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Tricks with a swarm of bees
Jun. 21st, 2002 04:11 pmYou see, this is why I don't keep a diary. You start with such good intentions, and then you blink, and ten days have passed without a single entry and you have to play catch-up (if you ever get the time, and you never do). I have a lot of old diaries in a box somewhere, faithfully recording about fifteen years' worth of Januaries, and only Januaries. Future archaeologists may well take me as historical evidence for Brigadoon. However, this isn't supposed to be The Complete Records of Me (as if I'd post that on the web anyway), so let's continue.
Friday: I finish teaching early, and head for the pub to get mightily bladdered with some work colleagues and ex-colleagues. Janet and her partner are off to open a restaurant in a tiny village in France, and she has photos to show us; the place they're buying hasn't been renovated or even cleaned in a long, long time, but you can see the potential. The rest is shop talk: bitchy and fun exchanges about who's leaving, who's staying, who's coming back, who said what to whom, and so on. I'll spare you the details.
Saturday: Dinner, again, but this time with cloudhigh, who appears at our door clutching a fine Chianti and some excellent cheese. We eat these on either side of a visit to a singularly lacklustre Chinese seafood restaurant in Bayswater (it was highly recommended by Time Out and Harden's, so perhaps they were having an off day). The food isn't the point, of course, and a good time is had by all.
Monday: Off to sunny Ipswich! I've been looking forward to this, because I'm going to teach at Willis, who have a splendid building that I've been wanting to see. It's a Norman Foster job, a sleek curvy three-storey black glass construction that's been there for almost thirty years, but could have been built yesterday for all that it's dated. The glass wall is featureless and sinks straight into the ground, and the entrances are well-hidden, giving it a mysterious, impenetrable look by day. At night, it's lit up inside and you can see right into it and through it. As you go in, there's a straight run of escalators from the lobby to the third floor restaurant and roof garden, and not a single wall in sight. It's bright, spacious, airy, friendly, human, and all the other things that a good building should be. Unfortunately, my only sight of it is at lunchtimes; I'm actually teaching in the building across the road, which looks like a multi-storey car park.
Thursday: Hurrah! The training needs analysis that I'm supposed to be doing has been cancelled! Now I'll have time to prepare properly for it. Not only that, but I've had some new books waiting on the table for a couple of days now... the latest in my collection of odd tomes being "Calendrical Calculations", a book solely devoted to working out what date it is in about a dozen calendars, with accompanying code in (yay!) Lisp. Definitely a worthy successor to "Scientific Unit Conversion", which is a must if you need to convert ferks into almudes, or have ever wondered which is longer, a plethron or a mignonne. (I don't and haven't, but how could you resist a book like that?)
Finally, some obscure history. I've always been interested in London's history, and I've particularly been trying to find out what stood on the site of my flat (this block only dates from the late 1990's). There's an engraving showing the view from here, dated 1745 and claiming to be "from the Bowling Green at Islington", but it's clearly not drawn from ground level, so there must have been a building here as well. Last week I finally found it. It turns out that there was indeed a building, from about 1669 until the early 1800's: it was called Prospect House and was known for its bowling green. A Mrs Dobney ran it until 1760, advertising its suitability for "gentlemen bowlers", who came up from London to spend time out here in the countryside. When she died it became a bizarre sort of dog-and-pony show involving a whale skeleton, a juggler and a horse-riding performance including "tricks with a swarm of bees" (no, I have no idea either). After that it was, in quick succession, a boarding school, a tea garden, and lecture rooms, before being demolished to make way for the road and a row of terraces. I think we've lost something here: there just isn't anywhere, nowadays, where you can see a man on horseback do tricks with bees. Apart from "Jackass", of course.
Friday: I finish teaching early, and head for the pub to get mightily bladdered with some work colleagues and ex-colleagues. Janet and her partner are off to open a restaurant in a tiny village in France, and she has photos to show us; the place they're buying hasn't been renovated or even cleaned in a long, long time, but you can see the potential. The rest is shop talk: bitchy and fun exchanges about who's leaving, who's staying, who's coming back, who said what to whom, and so on. I'll spare you the details.
Saturday: Dinner, again, but this time with cloudhigh, who appears at our door clutching a fine Chianti and some excellent cheese. We eat these on either side of a visit to a singularly lacklustre Chinese seafood restaurant in Bayswater (it was highly recommended by Time Out and Harden's, so perhaps they were having an off day). The food isn't the point, of course, and a good time is had by all.
Monday: Off to sunny Ipswich! I've been looking forward to this, because I'm going to teach at Willis, who have a splendid building that I've been wanting to see. It's a Norman Foster job, a sleek curvy three-storey black glass construction that's been there for almost thirty years, but could have been built yesterday for all that it's dated. The glass wall is featureless and sinks straight into the ground, and the entrances are well-hidden, giving it a mysterious, impenetrable look by day. At night, it's lit up inside and you can see right into it and through it. As you go in, there's a straight run of escalators from the lobby to the third floor restaurant and roof garden, and not a single wall in sight. It's bright, spacious, airy, friendly, human, and all the other things that a good building should be. Unfortunately, my only sight of it is at lunchtimes; I'm actually teaching in the building across the road, which looks like a multi-storey car park.
Thursday: Hurrah! The training needs analysis that I'm supposed to be doing has been cancelled! Now I'll have time to prepare properly for it. Not only that, but I've had some new books waiting on the table for a couple of days now... the latest in my collection of odd tomes being "Calendrical Calculations", a book solely devoted to working out what date it is in about a dozen calendars, with accompanying code in (yay!) Lisp. Definitely a worthy successor to "Scientific Unit Conversion", which is a must if you need to convert ferks into almudes, or have ever wondered which is longer, a plethron or a mignonne. (I don't and haven't, but how could you resist a book like that?)
Finally, some obscure history. I've always been interested in London's history, and I've particularly been trying to find out what stood on the site of my flat (this block only dates from the late 1990's). There's an engraving showing the view from here, dated 1745 and claiming to be "from the Bowling Green at Islington", but it's clearly not drawn from ground level, so there must have been a building here as well. Last week I finally found it. It turns out that there was indeed a building, from about 1669 until the early 1800's: it was called Prospect House and was known for its bowling green. A Mrs Dobney ran it until 1760, advertising its suitability for "gentlemen bowlers", who came up from London to spend time out here in the countryside. When she died it became a bizarre sort of dog-and-pony show involving a whale skeleton, a juggler and a horse-riding performance including "tricks with a swarm of bees" (no, I have no idea either). After that it was, in quick succession, a boarding school, a tea garden, and lecture rooms, before being demolished to make way for the road and a row of terraces. I think we've lost something here: there just isn't anywhere, nowadays, where you can see a man on horseback do tricks with bees. Apart from "Jackass", of course.
