Not Being Choaked
The big news is the success of the Royal Oak campaign. I was preparing a letter to Sadiq Khan when we heard that he had decreed that TfL would not locate the coach station here. It quite took the wind out of our sails, as we had been gearing up for a long and bitter struggle. Both Tory and Labour councillors, and the local MP, Karen Buck, were all part of the campaign, not to mention impressive Bayswater ladies, and we knew the proposal was ridiculous, but still it was a very pleasant surprise to succeed, and so quickly. Sadly I missed the victory drinks.
In the Home Straight
The windows are beginning to go into our new building, so it is starting to actually look like a building. This is positive, but less positive is the news that the lift doors were manufactured wrongly, and so have to be changed. The length of time that it takes to install a lift is extraordinary, so this may apparently delay us. Virtually all the equipment for the new building is now on site, and swarms of people are working very hard putting it in. The faience looks splendid, and is currently being grouted (or masticked, to be accurate). We are due to interview potential cafe operators next week, so everything is coming together and starting to feel real. There's still a significant repair to be done in church, but we're on track to be able to celebrate soon!
No Home
A story that I don't feel like celebrating has been playing out recently. There was a person who had been homeless, but was living in a flat near St Peter's, and came to our Lunch Club and Breakfast Club. Gradually, over many months, they started coming to church as well, and it seemed that they had sorted out their life; they were talking to me about faith, and I was happy that they found the church supportive. Then we saw them less frequently, and then suddenly, a few weeks ago, they appeared sleeping on a pavement, under some scaffolding. When we tried to engage we were told they couldn't talk, which was certainly partly shame, and so there was not much we could do. Fortunately the place they were sleeping was very public, and attracted a lot of attention, so they have now got some support. Disappointing. We ask ourselves how we failed them. In truth we were wrong to have been congratulating ourselves, because the situation was always more precarious than it appeared, and there was a very complicated back story.
Dog's Home
Meanwhile Angry Woman with Dog has loomed large again. Her housing provider sent her notice of eviction proceedings last August, and so I hurriedly helped her get a solicitor. Proceedings have still not started, but the housing association won't say that they are not going to. Seven months it has been hanging over her. It is clearly being used as a threat, a device to try to get her to behave better. This seems to me to be cruel, and is deeply unreasonable for the solicitor, who won't get paid by Legal Aid if there are no actual proceedings. The trouble is that the main complaint against her is that she has a noisy dog, which is true. I have bought harnesses to try to make the dog more controllable, and devices to try to stop it barking, even some sort of tranquilisers for it (for which I am confident there is no resale market, unlike horse tranquilisers). It's really not a suitable dog for her (too big for the flat, too strong for her) but she won't hear of getting rid of it, as although she shouts and curses at it, she really loves it. In a chaotic and dysfunctional life a companion animal is a lot more reliable than the humans around.
Colour Wash
Last Saturday we went to the Bonnard show at Tate Modern, which caused us to discuss how modern is "modern", because Bonnard was a post-Impressionist who did his most characteristic work around the First World War and died in 1947. Of course it's the old Tate Gallery thing, that the Tate in the old days was the repository for British art, and international twentieth-century art, as the National Gallery basically turned its back on anything from after 1900. The other (more popular) show on at the moment is of the Surrealist Dorothea Tanning, and I guess she would seem more "modern", despite being practically Bonnard's contemporary, because Surrealism is recognisably "modern" because of its debt to Freudian ideas. Bonnard remained working in a way that didn't move on very far from Pissarro or Cezanne and so feels much more part of the great tradition. Still, he really wasn't very good. I am struck by the reverential hush that prevails in art galleries, and I fear I broke the hush with some critical comments. At one point I was giving my view when a young American woman next to me asked me a question, fortunately one which I was able to answer (I wasn't just talking out of my backside on this occasion). I don't want to spoil anyone's enjoyment, but I think dialogue and discussion are an appropriate part of the gallery experience, and so I don't think one should be ashamed of having an opinion.
My opinion is that Bonnard is a second-rank artist who painted a handful of very nice pictures and an awful lot of dull ones, and a number of real shockers. The Tate curators wanted to emphasise his use of colour,and that's why I went, but even that's not really very special; he's a great one for yellow and purple, but a lot of it just feels straight from the tube with no thought. My point which caught the attention of the American was that in his garden pictures he is too fond of viridian, a striking pigment which is not the colour of any plant in nature, but which he uses raw. He uses colour as a substitute for drawing, and the few drawings in the show reveal his draughtsmanship to have been strikingly weak. It's notable that his most convincing human figures have their faces obscured, because he really is very bad at faces, but sometimes his anatomy is rubbish as well. The curious thing about the show was that it was chronological, but only started in the artist's forties, when he had settled on his final style, and so there is no artistic development at all, though there are some very weak pictures from his last years which speak of declining powers. The trouble was that he thought he was Monet, and he wasn't.
I hadn't realised that he lived very near Monet in Normandy. Bonnard's house at Vernonnet (one of three homes, he was not a starving artist) is only a few miles from Monet's at Giverny; you'd get off the train at Vernon for both. Ian and I came very close to them on the cycle ride last summer, and perhaps I might do that one day in the future, but I'm not sure that Bonnard would detain me for long.
Friday 22 March 2019
Friday 1 March 2019
PARKS AND RECREATION
Falling Leaves
The cycle path across the Green, alongside the canal, runs past our contractors' compound, and they have regularly sent blokes out to clean the path up, hosing down any mud that delivery lorries have brought onto it, and sweeping up rubbish and leaves. There are, of course, lots of leaves, as there is a row of black poplars between the compound and the path, so, back in the autumn, our people were quite busy sweeping them up. The remainder of the path, however, beyond our compound, is a very different matter. Westminster Parks finally cleared the fallen leaves from the path this week; at the end of February. They had spent a couple of days working on it earlier in the month, but one section was left untouched until this week. Now, I imagine that they justify this by saying that it would need repeated visits if they were to try to clear the leaves when they were actually falling, but they made repeated visits anyway! I am perfectly sure that leaves which have piled up and then been rained on, partially rotting them down, are actually more effort to clear because they are much heavier. More to the point, as a cyclist, I am fed up with (in places) half the width of the path being covered by a mound of slippery dead leaves. Still, I must be grateful that it has finally been done; it's boring just to moan about the stupidity of the Parks Department.
Blurred Lines
It's quite boring to moan about the stupidity of people's parking round here as well, but forgive me, I feel the need. Some time ago I was one of several people who agitated for double yellow lines to extend over the Harrow Road canal bridge on the east side of the road (they already existed on the west) because cars parked there completely blocked the view of anyone coming out from the Green, either to cross the road on foot or to pull out on a bike (which I do every day). That was done, which is a great help, but the problem is that people just ignore them, particularly at night. There seems to be a general view that single yellow lines are just advisory, and don't apply after lunchtime on the Harrow Road, and that as long as you are not parking overnight then it's fine to park on a double yellow line as well. It may simply be the calculation that Westminster never sends "civil enforcement officers" out after dark, and so you are perfectly safe from a fine. It may be that civil enforcement officers are seen so rarely in our area that people gamble on their absence anyway, or it may be that people have observed that when they are here they are only really interested in cars parked wrongly in marked bays, and pay little attention to yellow lines or dangerously parked vehicles.
I sometimes feel as I zigzag around illegally-parked cars that vigilantism is justified in these circumstances; if I possessed a paintball gun I would be very happy to splat the windscreens of miscreants. It's an ignoble impulse, I know, but it would be so satisfying. Self-righteousness is a very unattractive emotion, isn't it!
Royal Choak
The campaign against the ludicrous TfL plan to put a coach station at Royal Oak gathers pace. There is a public meeting at the Porchester Hall on Shrove Tuesday at 7pm, which I am encouraging people to go to.The campaigners have set up a website, www.stoproyalchoak.com which has links to the two petitions against the plan, which are still collecting signatures. They want to submit the petitions on 14th March, so we are urging people to sign up quickly. One odd feature of this is that no-one actually knows when TfL will be making a decision about this; everything is shrouded in mystery. The campaigners are rightly concentrating on the pollution issue, (hence "Choak") because the plan promises to bring hundreds of extra coaches daily onto the Marylebone Road, which already has the worst air quality of anywhere in the UK. The number of schools within a few yards of the road is ridiculous, and they stand to find their air quality becoming even more dangerous. On the Warwick Estate we shall be right in the firing line; how will people feel using our excellent outdoor gym equipment when the air is full of diesel fumes?
The thing that nice, polite people are not saying publicly is that they really fear the social fallout of a coach station, because we all know that one of the factors in Victoria being a centre for rough sleeping is the presence of the coach station. It is on the coach that the penniless newcomer arrives in London (when not actually trafficked). Over the decades Victoria has developed an infrastructure to deal with this, which we simply do not have in Westbourne or Bayswater. We already have rough sleepers of our own who we struggle to support, without adding in a whole lot of newcomers. The Leader of the Council is eloquent in questioning Westminster's responsibility for all the homeless people who actively choose to come here, and while I may be a bit uncomfortable with that approach, I suspect we would all be agreeing with her if they appeared on our pavements in Westbourne.
Predictive Text
Our new building is faced with panels of glazed terracotta, or faience as it is sometimes called, a characteristically late-Victorian material. I have run into all sorts of confusion recently because if you try to type faience into your phone you will inevitably find it "corrected" to fiance; now I have a fiancee it adds even more potential for bafflement. The good thing is that the specialist facade contractors are making really good progress, and are hanging the faience panels on the Rowington Close front now. The faience is wonderfully highly glazed, and looks really good, even though it's hard to see it properly as it is still obscured by scaffolding. It really glittered on the sunny days we have just enjoyed. There is a relief pattern in the faience, which is going to look splendid, and which picks up a detail of Street's brickwork, which I am very pleased with. There is only one manufacturer in the UK who makes glazed terracotta, so we are delighted to have them making these panels to our specification; they have just made a much larger quantity of white faience for the restoration of the Victoria Palace Theatre, and we were always a bit anxious that our rather small order might get bumped down the schedule by another really big one, so it's a relief to see it all on site, and indeed going up on the walls. Nearly there!
The cycle path across the Green, alongside the canal, runs past our contractors' compound, and they have regularly sent blokes out to clean the path up, hosing down any mud that delivery lorries have brought onto it, and sweeping up rubbish and leaves. There are, of course, lots of leaves, as there is a row of black poplars between the compound and the path, so, back in the autumn, our people were quite busy sweeping them up. The remainder of the path, however, beyond our compound, is a very different matter. Westminster Parks finally cleared the fallen leaves from the path this week; at the end of February. They had spent a couple of days working on it earlier in the month, but one section was left untouched until this week. Now, I imagine that they justify this by saying that it would need repeated visits if they were to try to clear the leaves when they were actually falling, but they made repeated visits anyway! I am perfectly sure that leaves which have piled up and then been rained on, partially rotting them down, are actually more effort to clear because they are much heavier. More to the point, as a cyclist, I am fed up with (in places) half the width of the path being covered by a mound of slippery dead leaves. Still, I must be grateful that it has finally been done; it's boring just to moan about the stupidity of the Parks Department.
Blurred Lines
It's quite boring to moan about the stupidity of people's parking round here as well, but forgive me, I feel the need. Some time ago I was one of several people who agitated for double yellow lines to extend over the Harrow Road canal bridge on the east side of the road (they already existed on the west) because cars parked there completely blocked the view of anyone coming out from the Green, either to cross the road on foot or to pull out on a bike (which I do every day). That was done, which is a great help, but the problem is that people just ignore them, particularly at night. There seems to be a general view that single yellow lines are just advisory, and don't apply after lunchtime on the Harrow Road, and that as long as you are not parking overnight then it's fine to park on a double yellow line as well. It may simply be the calculation that Westminster never sends "civil enforcement officers" out after dark, and so you are perfectly safe from a fine. It may be that civil enforcement officers are seen so rarely in our area that people gamble on their absence anyway, or it may be that people have observed that when they are here they are only really interested in cars parked wrongly in marked bays, and pay little attention to yellow lines or dangerously parked vehicles.
I sometimes feel as I zigzag around illegally-parked cars that vigilantism is justified in these circumstances; if I possessed a paintball gun I would be very happy to splat the windscreens of miscreants. It's an ignoble impulse, I know, but it would be so satisfying. Self-righteousness is a very unattractive emotion, isn't it!
Royal Choak
The campaign against the ludicrous TfL plan to put a coach station at Royal Oak gathers pace. There is a public meeting at the Porchester Hall on Shrove Tuesday at 7pm, which I am encouraging people to go to.The campaigners have set up a website, www.stoproyalchoak.com which has links to the two petitions against the plan, which are still collecting signatures. They want to submit the petitions on 14th March, so we are urging people to sign up quickly. One odd feature of this is that no-one actually knows when TfL will be making a decision about this; everything is shrouded in mystery. The campaigners are rightly concentrating on the pollution issue, (hence "Choak") because the plan promises to bring hundreds of extra coaches daily onto the Marylebone Road, which already has the worst air quality of anywhere in the UK. The number of schools within a few yards of the road is ridiculous, and they stand to find their air quality becoming even more dangerous. On the Warwick Estate we shall be right in the firing line; how will people feel using our excellent outdoor gym equipment when the air is full of diesel fumes?
The thing that nice, polite people are not saying publicly is that they really fear the social fallout of a coach station, because we all know that one of the factors in Victoria being a centre for rough sleeping is the presence of the coach station. It is on the coach that the penniless newcomer arrives in London (when not actually trafficked). Over the decades Victoria has developed an infrastructure to deal with this, which we simply do not have in Westbourne or Bayswater. We already have rough sleepers of our own who we struggle to support, without adding in a whole lot of newcomers. The Leader of the Council is eloquent in questioning Westminster's responsibility for all the homeless people who actively choose to come here, and while I may be a bit uncomfortable with that approach, I suspect we would all be agreeing with her if they appeared on our pavements in Westbourne.
Predictive Text
Our new building is faced with panels of glazed terracotta, or faience as it is sometimes called, a characteristically late-Victorian material. I have run into all sorts of confusion recently because if you try to type faience into your phone you will inevitably find it "corrected" to fiance; now I have a fiancee it adds even more potential for bafflement. The good thing is that the specialist facade contractors are making really good progress, and are hanging the faience panels on the Rowington Close front now. The faience is wonderfully highly glazed, and looks really good, even though it's hard to see it properly as it is still obscured by scaffolding. It really glittered on the sunny days we have just enjoyed. There is a relief pattern in the faience, which is going to look splendid, and which picks up a detail of Street's brickwork, which I am very pleased with. There is only one manufacturer in the UK who makes glazed terracotta, so we are delighted to have them making these panels to our specification; they have just made a much larger quantity of white faience for the restoration of the Victoria Palace Theatre, and we were always a bit anxious that our rather small order might get bumped down the schedule by another really big one, so it's a relief to see it all on site, and indeed going up on the walls. Nearly there!
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