Took me a day to decide on this one, if only because I am now going to end up with two consecutive shots taken from the same place, viz, the back of my house. But never mind. There is a clear sense of autumn on the turf roof on the extension to the mill — younger than this blog, although it doesn’t feel like it.
Went to Leyton Orient FC, of League One, today simply because I had never been there — it’s another one of those list-making things — a lunchtime kick-off making it straightforward at both ends of the day. Their two dragon mascots were quite endearing and going on the faces of the crowd behind, at least a couple of whom are clearly old enough to make their own judgments here, the locals think so too. They lost the game, though: 2-3 to Stevenage.
A full week of shots in London, then — 7 in a row. But that was the last, for three weeks anyway. At this rate, the capital will overtake the Lake District sooner rather than later and become the third most-depicted place on here, after Hebden and Manchester. I like the countryside, yes, but I must admit to quite liking London, too.
A city the size of London is going to need a lot of water. And unlike, say, Manchester, there are no high hills particularly nearby, in which one can build reservoirs and let gravity do quite a bit of the work of moving that water to where it is needed (water comes all the way to Manchester from the Lake District a hundred miles away through gravity alone). Therefore, some serious pumping is required. What used to be the Kew Bridge pumping station, and is now the London Water and Steam Museum, contains the biggest beam engine ever built, a gargantuan see-saw with a steam engine at one end and the pump at the other. That colossal object was impossible to photograph adequately, but these instruments will do.
And that reader was me, today. Third and, for now, last day working at the National Archives. What’s in the files and boxes? Well, let me get on with writing the book, and some of it, you will find out.
This agreeable piece of whimsy sits in the Cafe Torrelli outside Kew Gardens tube station. I don’t do advertising on here but lunch was pleasant, and I ate better than this guy seems to have recently.
I am back in London for another stint rooting around the National Archives. So, as with the last time I was there in February 2023, I get to walk to work along the banks of the Thames. This particular stretch seems very popular with rowers. Personally I doubt I could comfortably adopt this form of exercise due to freaking out about the travelling backwards, not seeing where I was going thing, but obviously they don’t care about things like bridges.
“Who’s this guy then?”
“No idea. Another tourist with a thing for pigeons I suppose. Like London’s the only place that has them.”
“Pervert. Perhaps if I scowl at him he’ll go away.”
On my regular visits to London I have been walking past this statuesque chap since 2016. The sculpture is of Sir Nigel Gresley, designer of the famous Mallard locomotive, which still holds the speed record for a steam locomotive. The statue is about 7 feet high — Sir Nigel wasn’t, though. Apparently, the design was to have originally featured a duck (that is, a mallard) as well as Sir Nige, but this was left off in the end, after, and I quote the Guardian (via Wikipedia) here; “possibly the most acrimonious argument in the long, pedantic history of the railway hobbyist”.
I pick this shot for the colour palette mainly — the blue of of his jacket works very well. It is taken from inside the ground, as the reversal of the lettering makes evident. As you can also see — it is raining, a lot. But the game behind me did manage to reach a conclusion. Nothing to do with Keighley Cougars, a rugby league club (you have never seen rugby league depicted on here, and unless I radically change in my remaining years, you never will) — the owners of that club decided they fancied a football team as well so simply bought one, Eccleshill United of Bradford, and teleported them here for as long as they feel like dabbling in another mode of football.
Two decades of working the allotment has proven that fruit is so much easier to handle than vegetables. The plums and the various berries (black, blue, josta, logan) have all been and gone. But here is just a small portion of the last crop of the year. Anyone want some apples? We will have too many.
Being 42 