5 posts tagged “london”
for those who do not already know it, i am a christmas junkie. totally. i love just about every part of it except the part that insists on putting fruit into baked goods (blech). and this year i have decided to share my particular love with everyone. i am settng my own NaBloPoWhatever challenge and will be posting a carol or christmas song every day until we leave for denmark. as today begins the onslaught of adventy stuff (in our family, the christmas season always starts on 1 december - the tree goes up, carols go on, mad helpless grins abound) i thought i'd start with a bit of a bang with one of my all-time favourites, 'this little babe' from benjamin britten's a ceremony of carols. this version is sung by the choir of st john's college cambridge.
today has kind of been overwhelming in its christmassiness, actually. and in the excess of suddenly-arrived activity. i went back to the doctor yesterday and it seems i am in limbo with inconclusive test results resulting in a verdict of "try to stretch yourself more and come back if the symptoms recur". hmm. anyway, today i definitely stretched. first thing on getting up, the first carols of the season went on the stereo and i had a bit of a tidying frenzy in the living room, which has looked like a bomb site for weeks, in preparation for the raising of the tree (insomuch as any tree that is 2 feet high can be "raised"). then we gathered ourselves and our christmas lists up, walked up the hill and boarded the tube for the west end. today was vip ("very important pedestrians") day when they block off oxford st, bond st and regent st to all traffic and shoppers can revel in being able to walk down the centre of a couple of the busiest streets in london without getting squished. jostled, yes, because the place becomes an absolute zoo with christmas shoppers, but not actually flattened. this in itself is joyous. so we revelled a bit more by heading in to the selfridge's christmas department (instant snow!!!) and then on to john lewis' christmas department (plush snowmen with cute carrot noses!! wobbly tin santas!!!) and doing a little random christmas shopping on the way. djeli's shopping is now just about done. mine languishes still, but at least i have weekdays and don't need to be harrassed to go out and do it. anyway, it got dark and started to rain, so we headed for oxford st tube... along with everyone else... so we got scared and decided to walk to tottenham court rd and it seems that during the interim everyone decided to not catch the tube after all and we practically had a carriage to ourselves all the way to ealing broadway.
we got back to ealing just in time for the beginning of the pitshanger "light up the lane" festivities. every year they hold a street party up at the village shops when they switch on the christmas lights. we missed it last year, so we really wanted to see this year's offering. and soooo much fun. they really do the whole community celebration so well here. if it was done in australia it would have been supremely half-arsed and no one would have turned up except for a couple of grannies and maybe a hippie or two, depending on the area. but here, most of the restaurants had put out stalls selling easily-munchable-on-the-run fare, the bakery was madly baking fresh pizzas (they're about to start selling these properly and omg yes, that's an excellent thing - soooo yum) and had prepared a big batch of chocolate cakes with stars on them made out of that funny plasticky but somehow yummy icing you get on fruit cakes, and heaps of bell- and star-shaped butter biscuits and other seasonal delights. the grog shop and pub were selling cups of mulled wine (djeli had mulled wine with cherry brandy which really had quite a kick to it) and pimms winter with apple juice (lovely and warming - i had this one). there was even a puppet show outside the library, and all sorts of stuff going on, and fireworks going off at both ends of the lane when they flicked the switch for the lights. and so many people! it's so lovely to see people heading out to stuff like this with their kids and just standing round in the street chatting away to their neighbours and (often, round here) relations with a glass of mulled wine in one hand and a mince pie in the other. it's the way the world should be.
i'm a wuss. i freely admit this. i didn't want to wait in line in the rain till 3am for my copy of harry potter and the deathly hallows, so i ordered it from the local bookshop. i'm picking it up this morning :-)
but i didn't want to miss the party either! so last night, djeli & i hopped onto the tube and made the trek into piccadilly to inspect the line outside waterstone's. and great muggles!, i'm glad we did. we started off just walking down piccadilly, but quickly realised that the queue had taken a turn down a side alley on the piccadilly circus side of waterstone's. a carnival atmosphere was very much in evidence - costumes, cheering, placards saying things like "the giant squid is a horcrux!". i talked to one girl near the front who said she had been there since 2pm on wednesday. i told her i admired her dedication. which i most definitely do. apparently some horrible people, in the last couple of hours before the midnight opening, had been running up and down the front of the queue shouting out what happens in the book. bastards. hung drawn and quartered, they should be :-/
so we decided to follow the queue and see how long it was. so, from the entrance of the shop it went back towards piccadilly circus, then down the alleyway to the street which runs behind waterstone's parallel to piccadilly (i don't know what it's called - would have to look it up). it then went right along the length of that street, turned left and carried on all the way to pall mall where it turned again to the left just for a few metres. djeli did some calculating on the A-Z he has in his PDA and worked out that (at about 11.30pm) it was 0.47 mile long! everyone was terribly cheery and there were some excellent costumes - witches, wizards and school uniforms galore, but i also saw a luna lovegood (wearing her lion-head hat), a clutch of death-eaters, a tonks and even a full-blown lucius malfoy. while we were following the queue, a motorcyclist drove into the kerb and came off his bike. ouch. but he insisted he was ok and weaved off on his bike a couple of minutes later. everyone was convinced that he'd got distracted by the queue and wasn't paying attention to where he was going. hope he's ok...
there were more than a couple of people sitting around, doggedly attempting to finish (presumably re-)reading 'half-blood prince' before getting hold of 'deathly hallows'.
as midnight approached and a chant went up - 'har-ry! har-ry!' (interspersed with a few 'snape! severus snape!'s) - we went round to the front of the store for the opening. soooo many sight-see-ers, like us, although a lot of them seemed to have been lurking out the front for a good long while and i wonder whether they thought perhaps some of the actors from the films might have turned up. and then the countdown to midnight started: "'five! four! three! two! one!" and everyone cheered and all the cars backed up along piccadilly because of the crowd extending out into the street honked their horns and then waterstone's finally opened their doors and let the fans in. then more cheers as the first people to receive their copies came out with them held high. ever so glad i didn't miss it! really a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
ok. enough consorting with you muggles - i'm off up the road to get my copy! happy pottering!
i know everyone else has already posted about the marvellous snow we had yesterday, but it took me about 4 hours just to push 6 photos through photoshop, so i'm a little late.
we hadn't heard any weather reports at all, so it was a complete surprise to us. djelibeybi woke me up, then tottered over to the window and obviously woke up himself with a start and said "There's SNOW!!!!" at which of course I shot out of bed and we both got terribly excited and started hurling on multiple layers of any clothing we could find and grabbing at cameras, first snapping from inside...
then gradually making our way out into it.
But I never imagined it could be so very beautiful - it was like a Christmas card, and the snow itself was so light and fluffy - when you picked it up it was like cold (but not particularly bitingly cold) fairy floss, but without the stickiness. Absolutely perfect for snowballs. And yes, we did experiment with this :-)
I'm quite glad we don't have any more today - for the purely selfish reason that I need to go into town and hand-deliver my spnm shortlist application and meet up with the minion and the world's best ex-boss for coffee - but it would be nice (again for purely selfish reasons) if it did it again tomorrow :-) And at least we haven't gone the whole winter without any wintery weather at all, which was what we seemed to be heading for before yesterday. Hurrah!
Show us the best picture you took in 2006.
Submitted by Captured Moments.
hmm. it's kind of hard to pick just one out of sooooo many (455 - and that's just the ones i've posted!) even though i think i posted a lot of rubbish to flickr this year for which i humbly apologise. not sure what's happened really... anyway, so here's a selection (although some of the rubbish is because my camera has taken to just putting a sprinkling of digital noise all over everything so it's rare i get a crystal-clear shot any more)
first, from around london:
from vienna:
from greece:
and i think the best drawing i did in 2006 was this one:
Show us why you love the city you live in.
Submitted by meg.
because it can be beautiful:
because it's also grimy:
because it's close to the countryside and to beaches which aren't like beaches at all:
and because it's close to everywhere else i could possibly want to be:
oh, and because it's where i've wanted to live all my life. mustn't forget that!
