, raining in London, so Elena and I decide on a safe indoor pursuit and head to the Royal Academy on Piccadilly to see the Manet exhibition.

We feel the need to be safe. 

Kim, the young yet podgy panjandrum of North Korea, has started letting off small hydrogen bombs because he is angry. The research shows that it is human nature to make a reckless move in a bid to bounce back if all the options look bad - for Kim, who appears to be very well fed, it’s looking bad all round. For North Korean people, who are starving, it just carries on being bad, so maybe they’re feeling reckless too.  I recall the case of a certain Mr Kahn, from Pakistan, who made a living selling North Korean nuclear bomb components to the highest bidder. If anyone of that name asks you if you’d like to join his get-rich quick scheme, say yes and pass on the details to me.

I’ll lose them.
I lose everything else, especially hats. I’ll put the nuclear secrets in my hat and they will be lost forever, so the world will be a safer place for a while.
Don’t tell Obama, whatever you do, he can’t be trusted and is very dangerous as he seems to have an excellent memory for deadly detail but be remarkably absent minded when it comes to election promises.
He’s not cool with criticism either -  he signed the National Defence Authorisation Act in 2011 which gives him power to order his military to arrest you and throw you in jail for life without a trial. No, you don’t have to be an American, it covers everyone.
Phewee man, call me an old hippy but that sounds over heavy to me?

And SARS is back in town - the fatal respiratory disease, so we are not using the tube and breathing fitfully on the buses.

Manet made some great paintings, and they are all here - but what a smug bunch those Belle Epoch bourgeoisie were, sitting in their salons, smoking, loving or lusting. The girls are always naked and the men are covered head to toe. As they sat feeling pleased with their new found industrial wealth the scramble for Africa was underway - the second big act of theft, murder and mayhem ( the first one was the one that got civilisation going in the shape of capital accumulation, some time ago now ) that we celebrate in our art and architecture, and Europe was preparing the ground for World War 1 and then racism all round.

Gee, we must cheer up, nothing we can do about any of this today, so we take refuge across the road in a new chocolate cafe called Khave Dunyasi.

It reminds us of Heaven.

In Heaven, nothing much happens except you sit around singing things such as ‘ Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty’ and you feel happy.

In this chocolate cafe, everyone sits around sipping coffee and singing the praises of the chocolate, 

"This is really lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely" and everyone is really feeling happy happy happy.

Nobody should be allowed to run a country, it’s too complicated, it should be divided up and shared out between everyone, but if they are going to, they should have to prove that they love Jazz.

Jazz musicians have to create, compose, listen to each other and to their audience.

They aim at making us feel human.

This is what politicians should do if they are running countries.

If they did it as well as the Jay Phelps quartet did at the Hippodrome Casino last night, the world would be a safer place.

The Hippodrome Casino is a relatively new jazz venue in London. It’s great.

We entered through the gaming card and croupier floor, sham sophistication - Good evening Mr Bond - but good fun if you’re not an addictive gambler.

The quartet - Jay on trumpet, the great Moses Boyd on drums, Ross Stanley on Piano and Mark Lewandowski on Bass, were a perfect combination of sensitive attention to each other, to their main musical theme, and to the opportunity to invent, surprise and shatter the expectations of the audience.

If only Kim and Obama had been there!

A Clifford Brown number, lyrical and uplifting, called What’s New, would have had North Korea and the USA agreeing to cooperate in feeding the starving and finding other ways to spend the billions they spend now on nuclear weapons to teach every child how to love one another, make music and understand mathematics. The manufacturing of useful items, all the arts and an efficient agriculture will be a natural by product of this programme.

God will not be invited, as he does not seem to be able to agree on anything, and neither do any of his adherents.

We don’t need Heaven anyway because we have chocolate cafe’s.

Jay Phelps, you are more than a genius of the jazz trumpet, you and your work are the hope of mankind!

The Winter's Tale, Mr Huhn, Lies, Freedom, good and bad food and drink

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s headquarters and the cultural capital of England is in Stratford upon Avon, housed in what is surely one of the ugliest and badly designed buildings in the world.
The stage and seating are superb, but very little else is either aesthetically pleasing or easy to navigate and use.

 It looks like a power station....

 .....it feels like a prison

These pictures show how impractical and prison - like the interior of the theatre is; the gloomy rooftop restaurant, most of which is shut off from the view and any light; the narrow corridors ; the stairwell with its tiny windows.
Surely the architect should be forbidden from practising again and sent to Siberia?
 To add to the desecration created by this white collar vandal, a fine copse of ancient oaks which once proudly stood in front of the theatre was cut down to be replaced by a bland lawn and rectangular path pattern.

‘Man was born for happiness as a bird for flight’ - wrote the Russian writer V.G Korelenko, and in Revelations in The Bible it says that ‘there shall be no more pain and there shall be no more tears'.

Perhaps W. Shakespeare had both of these thoughts in mind when he wrote ‘The Winter’s Tale’ around 1610, with the proviso that we can’t just inherit a happy and pain free life - we have to earn one and deserve it, and if we take it away from others, we have to earn it back again.

The plot of the play is absurd, but life itself is absurd so that the drama provides a perfect medium through which resonates the cruelty and tyranny of our own little lives which we find mirrored in the disjointed and extravagant adventures of these characters on stage, who seem to live in a bizarre confabulation of classical Greece and Christian saturated Sicily and Bohemia, defying logic except the meandering logic of the heart.

Elena and I were in Stratford again to see the play and renew our search for the lost spirit of Merrie England, Shakespeare’s England, the period when complete bastards like Francis Drake murdered and plundered on the high seas to impress Queen Elizabeth in the hope of a monopoly or two. 
This spirit has been lost somewhere in a shopping mall and the global banking cartel, the former by the common consumerate and the latter by the self deluded ‘ masters of the universe’ who seem to think that shuffling money around the world is tough guys work and justifies danger money in return.
In Shakespeare’s day you had to risk your life to make a fortune and since lives and livelihoods were often on the line the language was straight and sharp :

‘ We are but plain fellows sir’
‘ A lie, you are rough and hairy’

This is sterner stuff than the former Energy Minister Mr Huhn is capable of, who was only able to confess his lies to the police and his forcing his wife to lie on his behalf with the evasive sentence ‘ I am deeply sorry for something that happened a long time ago’

Something that happened?

A lie, thou smooth skinned sop, something you did deliberately and would do again given half a chance!

We will probably be sued by Mr Huhn for this accurate amendment with addition.

A mental patient rang the social services, care workers and mental health workers to tell them that she was dangerous, had killed before and would kill again. All these ignored her and she went on to behead and kill an elderly woman.

The social services stated that the calls she made were a ‘ missed opportunity’

You’re not kidding.

Ah well, from the play we made our way again to The Thatched Tavern, the best pub in Stratford, which on our last visit had run out of beer.

This time, all barrels were in place and fine foaming ale was flowing.

Gini was friendly unaffected and helpful

We settled down to good solid simple fare - Falstaff would have appreciated it, but the cleanliness of the toilets would have astounded him.
Look at these - Elena was nearly arrested for loitering with indecent attempt in the ladies, as was I in the gents, as we were so determined to capture these gleaming and hygienic examples of a facility that, in a British pub, is usually a stinking and dangerous affront to the senses.

The Gents! (photo by Mark Rapley)

.......and The Ladies!

How much better was the food and service here, at a fraction of the price, than we were fleeced for at a recent visit to the posh St John in Farringdon in London - actually, the service was good, but misleading insofar as we were sold a dish on the grounds that there was only one left which turned out to be awful.
Restaurants in London get away with murder for the same reason that people do - nobody has the courage, or the energy, as they once did, to protest or complain or intervene.

We are all too timid, listless and lifeless, our ennui is endless, we regurgitate opinion pumped out ready made for us like the ready made plastic meals we eat from our supermarkets that are slowly strangling and wringing any pungency and taste from British life.

Stop though.....

........It’s not all bad, at least we are free, free to set up in business, drink and eat where we want, listen to what we want, free to abuse these freedoms or ignore them as we wish.

We decided to drink too much and abuse the freedom to drink and abuse our bodies at The Riding House Cafe on Great Titchfied Street, London W1.

This place is a hang for well heeled media and rag trade types, the beautiful people - how did I get in?
They were free to turn me away, for being too old and not wearing Converse plimsolls, but maybe they could smell my debit card burning a hole in my pocket.

The crowd of free dancing young made us feel young and free too - enough said, you know the rest, and thank God for the modern world and paracetamol.

We were made for happiness, but there will always be pain.


Unless otherwise stated all photographs by Elena Bruce

London life is a lottery, St James' Park, Brass band horror and a young Jazz Genius

source: internet

Earlier this week, a young traveller from New Zealand was killed in a freak accident.

As he was walking along the street in Camden Town a William Hill betting shop sign fell on him - what were the odds on that ?

A similar incident killed a young woman last year when a window pane fell on her in a square near Oxford Circus. She had popped out of her office to get a sandwich for lunch.

Last week, a young man from an estate in Pimlico was chased down and butchered to death by boys of his own age from a nearby estate, in broad daylight.

This was an echo of a similar incident last year when a pack of teenagers chased another youngster down in Victoria Station, in full view of horrified commuters waiting for trains, on the main concourse of the station, during the rush hour.

The guilty always seem to be found quickly and are punished with imprisonment, which does nothing to stop the sorry string of these outbreaks of school age barbarism.

Random endings from careless fixings or sloppy work, mayhem, murder and madness bubbling up to the surface from the dark currents that crawl along the bottom of the stream of London life.

What’s going on?

It’s always been going on, we don’t know if we are living through more or less of it. Stephen Pinker wrote a big book which claims that we live in quiet peaceful concord compared to our forbears. Who knows, but I’m starting to feel a bit jitterbug jumpy from reading and watching the news.

Talking of which, if the young on the hood want to work off some steam, why don’t they get jiving around like this sexy couple from the sixties .......

....... wise up young bloods, love is all you need, and if you can dance like this then love is what you’re gonna get, as well as the genuine admiration of your peers.

‘This city’s big but it’s got no soul’ sang Gerry Rafferty in his classic hit ‘ Baker Street’

Is it time to ‘settle down in a quiet little town, and forget about everything’ ?

Not yet, we are still alive and the city is full of the free and it ferments around us with frustration and rage so we must just beware of when it boils over but stay here - we can take the heat.
In any case, whilst our defense strategy is ‘ launch on warning’ of hydrogen bombs on one Polaris class  submarine, everything is a little shaky when it comes to health and safety.
Why does the Health and Safety Executive ignore this obvious threat to our health and safety?
We’d be quite keen on everybody having a missile defense system rather than everybody having offensive missiles and no defense except the prospect of mutual oblivion.
Maybe it’s just us, wanting to live and all that.
Don’t expect Cameron and co to do any serious thinking about this - they’re not really alive, so being dead doesn’t really worry them.

Talking of feeling threatened, last night we were beaten up by a brass orchestra at the Royal College of Music.

The programme began with some mellifluous Strauss which the students played with spirit.
The entire audience beamed with pleasure as the fanfares of tuba, trumpet, trombone, horn and the supporting sounds of timpani, percussion and euphonia filled the commodious and stately hall.
But then the conductor told us that we would here a piece written by a contemporary composer.
Contemporary ‘ classical’ music usually leaves out the music, so we glanced anxiously at each other.
A thunderclap rent the air, the audience fell back, stunned, staring at each other as if a bomb had just gone off in our midst.
There followed the sound of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the onset of the Blitzkrieg and Stuka dive bombers raining death down on the innocent of Europe, punctuated by moments of psychotic indecision and nervous breakdown.
It hurt bad.
We can see the problem : they can’t keep writing like Strauss or Mozart, but this can’t be right - there must be a middle way.

We needed a break, but still in the mood for music we set off to catch the young prodigy of the jazz piano Charlie Stacey and his Trio at Jazz after Dark in Soho.

Charlie is 18 years old.

We first came across him back in the days when we ran Hot Dog Jazz events in Soho to encourage young jazz and build a young audience for it.
He was only 16 then, and commanded respect even then.
This gig was awesome, as our neighbours from Chicago, sitting on either side of us, remarked.
Charlie opened up with Miles Ahead by Miles Davis.
Toes started tapping, fingers started drumming and girls started dancing and whooping.
The depth, control and inventiveness of the performance was astounding.
I wished I could have brought the composer of the brass symphony - a man called Gunther Schuller - here to listen to Charlie, for his jazz shows how to blend discordant and jarring reality with the sound of the divine so that humanity is left with some hope.
Life should be enjoyable but if you only eat sweet food you will end up toothless and fat.
Catch Charlie and some great jazz to learn how to suffer and smile, laugh and live so that the pain, if it comes, is exquisite.

Last scene of all,that ends this strange eventful blog post, is a walk in St James Park, near the noisy neighbours of St James, the Windsors of Buckingham Palace.
They are always throwing noisy rock concerts in their over-large garden, which is bringing down property prices in the area.
It’s alright for the Windsors, their mortgage was paid off generations ago, but a small fall in prices for most of us nouvauxe riche and it’s negative equity, just like the country.

Still, St James Park is a reservation for the rejuvenation of all souls, rich or poor, and it’s a treatment that is both free and effective for most conditions, especially consumer ennui.
In St James, you can reflect on the truth of this : ‘ Consider the birds of the air, they do not sow neither do they reap, or store away in barns, yet thy Heavenly Father feedeth them.........

Of course, in reality, they are fed by the visitors to the park, and so they grow fat and tame, but they still show us how to live together regardless of tribe or territory. They come from across the globe to confer together on matters common to them all, and they develop a common programme of survival.
We were listening to a particularly lively debate when a young human approached the conference and feigned friendliness, then screamed and ran at the gathering, dispersing the participants and ruining the debate.
A typical human.

Earlier today we had bought a Lotto ticket on the grounds that life itself is a lottery.

But we were not winners in Lotto, despite our good fortune in the lottery of life!



Unless otherwise stated all photographs by Elena Bruce