Month: Apr 2024

215: next stop, Islington

This week I’ve spent a lot of time on buses on my way to and from visits to interesting people. I like London buses. They are reliable, cheap and almost never involve changing at Bank station. They’re also above ground so hopping on buses around the borough is helping me consolidate my mental map of Islington – this week I connected the dots between Highbury and Islington Green, for example. I now know that the number 4 bus will get me back to Barbican from Finsbury Park, and that it’s no slower than taking various trains.

I like to sit on the top deck when I can, as you’re above the shop fronts and can see the bones of the buildings above them. Islington, bordering the City, has elegant squares (especially in the bit around New River Head where we’re building our new Centre) and brick villas and terraces – home to the Charles and Carrie Pooters of Victorian London. There are modernist council estates like Berthold Lubetkin’s Spa Green Estate and Bevin Court. Interesting buildings include a gorgeous Art Deco cinema (now a community hub) in Upper Street. Exmouth Market has traditional tiled pub fronts, and the old Metropolitan Water Board HQ (also New River Head) oozes Edwardian grandeur at the front and 1930s sweeping glass brick glamour at the old Laboratory building. There’s Islington Green, a tiny square where the statue of Bob the street cat holds court. There are also ridiculously posh corners like Highgate Village, and of course the gothic glories of Highgate Cemetery.

The Pooters, residents of Islington – Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon Grossmith

There are railways and stations and canals, including the very long Islington Tunnel, and for some reason a lot of theatres in pubs, and medieval wells where people would go to take the waters. The more time I spend on buses and visiting new places, the more I like it. I’ve even stopped getting lost on my way back to the office.

Other things making me happy this week

  • A visit to Artbox in Islington, an arts organisation working with adults with learning needs
  • Coffee with Amanda
  • Finishing Silent Witness – all 27 series!
  • Mike Bubbins’ sitcom Mammoth (BBC) and Deadboy Detectives (Netflix)
  • A walk in the early morning woods on Monday
  • Book recommendations from a colleague – finding a fellow fantasy fan is always good. Also, I read the start of a book over someone’s elbow on a busy tube and it looked really good so I had to buy it. Not even sorry.

What I’ve been reading

A Court of Mist and Fury/A Court of Wings and Ruin/A Court of Frost and Starlight/A Court of Silver Flames – Sarah J. Maas

Notes from a Small Island/A Walk in the Woods – Bill Bryson (Audible)

Mrs England  – Stacy Halls

214: oooh, people

Every so often I stick my head up above the arts and heritage parapet and remind myself that there’s a world out there of people who probably really enjoy spreadsheets and who can do magical things with apps and technical things and who aren’t at all fazed when month-end and year-end come around. A fabulous friend of mine runs an event planning company and one of their big events is the Digital Accountancy Show, this year held over two days at Evolution Battersea. She brings me and two of our other friends in to support the event – if I tell you that over the three days I logged more than 80,000 steps that should tell you how busy it is.

I love it. My role is officially exhibitor support, plus anything else that looks like it might need doing – covering breaks for other staff, lugging giant water bottles around, answering questions about access, unloading courier deliveries and more. On the first morning of the show I arm myself and my little team with about a million HDMI cables, acquire a notebook and pen from one of the stands and troubleshoot everything in sight.

This year there were many tech queries so I spent a lot of time fetching the people in charge of the USBs. Some things I can fix myself – upside down logos on the stands are pretty simple, for example, by removing the panel and rotating it through the required number of degrees. Some things are harder – my stand isn’t where I thought it would be, something’s damaged or broken, there’s no TV/lights – so I listened to stressed digital types, soothing ruffled spreadsheets. I collect feedback to give to the Show team, check in with people throughout the show, herd people over to the marquee for the evening show, wrangle fire-eaters (yes, really) and generally fly about the place.

Taste test required – I think I’ll stick with the wafers

The show is pretty spectacular and the venue is more like a club than a trade show – laser shows, silent disco style earphones for the talks so all the stages can run simultaneously without the sound bleed, dry ice, light rigs. So much so that when we had a thunder and hail storm on day one a lot of people thought it was sound effects. The companies up their game every year too – when the event was held at the Tottenham Hotspurs ground it was quite straightforward, but now teams bring fancy coffee machines (some bring baristas to work them!), and one brought an ice cream machine. Scottish firms ply everyone with Tunnocks teacakes and caramel wafers, which are always winners. The show swag gets better every year too – a firm called Apron had the best tote bags this year, and put the team in funky work overalls. Some firms give away good coffee, others seed sticks or seed packets. This year there were interactive elements – darts, safecracking, those buzzy puzzles and an electronic thingy. SuperAcornomics dressed their poor lad up in a red squirrel costume and his handler trundled him about giving out mints. There was a red panda mascot, but I couldn’t convince the organisers that we ought to start the night show off with a mascot wrestling match, unfortunately. It would have been great. These shows keep me in notebooks and socks too, which is handy.

Days are long and although we were in a rather nice hotel in Battersea, we didn’t get to see much after Sunday when Miriam and I had a wander round Battersea Power Station and tested out the spa (very small and uncomfortably couply – we were doing widths in the pool to avoid the other end, where one of those ‘no petting’ posters from municipal pools would have been appropriate). A nice lady in the Curated Makers shop told me if I ever wanted to make jackets to sell to come to them first, which was lovely to hear.

At the end of Day 1 we made it back to the hotel and I was in bed by 9, having stayed in a hot bath till everything stopped hurting. By the end of Day 2 I was so ready for my own bed…

Having been working on closed projects since 2020, things like this remind me that I rather like interacting with people – I love my day job but I’m really looking forward to having some visitors again! Four-legged ones will do, like this tiny cub who kept having to be rescued from the venue while build and strike were underway.

Other things making me happy this week:

  • A visit to Westminster Abbey to meet the team there. I also met a cat.
  • First of the summer swims at Redricks – 12 degrees!
  • Sleeping in my own bed again. Hotels are all very well but lack cats.

This week will have a lot less walking, I hope! Watch this space…

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

A Court of Thorns and Roses/House of Flame and Shadow – Sarah J. Maas

Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson (Audible)

213: impossible questions

This week one of my manymanymany cousins posed the following ridiculous question over on FB: what are your two favourite novels?

Well, honestly – where do you even start answering a question like that? I thought about it for a bit and asked for clarification along the lines of ‘what, this week or always?’ The two novels you’d most read, apparently. This did not, for some reason, narrow it down at all, even when children’s books were eliminated from the equation.

At age 10 this would still have been a hard question but I could at least have narrowed it down to a Nancy Drew, one of the Little House books or something by L.M. Montgomery. At 50 and as an avid reader this question ranks right up there with the meaning of life or one hand clapping or something equally conundrous (that’s not a word, according to the spellcheck but it’s my blog and I can make up words if I want. It’s a good word. Conundrous. Try it.)

Novels most read? I read my way through Terry Pratchett’s Discworld at least once a year, with probably Night Watch and Hogfather being most read. But then I also pick up the Moomin books with the same frequency. There are novels – series – I go back to and read through before the new one comes out (Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series, or Elly Griffith’s Ruth Galloway books.

What about novels that have stayed with you even though you’ve only read them once? The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa, for example, or The Cat and the City by Nick Bradley, both fairly recent reads but which I’ve been recommending to all my friends who like cats and/or books.

Do short story collections count? If so, some of Stephen King’s collections or any of Charles de Lint’s Newford stories have been in heavy rotation for years – and there are novels in this series too.

Also, favourite novel for what – a good mystery? For when you need a good cry? When you just need to remember that magic is out there, when you’re feeling nostalgic or in need of a good belly laugh? For when you’ve just been dumped? When you want something that you know you’re going to enjoy but don’t want to spend too much brainpower on it?

I did manage to settle on one novel – The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.. It’s what people would call ‘YA’ these days, but is still one of my all-time favourites, and now Things 1 and 2 also love it. I’ll have to come back to you on the other one.

Other things making me happy this week:

  • Progress on new cross stitch (despite being afflicted by an unputdownable series of books)
  • Good long walk in the sunshine on Saturday morning
  • Weather warm enough to consider painting my toenails – and that they’ve all grown back now to be painted!
  • A visit to the Unravel exhibition at the Barbican with an ex-colleague – gorgeous creations and a good catch-up

What I’ve been reading

Shanghai Immortal – A.Y. Chao

House of Earth and Blood/House of Sky and Breath/House of Flame and Shadow/Throne of Glass – Sarah J. Maas

Sweets – Tim Richardson

Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson (Audible)

212: I will hug him and pet him and call him…Kevin?

Faithful readers will no doubt recall that back during lockdown – four years ago! how? – people were doing a lot of baking things like banana bread and buying all the flour and yeast and stuff. Some people even nurtured their own sourdough starters, including London sister who called hers George and kindly shared one of George’s offspring with me. It feels wrong to call these offspring discards, as it might hurt their feelings. I called my new arrival Kevin, after Harry Enfield’s teenager, and kept him alive for….oooh, months. And then he grew mould and died a sad and gloopy death.

Luckily London sister is tolerant of my lack of culinary achievements (viz -TANITH! THERE ARE FLAMES! HELP!) and posted me another baby George which probably contravened some law or other about sending live things through the post but whatever. Kevin II spends a lot of time in hibernation or cryogenic suspension (OK, he lives in the fridge) but he hasn’t gone mouldy this time.

Every so often my family will request/demand sourdough pizza so I am forced to bring poor Kevin out of his slumber and coax him back to bubbly life. It’s not that I don’t love sourdough pizza (and cinnamon buns and bread and doughnuts) but I always worry that I’m going to spend several days adding flour and water to the jar while nothing happens, other than creating enough papier-mache glue to service an entire nursery craft activity.

Kevin, however, is from hardy stock and just two feedings later he was glooping away merrily, so much so that he and his discard (sssh!) made spirited attempts to escape from their containers shortly afterwards. This is despite the discard being in a container in the fridge….. “mummmmm, your sourdough has exploded…”

Today I made a loaf and tomorrow there will be pizza, and a baby Kevin will go out into the world this week to live with one of my colleagues (what will she name him, I wonder?) and then I’ll make a few more loaves and swear that I’ll make them regularly….and in a few months time when my family demand pizza we’ll do it all again.

Other things making me happy this week

  • 5k in the sunshine on Saturday morning – though off-road is still a little swampy
  • Popping down to The Bomb Factory in Holborn to see the work one of our community illlustrators did with the children at Holborn Community Association
  • Reaching series 23 of Silent Witness – only 45 more episodes to go!
  • Not being March anymore so my annual crisis is over for another year
  • Using my Christmas fabric to make a beautiful coat – the proper version of the bucket coat I tested a few weeks ago
  • Cutting things out for sewing bags
  • Lovely evening celebrating a friend’s 50th birthday

Now I am off to start the lengthy, lengthy process of making pizza….honestly, making pizza for six is a day-long commitment.

See you next week!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

The Easy Life in Kamusari/Kamusari Tales Told at NightThe Great Passage – Shion Miura

She and Her Cat – Makoto Shinkai and Naruki Nagakawa

Sweets – Tim Richardson (possibly one of the most interesting books I’ve read in years. Try it.)

Notes from a Big Country/Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson (Audible)

The Door to Door Bookstore – Carston Henn