Waylaid by Art

Cartographical exploits

Spent far too much time over the weekend doing the first bit of art (for a certain value of ‘art’) I’ve done in ages. A hand drawn map of London.

The idea (you can’t just draw something, you need to have an idea behind it for it to be real ‘art’) was to replicate half pages from the A-Z (the London street directory par exellence) by hand and then paste them all together. As each panel would be drawn without referencing the others the end result would be a fragmented, patchwork view of the city – kind of an exquisite corpse map – with roads, rivers and rail-lines fractured or just coming to dead stops. Close up it’s a mess, but zoomed out it’s still recognisably London.

(I suppose I could come up with some art-wank about it representing the tourist’s view of the city as a collection of disconnected enclaves surrounding tube stations, but that’s just a little too pretentious, even for me :))

The end result can be viewed here. Well, sort of the end result as after I scanned it I added another panel to the lower left. But you get the basic idea.

I was inspired to create the map by Londonist’s hand drawn map exhibition.  I’ve submitted it – guess we’ll see if they like it.

Hotel

Venting my frustrations…

I have completely failed to make any blog entries while I’ve been here in the UK haven’t I? This is mainly because I’ve been having too much fun to spend time sitting in front of a computer typing away, but since this is my last day with regular internet access I suppose I’d better make some kind of effort, lest everyone thinks I’ve died. So I though I’d write a review of my hotel.

For reasons that will become obvious I’m not going to name the hotel. I’d also like to state that overall my experience there has been good. There are just a few things that got on my nerves…

So let’s begin.

The staff at the “Mystery Hotel” are well organised and friendly. Check in and out are quick and efficient – if on arrival however you are allocated to rooms 114 or 115 it’s best to ask for a map. These are placed far away from the rest of the first floor, requiring extensive navigation to locate. There are signs, but these peter out before you hit the first of several staircases. Be careful – one wrong turn and you could end up battling a snow-witch in a land where it’s always winter but never Christmas.

Your room will be clean with a wardrobe, a dresser, tea/coffee making facilties, a television, a phone and a safe. If you’re shelling out enough cash there may also be room to swing a cat – this is however London so a lack of space is only to be expected. You will have an onsuite bathroom, which is just the perfect size for you to brush your teeth without difficulty while sitting on the toilet. Hot water is both hot, wet and plentiful – in an unusual twist however cold water is in short supply, your tap producing just a half hearted trickle which refuses to alter in volume no matter how far you turn it.

Your toilet is a source of unending wonder – you will wonder for all eternity how it manages to produce noises akin to the base stop of a major pipe organ for several minutes after being flushed.

A continental breakfast buffet is provided in the basement restaurant. This is clean, well organised and packed to the gills with Spaniards by 8:00am, so get in early. The selection of food, drinks and condiments is perfectly adequate. The restaurant may be open for other meals – I’m honestly not sure. I did go down to check it out one evening but it was like the Mary Celeste down there, so I fled.

Eating options in the immediate area include the Pride of Paddington pub which does a very nice grilled chicken, three separate Italian restaurants in the space of about twenty metres of road, and a diner named Garfunkle’s just past Paddington station. I can recommend the gnocchi at Bizarro (perhaps that should be ‘me can recommends tasty potato dumpaling things’?) which comes with a free floor show from the serving staff who race around the place without break like their pants are on fire. Garfunkle’s is also very nice, but beware of the tendancy of the waitstaff to assume that any change they owe you is intended as a tip.

But back to the hotel. It offers a laundry service where you place your dirty clothes in the bag provided and leave them in your room. By the time you get back from your day’s activities the maid will have tidied your room, made your bed and neatly left the bag of still-dirty clothes on top of it. I found the best laundry option was to haul your clothes one block along the street towards Paddington Station to the Harlequin laundrette where a nice Muslim lady will have them washed, folded and ready to pick up by 5:00 that evening for about ten pounds.

Your hotel room includes a phone. This will not work. The procedure to get it working involves heading down to reception where they’ll explain that you need to pay a deposit of either 40 or 50 pounds (depending on who you’re talking to) before they’ll switch it on. It’s best to do this before you head out in the morning, as it gives them the full day to do absolutely nothing about it. On your return in the evening confirm that the phone is still not working. Head back down to reception and query this. They will express puzzlement and poke at a computer for a while before stating with confidence that they have no idea what’s going on. Ask them to look into it again, and with any luck your phone line will be sorted out by the time you return to the hotel the next day. Probably.

Transport connections are excellent with the hotel only two blocks from Paddington station. Busses charge up and down the street at all hours, and if you feel lucky you can try to catch one of the wildly bucking black cabs that hurtle around the Hilton in the nightly running of the taxis.

There is an internet terminal in the bar. You’re probably better off heading down the street to the Reload internet cafe. A weekly or monthly membership is fairly cheap and you not only get decent hardware and speeds, but you can enjoy the sound of the Underground trains as they whiz back and forth only a few metres through the wall from where you sit.

So, that pretty much sums up my hotel experience here in London. Tomorrow I’ll be heading to Southampton for a few days before flying home mid next week…

PS: The wedding was excellent! I’ve put some photos (note that “some” – I’ve got heaps more) up on my Flickr Stream

Chavs and Rude Boys

I think they’re kind of like bogans…

Well, this is it. I fly out tonight for the UK. As is usual for these kind of things I am in equal parts excited and terrified. And I haven’t even finished packing yet.

The terror in particular is compounded by my discovery yesterday that I totally screwed up my dates and am arriving in London a day earlier than I thought. On the upside this means I have an extra day to do stuff in. On the downside it means I have no accommodation booked for my first night. I imagine the hotel I’m staying at will be able to fit me in, but if not I may end up sleeping under a bridge, fighting off chavs and rude boys with a pocket knife.

So yeah. My plane leaves at 1:05am tonight. Wish me luck!

Yes, well…

The frequency of my blog entries getting back to normal eh? So much for that idea 🙂

There’s been a lot of stuff to get done at work before I finish up, and there’s still a lot of stuff to be organised for the trip, and as a result I’ve been busy as all get out. And as a result of that I’ve been too tired to do much in the evenings except throw something in the microwave and collapse in front of the TV (and an unremitting diet of microwave dinners is probably not helping anyway). So keeping up with blog entries has sort of fallen by the wayside. But they should pick up sooner or later – maybe 🙂

A few quick notes on things though.

Justin and Marika

I caught up with Justin and Marika last week. We went out to dinner at Kailis Brothers in Leederville (where I had a very nice salt and pepper squid) and then walked up to the Luna to see some film I’d never heard of but which Justin and Marika said was a documentary about a family who’s house was stormed by the police and FBI in the middle of their thanksgiving dinner – sort of a social justice/abuse of power by the authorities type thing. In actual fact it turned out that the police and FBI stormed the place because the father of said family was a paedophile trading in child porn, which was frankly not what I’d been lead to expect. But it was interesting anyway, in a somewhat unsettling way. I’ll probably have more to say on it later.

Oh and it turned out that the reason Justin and Marika didn’t turn up to my birthday dinner back in February/March was because they’d just found out Marika was pregnant – and were in severe shock at the time. They’re extremely happy about it now, so congratulations guys!

The Charmed Season Finale

Gideon is dead. Good. You do have to wonder where Leo picked up the ability to shoot lightning bolts from his hands Emperor Palpetine style though. And since when was Chris telekinetic? They did a very good job in the adds of suggesting that Piper was going to die (not that I figured she’d stay dead of course, name one Halliwell sister who hasn’t been dead at some point or other) but in the end it turned out that they killed off Chris, which is fair enough because the entire temporal paradox of his very existance was rapidly becoming an embarrasment. Ummm what else? Oh yes, Barbus. It’s good to see him back. Every TV show needs a demon of fear who looks like a cross between David Bowie and Tom Waites and speaks with a Tennassee accent (Tennasse? I dunno, somewhere like that). And his turn as the Demon of Hope in the mirror universe was hilarious. Actually speaking of the mirror universe it was nice to see that they kept to the convention of the guys all having pointy little beards and the girls done up as goths – just so we could tell who was who 🙂

(Oh yeah, normally I’d regard Rose McGowan done up as a goth as a dream come true, but they went way overboard with the hair – it looked like she was wearing three wigs on top of each other – so no dice 🙂

Ummm, sure there was some other stuff I was going to write about, but I’d better get on with some real work (I’m in the office early again today) . So, farewell until I get myself together enough to write again, which could be sometime in November at this rate 🙂

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