There is buried treasure at Hoe Lane. There is a disused, public right of way with railings on either side in the middle of Theobalds Park. Temple Bar used to be here, but they put it back in the City. Time for a pink gin. Lots of swans about. The New River trek continues.
The Queen of Tonga stole the show at the Coronation, but I knew that already. My grandfather worked at the Royal Small Arms factory at Enfield Lock, helping to make rifles and machine guns. As did Leslie Welch, the Memory Man. He died when I was about 15 months old, but I do have a memory of him. I’m told he used to chain-smoke, eat boiled sweets, and barely say a word. The river Lea splits in two round there, but rivers don’t have locks, and nobody knows if it’s spelt Lea or Lee, as in Lee-Enfield rifle, and I find it confusing. What I did not know was that his parents also moved down from Sunderland, and are buried somewhere at St James’s Church at Enfield Highway. I didn’t even know that he had parents. Is that normal? I think he was also in the Merchant Navy. My mother and he were watching TV one time, and it featured Galveston, or some port in Texas, and he remarked that he’d been there. One of the few things he said. I don’t talk much either.
I don’t understand water towers, not at all, but the one in Trent Park is what they all should look like. Space age, like Cockfosters tube station, clearly ahead of its time in its use of concrete. A gem. The obelisk is imported, however. The golf course has public footpaths. I remember the pair of trees straddling a fairway being thin rather than wide, but that’s the memory.
There is nothing good about Ponders End. We got moved there when I was 13. Nothing there, except a world class view from the 18th floor. The whole of north London, and much else besides. On a clear day, you could see as far as Crystal Palace and Croydon transmitters. I liked living up high, there is a feeling of escape to it.
"It's as close as London gets to New Jersey. But it's one of my favourite places for walking, through the Lee Valley. It gets beautiful in that urban way, but then you go through soap factories up near Ponders End. It's got a wonderful, dislocated, alienated feeling."
How the **** did somebody come up with that design in their head, have a sufficient understanding of mathematics, materials and engineering to figure out it would work, and find a builder skilled enough to make it? It's amazing.
The pantheon in Rome is much more amazing, completed ~128 A.D. Especially how the dome was constructed and the materials used to lighten the load of the dome itself.
Great cities must carry their identity to their fingertips. Go to a corner of some bar or cafe in Paris, find a speck of dust there, and it will be effortlessly, unmistakably Parisian. Urban London is all contrasts. One minute is King’s Cross, now a high-tech, international transport hub, the next is quiet, Georgian Wharton Street, beautifully lined by cherry blossom. Children with toy guns and London accents running around the 1950s Golden Lane estate, like in a timewarp, all of it forgotten London.
April Fools' Day or April Fool's Day is an annual custom on April 1 consisting of practical jokes and hoaxes. It is thought to have originated as a pagan Spring ritual, and is known to predate the festival of Easter by several millennia. Cave paintings indicate the earliest known hoaxes, which were faked human sacrifices, most likely to Moon deities, although some scholars reject this interpretation.