No, nothign to do with bishops. Members of the pool team seeking chalk for queues. Lambeth Walk <=> Chalk.
I think they make it up as they go along. Actually I think they really do sometimes. "Cockney rhyming slang" actually does exist but its not so much a local language as a kind of word game.
Culturally its perhaps the London equivalent of Glasgow's deep-fried Mars bars. Yes they exist, yes people do eat them occasionally, but its not exactly traditional folk culture, more a sort of long-running joke.
Girl: "Look at that church!"
Boy: "That ain't a church, its got a flag on it."
Bother and sister aged about seven or eight being taken on day trip to London.
Two slightly older children previously overheard on the same train line at about the same place going the other way. They had seen the film of the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. The boy had a theory that a "faun" was called that because like a rose with thorns they were beautiful above but ugly below. For him the words "faun" and "thorn" were homophones, exactly alike, identical sounds. From their parents conversation they seem to be from well-educated prosperous middle-class Jewish families.
Non-rhoticism really has arrived. For us south-eastern English, "R" is a vowel :-)
On my way to work this morning I picked up an envelope from the doorstep. I opened it on the bus. It contained the wristband and some leaflets. I put it in my bag,
When I got on the train I opened my bag and looked at the envelope and the wristband wasn't there.
I wish I could claim that they never sent it but I can't. I saw it. It was silvery and said "Rising Sun" on it which struck me as odd because the bus was passing the Rising Sun pub at the time.
Its probably on the floor of a 321 bus approaching Sidcup right now. Its not the sort of thing that gets handed in as lost property - it just looks like rubbish. Its astonishingly unlikely that anyone would pick it up or realise that it was unused and if someone did I imagine they would use it or give it to a friend - after all there are no identifying marks on it. I suppose I'll have a poke around to see if its in the gutter outside Lewisham station when I get back this evening but I'd be very surprised if it was, because I had zipped up my bag before I got off the bus so its probably in the bus. And even if I did drop it in the street the chances are it would be washed down the drain by the rain.
To Cardiff, where I have never been before - for recording a TV program not that that's relevant to this blog other than that the BBC paid for me to go to Cardiff and stay in a hotel overnight.
Well, the hotel isn't actually in Cardiff but the Copthorne which is by a motorway junction in some bypass shedlands about ten miles west of the city. In the 1990s these places looked like the future - which is to say they looked like America in the 1970s - and we used to go on about "Edge Cities" and all that but now they already look as dated as a Nissen hut - and petrol prices drag us all back to the town centres and the railway station.
Anyway for a bit of only-just-post-industrial wasteland surrounded by motorways the Copthorne is actually quite nice outside (if not inside where it look just like almost every other medium-price chain hotel - and why are hotel bars almost universally so badly run? and why do they never have decent beer? ) but they have a little artificial lake or pond and a wooden terrace overlooking it where people go out to smoke but the wooden seats are in fact more comfortable than the ones in the bar (there must be a vast factory in Poland somewhere where they mass-produce those squeaky upholstered chairs that look comfy but in fact aren't) and it was much cooler (why are hotels always so unpleasantly hot?) and despite the roar of the HGVs there are ducks and coots and swifts and house martins (which seem to be nesting in the eaves of the hotel) and at least one swallow and crows and thrushes and a heron and it was all rather nice.
And so actually to Cardiff itself the next day for a walkabout...
Driving in in a taxi I've never seen so many stadiums in one small city.
Cardiff will be nice when they've finished it. I've hardly ever seen such an amount of building going on in one city centre.
Actually that's a little unfair - central Cardiff keeps a lot of its old industrial street plan. Its a sort of anti-Brum, the exact opposite of Birmingham. Over in Brum they demolished most of the old centre (supposedly the best preserved early centre of any large British town) and replaced it with a new one in Victorian red brick. Which probably looked modern and progressive at the time but we'd think was wonderfully ornate and Olde-Worlde if it still existed but it doesn't because they tore it down in the 1950s and 1960s and replaced it with a new city centre on a new street plan based on the twin principles that if you don't drive you don't count and that the greatest architecture of the twentieth century was the Todt organisation's bunkers on the Atlantic Wall. And now they have torn that down and they are replacing it with the kind of buildings that are funny shapes and clad in high-tech alloys that change colour depending on the mood of the occupants.
But Cardiff is mostly NOT like that. The old centre still makes sense. Not that its that old because Cardiff is mainly a late 19th century town and a lot of the apparently old buildings are largely Victorian fakes anyway - but well faked Victorian fakes . There is a High Street with the Castle at one end, the station at the other and the parish church and the market next to each other in the middle. There are side-streets and alleyways and arcades off it - lots of them. And lots of smaller passages as well - Cardiff is a city of twittens. You can usually get behind things or past things or walk through the middle of things. Its a pedestrian-friendly city centre, its "penetrable" in the jargon
And the main concourse of the Central Station looks lovely in the bright sun. It seems more like a bit of Trieste or Slovenia than Wales. Pity there isn't a decent bar.
Walking south from Central Station towards the Bay area an odd mixture of new office buildings, rather grotty 1960s council flats and a little bit of industry. A huge Anglican church visible from miles away, a Greek Orthodox church, and a couple of mosques. But not a lot in the way of pubs or shops. Vaguely reminiscent of walking south from Oxford Road station in Manchester towards Moss Side though on a smaller scale and without the University.
This, apparently, was once the famous Tiger Bay. No longer lively as far as I can see, but still very black. Something I don't ever remember seeing in England - a Job Centre with thirty or more men hanging around outside it smoking or drinking coffee from plastic cups and they are all black. Every single one. In any part of London there would be a mixture. I'd be surprised if I'm walking down a street where every single person is black (though I've seen no white people on this estate and few Asians) but I might well be walking down one where every unemployed man is black. That's odd.
Down by the Bay and to Plas Roald Dahl. Which turns out to be not as silly a name as I thought because apparently he was baptised in the little church overlooking the Bay.
All this Assembly and Millennium (and Dr Who) redevelopment works. Its much better than I thought it would be. Well, I guess it works for Cardiff as a whole. Whether it works for the rest of Wales is a different problem. And it doesn't seem to be working for the residents of Christina Street and Maria Street and Loudon Square, who are now just those grotty houses you see on the half-mile between the centre of the city and the new Bay. Butetown behind the front looks like a place to go through, not a place to go to.
I never realised how much Cardiff looked like the south of France. Well, it does when its 28 degrees in the shade and if you hold your camera just so...
Its hot. Too hot. I want a drink. Its bloody hot. And there are no real pubs on the posh bit of the bay - none that are open anyway. Just some Wetherspoon-alikes and some Eclectic International Brasseries. And Harry Ramsden's. But I want a cheap pint of Brains and a glass of tap-water with ice in it, not an expensive cooking lager and fish and chips for eight quid a shout.
Back to the little streets between Mount Stuart Square and the bottom end of Bute Street and come across the Bute Dock Hotel. Which looks like a real pub. Its dark and cool inside. I'm the only customer until an elderly gentleman with a Muslim-sounding name and what may have once been an RAF blazer comes in and orders a pint of Guinness. I think I'm starting to like Cardiff.
Too hot to walk all the way back to town and when I come out of the pub there are about half a dozen beautiful women walking in the same direction so that's obviously the way to go. It turns out they are going to Cardiff Dock station, so I get in the train. My fantasies of getting a ride from the Bay up to the Valleys is dashed when I find out that its just a single-track shuttle to Queen Street. (Or is it Queen's Road) But its only £1.20 and the train does seem to be full of beautiful women so that's not too bad.
Why are stations names "Queen's" anything always in slightly the wrong place?
The beer in the Queen's Vaults (whixh is a pub, not a railway station) is 40p a pint cheaper than in the City Arms but its at least 60p a pint less good. The QV seems to be the pub (there are one or two in most town centres) where rather dodgy-looking scrffy middle-aged or elderly blokes sit around nursing pints, drinking very slowly, smoking roll-ups, and making remarks about the women passing by.
Gross overgeneralisation: north of the main-line railway most black people in Cardiff have dark skin and African or West Indian accents. South of the railway they have medium-brown skin and Welsh accents.
Even grosser overgeneralisation: young women in Cardiff don't dress up as much as they do in the industrial north of England. Compared with Manchester and especially Leeds (& slightly less to Newcastle) Cardiff runs more to jeans and T-shirts and less to heels and hairdos. Maybe that is why so many of them look so lovely. That or the hot sun and the Brains.
Us poor benighted straights have no natural sense of dar. But a pub called "King's Cross" near a chip shop called "Dorothy's" and "Colin's Adult Bookshop" and clubs with the circle-arrow biologist's male symbol instead of Os in their signs give me the impression that these days even Cardiff has a pink light district.
I have a bad habit of comparing cities. The centre is not on the scale of Manchester or Glasgow or even Newcastle (never mind London), more on the scale of Brighton or Sunderland though clearly more substantial than either. Something of the feeling of Leeds in the way there is (or was recently) industry close in to the centre and things become low-density and suburban very fast if you go in some directions. In the University area and civic centre north of the Castle, something of the feeling of Cambridge or parts of Brighton (parts of Birkenhead too, though we don't talk about those) in the way some of the streets are laid out (though not in the architecture - Cardiff doesn't have much of the Georgian about it - though much of the Georgian in Brighton is in fact fake Victorian Georgian because we hung on to the neoclassical stucco style of facade on brick houses for a generation after it had gone out of fashion everywhere else).
But its more of a Place than, say, Birmingham or Leeds (most places are more of a Place than Leeds). The civic furniture is on a different scale. Its a capital city now and they want you to know it. So there is the National Museum of This and the Welsh Centre for That and the town feels just a little self-important. Which is OK. Cities ought to boast a little, to show off, to make themselves out to be more significant than they are. Its part of what they are for. Its one of the reasons Glasgow is more fun than Edinburgh, Brighton than Southampton, Preston than Blackburn. They are show-off cities that think they are special, take themselves just a touch too seriously, that get a bit brash and in-your-face and sometimes fall over and make fools of themselves on a Friday night.
I think I like Cardiff.
Overheard in a pub in Cardiff:
Landlord: "I had that Simon Weston in here the other day..."
Young Visitor from London: "Oh is he from Cardiff then?"
Landlord: "Now, he lives in Cardiff now, but he's not from round here. He's a Taff".
(Landlord to media types up from London to make some sort of advertising video)
Overheard in another pub in Cardiff:
"None of her children are mine. I put all my eggs in one basket."
To sunny Rochester to see our curate get vicared in Borstal.
For a small suburb surrounded on three sides by a saltmarsh, a motorwpay, and a prison, Rochester is a surprisingly nice place!
And Michael Nazir-Ali doing just about his last formal Anglican thing before not going to Lambeth - which in fact isn;t at Lambeth but just down the coast in Kent in a place he could get to with a bus-pass.
Really badly put-together new developments by the river though. Unimaginative buildings wrongly positioned. If I had time I would rant on them...
I was going to post links to my photos of Cardiff but it has just taken 2 hours to sort them out and if I don't leave the office in the next ten minutes I'll not get home till after 11pm. And then I will be late for work again tomorrow and stay late again and... :-(
A picture may be worth a thousand words but even with digital cameras its easier and quicker to do a thousand words rthan one decent picture!
Why does the count have to be delayed by 16 hours? Back when we used real people to count votes the first results were in by midnight.
Anyway, despite the expected debacle in most of the rest of the country, the London mayoral results are still too close to call, and we still have very little idea what the makeup of the Assembly. So I'm holding my political breath and thinking or talking about something else for today.
Though I expect that whoever we turn out to have voted for I'll need a few beers in the college bar this evening.
In the unlikely event that you have any friends or relations thinking of voting for Boris Johnson to be Grand High Poo-Bah of London later this week (*) then show them this lively interview. Especially if they are gay.
(*) or thinking of not voting for Ken Livingstone as first choice, which, if as it is a 2-round contest rather than a full alternative vote system, might be almost the same as voting Tory.
The real point of this post being (as Abigail is fed up to the back teeth with me saying) that if you *really* don't want Boris, and if there is a chance that he might sneak in with a small absolute majority in the first round then it is NOT safe to vote for whoever you really want in the first round (Greens, Respect etc) and Livingstone second - that only works if there IS a second round.
This posting based on the arguable assumptions that:
(1) it matters who gets in, in that government, including local government, makes a real difference to real people's lives (even if only a small one)
(2) yes Virginia, Amelioration is not Revolution. But it still makes things better, or at any rate less bad
(3) Corrupt careerist Labour politicians are bad - but corrupt careerist Tories are worse.
(4) No-one other than Labour or Tory is in with a chance (and yes, I know that would not be the case if we all voted for another candidate, but we aren't going to this week, are we?)
Feel free to debate them at length - while voting Labour :-)
Oh, and the BNP still look as if they might get an Assembly seat on the proportional vote - that is least likely the higher the turnout is. So get in there and vote with abandon for all those greens and left lists and so on for the assembly seats - the more left-wingers there are there the less of a free hand the new Mayor gets whoever he is.
Middle-aged woman with a terribly loud irritating voice talking some of the most egregiously self-serving businessdroid jargon I have ever heard into her mobile.
"That was the night they let everyone go. They kept two or three resources but they rolled everyone else off the project."
"I should tell you that from 29th April there will be no batch management from our project-team. All batch management resources will be rolled off"
"There is a bandwidth effect in the problem management space"
"Do you know X? He is the solutions architect on the project. He solutioned the deal with Y"
Utterly vomitable.
A lot better banter, if only slightly better morals from a man in a suit talking about money:
"Frankly its going nowhere. [We're] only waiting for them to CMOT on it and then we'll throw some magic dust on it".
"We need to get him onto a managed account but he'll want to tell us all about his future career"
"Send them a note saying that we released [the contract] before we got the true guidance on it and there's an error in it and send it back and we'll grandfather it and grub the terms out and give it back to them when we've cleaned it.
Yes, he really did use CMOT (I assume) as a verb - pronounced see-mot. That's a first I think!
"All I do all day is stand here and blow the whistle. I dress up like a fool and stand around on the platform and blow a whistle"
[A middle-aged bearded Railway Servant, as we would have called them a century ago]
Overheard on the train:
"Just imagine walking up and down Oxford Street pretending to be hats and dogs"
[That attracted my attention. I really very much wanted it to be "hats and dogs" not "cats and dogs". Imagine the unconfined nature of my joy when the reply came:]
"We should do it! Dress up as Monopoly pieces!"
[Two teenage girls with very short skirts and too much makeup who looked as if they were enjoying their half-term. Though they then went on to spoil the general aura of post-modern anti-consumerist Situationism with:]
"Have you seen my MySpace profile this week? You saw X on my friends list?"
"X Y? Yeah, but I didn't look at HIS profile!"
"His picture is SO GAY!!!! He's like, a goth, he's using this goth profile!"
Postyings here have been a bit in abeyance for the last couple of months. Not because there were no more walks or photos from them (there have been hundreds) but more because our Internet access was down at home and either I haven't been at work or else I've been a bit snowed under when I was there.
But now we have Internet access, and phone working, and some new furniture (mysteriously its all in Abi's room not mine, how did that work?) and Abi has started an OU course, and we have KITTENS! And the spirits did it all in a night. Well, about a fortnight actually, perhaps Christmas ghosts have slackened a bit since Dickens's time.
Maybe the long-promised rant about the layout of central Birmingham comes soon. But until that fateful day comes, I suppose this has to be done:
(as usual, selecting the pictures will get you bigger pictures)
Three or four of my microprojects coalesce in one photo!
Click on this photo to see a bigger version and read the words on the sign:
Not only a grotesque or silly signboard (the list is rapidly growing), not only an insight into the rebuilding of the bits of London tourist guides don't go to, but also an absurd new word. Result!
What on earth is an "Uberhaus"? And why? Well, I know what it is, its a largish flat with an upstairs garden, (which might be on the roof, or on a big balcony, or on the roof of a next-door building such as a car-park). But why? But why do the estate agents think that peopel willing to part with half a million or more squids in order to live on a reclaimed gasworks with a view of the A13 flyover will be attracted by fake German?
At least I got in first. Google has 8 hits for the word - six of them are estate agents, one is an article in the Daily Telegraph and first on the list is my photo linked above, which was only posted on Flicker last night.
From the wonderful people who brought you Route 666:
we can now have Confidential Destruction:
I suppose it goes along with the Quiet Apocalypse, the Private Calamity, the Modestly Reserved Little Extermination, and the Secretive Low-Key Obliteration
Maybe prices vary with how much destruction you buy. Destroy one, wreck one free.
Been walking round East Greenwich as a side effect of attending church there for a few weeks as part of the Reader's course. Taking lots of photos. This week they are mainly of the peninsula and up and down the Thames.
There are, I suspect, few Anglican churches in Inner London that have a grain elevator in the parish.
Can't really think of anything relevant to say. Well, I did, but it had the word "palimpsest" in it as a metaphor, so its probably a bit pretentious! As before the pictures link back to bigger ones on Flickr. Not as pretty is the ones with smoke in from Tuesday though.
Stave Hill in Rotherhithe, on the site of a filled-in Surrey Dock, is an artificial mound at the end of a ceremonial way planted with various runically significant trees, which was built, along with other oddities like Hilly Fields Stone Circle, in the megalithic frenzy of the years 1999 and 2000 which rounded off England's twenty-year love-affair with crop circles. Who knows - maybe if we could ask the folk who built Silbury or Stonehenge or the Long Man or the Nazca lines or Carnac why they did it maybe they would say "well, we were having a few pints in the pub and it seemed like a good idea at the time".
But there is, I have now found out, a use for it. If there is something really bad going on in the East End you get a great view.
This was a clear cloudless blue sky - all the darkness in the sky was from a fire at Stratford, some miles away in north-east London, off to the left from the point of view of this picture.
I was on a bus on my way to work after a morning doing other things when I saw this:
So, just in case, I wandered round trying to find out what was going on and work out where the fire was. I wouldn't want to get onto a train and find myself stuck in a tunnel as lines closed down or people were being evacuated past me. As it turned out the fire was miles east of where I work and there was no problem, but I was being very cautions until I either heard some news or got a good enough view to see where it was.
So I walked over to Stave Hill about a quarter of a mile away and got a view over the whole of south and east London. I reckon the cloud was at least five miles long and a mile high. An astonishing sight.
Thinking about it over the last few days, with and without beer, I now tend to agree with the idea that Bonfire is a practical demonstration of liberty. Despite the rather overblown flowery language some of the Lewes societies use on their programmes.
Even - in fact especially - the burning of effigies of the living and the dead, offensive though that is. (This year Commercial Square burned a police superintendent on a rocket) It genuinely is a matter of free speech. If you are only free to say nice things you aren't free. Free speech is the freedom to say evil and offensive things. Who would object to you saying only good things? If everyone burned in effigy was either safely dead, or obviously evil, then someone somewhere would be controlling who we are allowed to insult or protest against. If you can't burn the Pope, who can you burn?
The same goes for meeting together in large numbers. Freedom of assembly and movement has to be the freedom to assemble in a way that might potentially worry or disturb some others. If you an only meet together in places where everyone agrees it is proper for you to meet, and in numbers that annoy nobody then you are not free to move and meet.
Burnings aside (and Bonfire is a memorial to real people who really were burned at the stake in Queen Mary's time) Bonfire is our carnival, our folk festival. For a value of "our" that is more or less limited to the people of the little blob at the bottom-right-hand corner of England between the Thames and the Channel, and most especially to those born or brought up in East Sussex. And its something we do in public, together. Not a display put on for us by local government or some charity or a private company (though all those are involved). Its not commercialised, packaged, or marketed (though plenty of people make a little money out of it, and why not?) Its something we do of and for ourselves.
And its something we increasingly DON'T do. Public bonfires are dying out, being replaced by managed and controlled firework displays. I love fireworks but they aren't the whole point of the thing, they are an added extra. Not that many people have bonfire parties in their own gardens any more. When I was a kid there were bonfires all over Brighton. Private ones in gardens - my parents had a Bonfire party every year when we lived in Woodingdean in the 1960s - but also communal ones. On open land outside the council estates, one more or less on the Downs, even one on the beach,. I think there was sometimes one on the Level. These were not, as far as I could tell, run by committees or some organised charity or other trying to raise money. None of your "British Lions" or Heart Foundations or whatever, worthy though they might be (I hated it when the Heart people hijacked the London to Brighton bikeride). They seemed to be mainly built by boys a little older than me nicking old furniture from dumps (and from the next estate's bonfires) And we stopped doing it. Sometime in my teenage, the practice died out.
Which I think is why so many Brighton people go to Lewes, even those of us who no longer live in the South Country. Its the one place we can carry on participating in something we were brought up to and have been doing all our lives. Even if only by standing at the side of the road and cheering.
Talking of which, when one of the bands stopped outside St Anne's and played God save the Queen and some of the crowd joined in, a man standing next to me raised his fist and gave us a verse of the Internationale. And it wasn't even me :-)
Late into town because of an apparently insanely intrusive policing policy at Brighton Station. Crash barriers and a huge snakey queue and passengers allowed on to trains in dribs and drabs by police or security staff at the carriage doors. I was queuing for over an hour, during which two trains left, one little more than half full, the other with at least some empty seats in every carriage, wile hundred of passengers were made to wait on another platform and watch them go. Then we finally got let onto a third train - and that was as crowded as the 08.27 to Charing Cross. Standing room only, aisles full of people, a dozen or more packed into every doorway. And we took over half an hour to get there because they were only letting people off the trains piecemeal at the other end - things were even more tightly controlled at Lewes, the Station Road being divided into four narrow paths by barriers forcing us to walk very slowly, and a complete line of police shoulder-to-shoulder at the bottom of Station Street by the Lansdowne Arms (which is where I would probably have tried to go on any night but Bonfire).
On the whole it was an astonishingly well-behaved crowd. Are people so passive in other countries? But I hate to think what it might have been like a few hours later when a lot more drink had been taken. What looks like a pointless bureaucratic irritation to a sober man at 6pm can seem a lot more like police provocation to the same man drunk at 11pm. Maybe next year I'll change at Hayward's Heath!
These things go in cycles. Apparently 1906 was a bad year. In the late 1970s and early 1980s things were quite tolerant. Then there were concerns about Cliffe's reputation, and too much drinking, and too many oiks like us coming from Brighton and crowding out the pubs, and the usual fuss about rookies and rousers (i.e. home-made, or at least home-repurposed, bangers and jumping-jacks, although rather louder than the little fireworks that most people associate with those names). So they started to close the pubs one by one until the only place you could buy a pint in the centre of town (without being invited to the landlord's private party) was the bar of Shelley's Hotel (in these more tolerant years its the only place you can't) Security became harsh in places, lots of police blocking the roads, barriers everywhere. Nothing very bad happened. So they relaxed a little in the 1990s and opened the bars again. Nothing very bad continued to happen.
Sometimes a clampdown is kicked off by a couple of Friday or Saturday Bonfires in a row, where the crowds are typically larger. Or by a change of guard at County Hall, or a new Chief Constable, eager to make their mark (that's the rumour about the current situation) But after a year or two of nothing very bad happening the police begin to notice that large numbers of locals think they are behaving like prats and pull back a bit. Or take part in the marches themselves and start having fun. And it is rare for bad things to happen. Sussex Bonfire people tend to look after their safety rather well and the marchers more or less always know what they are doing, as do most of the regular spectators - and they (we) are a lot more used to it than people from some other parts of the world.
Anyway, I was about two hours late, and there was a huge press of crowd (more or less surrounded by police) completely blocking the way to the High Street. So I worked my round it and along Grange Road and then up the hill by St Pancras and Rotten Row and the little twitten that goes by St Anne's Church, so I got into the churchyard just a few minutes after the Grand United Procession started.
St Anne's churchyard is just about the best place to see the GUP from in some ways. I rarely manage to get down that far - we're usually coming from the other direction, and have a few pints in one of the pubs further up the street. The church is at the top of the bottleneck in the High Street - a turn in the road, a steep place, a narrower than usual street - so its hard to get to other than from the back.
And while I was there I met an unexpected friend, a crystallographer who used to work at our college and whose parents live round the corner in St Anne's Crescent. So I not only got to see the procession but had some rather nice lentil soup and mulled wine - but I had to leave to get further up the hill in time for another drink with the friends I had been expecting to see (and was staying with) before we saw the Borough procession on their way to their firesite.
As always the Borough fire site was wonderful. A REAL BONFIRE! And because we are so high up the hill, with a view all over town, we get to see everyone else's fireworks as well, as three or four displays compete with each other and bangs and flashes echo off the Downs and the cliffs. I guess this year Borough was probably the loudest, and maybe the prettiest with at one point some sort of red and gold flares shooting across each other trailing showers of sparks in front of more or less continuous wall of pink flame. Cliffe as often the most spectacular with some huge aerial bursts that cast clear shadows in the crowd around me perhaps two miles away. And Commercial Square (I think - their firesite was in a close line of sight with another) maybe the flashiest, sending up rings and targets and a couple of times writing "2007" in the sky with bursting mortars.
(As usual lots more pictures if you select the links)
The Blackheath fireworks are always a bit weird.(And it is only fireworks. There has been no real Bonfire there since some time in the 1980s - I think I was at the last one - a sad loss. Well, there is a funfair, ice cream stalls, disco music and the longest row of portaloos I remember ever seeing, but that doesn't make up for no Bonfire) It starts when we walk up to the Heath. For miles around people leave their homes and all start walking in the same direction.
Someone must organise the evening - someone from the Borough Councils I suppose, they seem to be the ones through whom we pay for it - but no-one ever seems to announce it, or publicise it. Everyone who lives in Lewisham or Greenwich or Deptford just knows that on the nearest Saturday to Bonfire night (and some other big public occasions) you walk up to the Heath. So we all do. About four or five people in my street were leaving at the same time I was. A couple outside their front door pulling on wellies. A parent packing a child into a pushchair. With no interaction or co-ordination we all start walking in the same direction.
A few metres away we get to the main road. its not crowded with pedestrians (though the motor traffic is totally jammed as always on this night) there are only a few more than normal, but they are all going in the same direction. Slightly disconcerting in a way, Just a little bit odd.
As we walk down towards the station and round the corner into Lewisham Way more people join us from side-roads and shops and pubs. Most of them look happy, many of them have drinks in their hands. The pavements are now crowded. We are all doing the same thing but separately - we are in little parties of two or three or four, or walking on our own, but walking in parallel, all bound the same way. Its like those sentimental photographs of crowds walking to football matches through carless streets in the early 1900s, fans of opposing sides walking together. Or some sort of 1950s or early 1960s horror movie when everyone leaves their homes to eerie theremin or glass harmonica music and sets off to the meeting place or the alien landing site, with no idea why they are going. Keep watching the skies!
These streets aren't car-free. They are blocked with cars and buses unable to move, jammed for miles. The police try to keep Shooter's Hill and the A2 open - though they are reduced to a crawl - but every other road in the neighbourhood is blocked by thousands of happy walkers. People who don't know what is going on look stunned. Has there been an accident? Is there some problem? Pity the poor bus-passenger.
The rest of us are having fun of course. It is fun, in a relaxing sort of social-solidarity way, all walking in the same direction together. It feels good. I take the back way up Granville Park rather than straight up Lewisham Hill which looks too full of people to be easy to walk along. For ten or fifteen minutes I wind up through the narrow tree-lined dark streets on the western slopes of the Heath, past Victorian and Edwardian "villas" and "mansions" and "cottages" whose asking price increases by a thousand pounds for every step you take (genuinely - if I had gone up the quick way it would have been more like a thousand pounds a foot - the Orchard and Lethbridge Estates and Sparta Street council flats at the bottom of the hill are among London's lower-rent areas, houses on Dartmouth Row only a few hundred metres higher up the hill can fetch well over two million each more than similar houses in Lewisham)
By the time we got to Blackheath we were eighty thousand strong.
Blackheath always turns out to be bigger than it looks. Urban eyes overlooking it from the edge read it as a flattish open park or recreation ground, crossed by a few roads, and surrounded by large houses and hotels. You expect it to be a larger version of something like Parker's Piece in Cambridge, or Hackney Downs, or Primrose Hill, or the Level in Brighton. Instead you find a confusing maze of larger and smaller bits and pieces of surprisingly wild open land and lawns and sports grounds mixed up with houses and churches and pubs and shops. As if someone had taken Hampstead and Hampstead Heath and mixed them up together, shaken not stirred, and laid them out at random. And it is only one part of a connected web of open spaces sprawling over suburban south-east London. Its north side overlooks the centre of Greenwich at The Point and is adjacent to the utterly different Greenwich Park, - London;s most beautiful large park, surrounded by its flint walls and landscaped centuries ago, to create a like Bushey park with a posher palace. To the south and east it merges into sports grounds and recreation grounds towards Kidbrook, which can then lead you south to Mottingham and almost to Bromley, or east via Charlton and the old woods on Shooter's Hill and Plumstead back almost to the Thames at Erith (as in my previous posts here). You wouldn't think there was a peat bog in inner London would you? I was lucky I was wearing my boots.
The fireworks, as always, were magnificent,
And so back to Lewisham and a party at the pub and more fireworks and foolishly staying out too late and almost not making it on time to church in Greenwich the next morning, which would have been embarrassing under the circumstances. I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been picked up by a passing evangelist from my home town in a car who stopped and asked me if I wanted a lift. Genuinely true. I walked into church beaming and grateful. Praise the Lord.
N (he knows who he is) would protest that he is not an evangelist, and if he ever was it was years ago. But he was good news to me on Sunday.
The view from Nunhead Station 
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