Paw found this one for me, which I enjoyed particularly since Liverpool station was a frequently used junction for me when I wanted to check out things to see and do in Jack the Ripper's old neighborhood.

To be quite honest...

....this phenomena is a big part of why I decided to leave England. I was lucky enough not to be victimized directly, but it had a profound effect on my psychological state at times and it was easy to tell when you were talking with someone who was wound up about it in one way or another - regardless of the topic actually being discussed. Folk often asked me about the cameras and what effect they had on my mindset, but really it was the effect they (and all that comes with them) had on people I interacted with.
This is also probably why I'm overly quick to get fed up with the highly reported Toronto crime "scene". Putting out thirteen trillion images and twenty kajillion words worth of media for every dick who stabs another dick doesn't do anything to make me safer, you dicks!

Jesus Christ London...

...this is not a good idea!

Addendum: Ah, now I see why that picture of Patrick Swayze I used seems to be attracting so much traffic.

The realm of dystopian fiction takes another step into reality

Man, the terrible treatment of a friendly street artist is bad enough - but finding out that Britain is continuing to amass the world's largest collection of DNA through law enforcement makes me feel all the better about leaving London.

Oh the fallacy of all skyscrapers being phallacies

I'm a goddamn 195 pound blogging machine today!

This, this is a thing to take pride in.

A friend and former coworker from my Network Rail job in London has recently moved on to a position in the rather interesting London Shard Project. It aims to not only be another distinctive part of the London skyline, a la the Gherkin, but to create "a vertical city". I find this highly amusing as such a concept has shown up frequently in the bleak, long-running, British sci-fi comic Judge Dredd. We can only hope that the future residents of this impressive piece of architecture do not succumb to Block Mania. Seriously though, it is a fascinating project - I recommend at least checking out the slick animated building guide and the image gallery.

A Picture Tells a Thousand Canterbury Tales

I was cleaning out my camera yesterday and it turns out that I still have a few pictures from England to share. Not long before I left I decided to head out to see my family in Broadstairs one last time and during that visit my Aunt and I went to the Canterbury markets.Me talking a picture of an old library, fancy that.
I considered checking out Canterbury's famous cathedral (This is the gateway).
But, as George Carlin has informed us with great wit, GOD NEEDS MONEY. At fifteen quid for entry I decided that I'd stand by my desire not to give money to corrupt institutions with belief systems that I strongly disagree with - though I did sneak the following picture by utilizing my camera's zoom function.
I then set off back into the market and pursued the not so new pagan worship practice of shopping. True story.

London Wrap-up

Now, as I've mentioned, this site has been pretty much a love letter to London (and England in general) since day one. Lately I have corrected this, as I'd like anyone interested in visiting or moving there to get a more well rounded picture.

But just for the sake of a kind of proper closure or to balance the summation or to appease the curiously Churchillian markings in the frost on my window...a quick parade of positive points.

Boredom is bore-derline fictional
See what I did there?

Seriously, even if you are low on cash you basically have to be terminally stupid and/or lazy not to be able to find something to do in London. I couldn't even do a brief summary of all there is to do by way of music venues, museums, restaurants, pubs, nightclubs, galleries, theaters, cinemas, shops, libraries, parks, markets, novelty locations...let me put it another way. If you are a Person with Interests and A Little Initiative, then you shall find somewhere in London that Caters To You. Time Out magazine is basically the bible of things to do in the city, but obviously there are other sources of information on the matter - many, many sources. Given that this sort of thing was the real meat and potatoes for this site, I'll stop here. Throw a dart at the archives and you're bound to hit an entry filled with my rabbling on about one fun place to go to or another.

Transit
Like anywhere on Earth, longtime locals will groan about the public transit system whenever they get the chance. I'd be lying if I said I never had my own frustrations with the famous London tube system or that I hadn't experienced the joy of having myself compacted into the side of a train car during rush hour. That being said, getting around London was easier and quicker than anything I have experienced anywhere else I've ever been. The slowest late periods and Sundays still managed to blow the finest Ottawa bus service out of the water - and in this I refer not only to the tube but the overland rail and London's own bus services. Like a lot of things in the city, it's expensive...but a clever individual can really get a lot for their money.

I will say this, if you have the extra time and patience then the bus system can actually be much better for your wallet (generally running at half the price) and your peace of mind than the tube. When I worked in Barbican for a stretch in August, it only added ten minutes to my route to take the bus and I often got half the double decker to myself (plus the childish good fun of a double decker bus ride). The bus is also advantageous in that you better learn the space between neighborhoods and see London as a whole, instead of disconnected dots of radius surrounding tube stations. Overland rail, which is much more prominent south of the Thames than tube lines, also carries this advantage.

By and by, whether you go for a day or a year, do not waste precious currency on any map guides to London unless they are the London A-Z. This is widely accepted as the finest guide to finding your way about the city and it is sold in damn near every book, stationary and even corner store in the city. There are a variety of sizes and formats, but a standard paperback sized version will do you plenty fine. A cousin of mine who has lived in the city all his life, working in various locations, still gets some use out of his copy thanks to the density of London neighborhoods.

I said it before and I'll say it again, Google Maps does not have your back in this city. Only a month ago it got me lost down some dark alleys about half a kilometer off-target from where I was trying to get to, despite punching in the correct address. To be fair, I shouldn't have placed so much trust in the green arrows location, but to be vanity fair the damn thing should be accurate - particularly when you consider that Google Maps is powered by the imprisoned souls of Christopher Columbus, James Cook and Marco Polo.

Anyways - at the end of the day, Londoners have an understandable love affair with the tube system which walks hand in hand with the daily grumbling. This has led to some rather amusing and detailed websites which you may enjoy checking out. Serious fans of the film Amelie could get a bonus kick out of this one.

Employment
If you are just looking for a steady paycheck, as opposed to gunning for a specific career path, than this is in fact a good city to be in. Recruitment agencies grow like weeds and though they can be a waste of time, I can honestly say I got all but one of my jobs over there through the durn things. Skilled workers (i.e. anybody who can put around in Microsoft Office Suite) who want to do a kind of working vacation in London shouldn't have a big problem once they get past the initial obstacles posed by immigration.

Football
Plenty of stadiums and enthusiastic pubs in which to catch a game. I myself lived not too far from Arsenal stadium. Even without being a rabid sports fan, I found myself getting a little sucked in. If you want to work your way in with the locals, you could do a lot worse than to follow football and learn enough to join conversations on the subject - just be careful who you swear allegiance and to keep an eye on what team any given group of pub dwellers may be supporting. The infamous football fan violence-o-rama phenomena isn't as bad as it's made out to be, but folk can still get more worked up about it than politics and religion combined.

and finally...

The one line hit parade
- Old and varied architecture, lots of it!
- The relatively new smoking ban.
- Hell of bike lanes/paths.
- Waitrose supermarkets.
- Wide availability and variety of alcoholic beverages.
- A cacophony of ever changing and specific-yet-vague slang. My personal favorites would have to include lairy, chav and shrapnel (definition C). Though not slang per se, the term gormless will always have a special place in my lexicon.

And finally, finally (for real) finally...

London is a place where you can count on more before less, louder before quieter, faster before slower and so forth. There are many, many aspects of the city that I would define as being neither better nor worse but simply more intense than anywhere else. This is something which drew me from the comparatively quiet hamlet of Ottawa, but I can honestly say that after thirteen months there I am happy to be in Carp again - which I shall put up a couple of updates about, if only to show that it has it's charm and places of interest. From there we shall see!

Mid to late Janurary is looking to be a more realistic time for my moving to Toronto. I reckon that I should maybe try learning from past experience? Specifically, I think that if I had found the patience to save a little more money and weigh the pros and cons of who to stay with while I sorted out the job/apartment equation in London...well, it might have taken me a lot less time to get settled in and I wouldn't have felt like my situation was as precarious as it did on some days. So I reckon I may grab a short term job doing whatever, so that I can pad my bank account a bit more before heading down.

Anyways!

I doubt this will be the last time I write about England just as I do the notion that I shall never return there. A friend I made is moving to Berlin in the new year and, depending on What Happens, I may fly over to visit her - and Berlin and maybe Paris as well.

I promise, this is not the end of this here bloog.

BLOOG.

Crap Bags

Holy crap bags I had a great weekend catching up with people...and there are still more folk to see!
Though I wouldn't call this a first world problem, it certainly is better than a kick in the face.

So yes, back to the task at hand of examining the less appealing side of Londinum - to be followed by something positive.

Crime
London is a big city and it has a somewhat notorious crime problem, despite an overall decline in crime rates in recent years. Like the high cost of living, this is something which most of the human race is well aware of - regarding big cities in general, if not London specifically. Islington ranked fairly well in the overall London borough crime charts.

As in Germany, strict knife and gun laws have led to a trend towards "weaponized" dogs amongst gang members and thuggish types in general. Pitbulls (and mixed breeds with a healthy bit of pitbull in them) are very trendy amongst Chavs and their ilk for precisely the associations that make most other folk shy away from them. In Islington, Finsbury and Hackney I saw more of these dogs than any other by far and I must admit that it was a little annoying how my view of them had been changed to one of apprehension by the almost inescapable headlines put out by the various news outlets (which generally bore a great resemblance to the style and bluster of millennial American journalism).

Though it's been many years since the infamous Kray Twins ran around Bethnal Green, organized crime is still a force in the city - with the Russian Vory most recently capturing the public imagination in Cronenburg's latest.

But la dee dah

I generally felt perfectly safe as I went about London, be it the shiny tourist paradise along Embankment or getting lost in the Kray's old neighborhood while trying to find an illegal bar. This is despite a failed terrorist attack that happened in a part of Picadilly Circus I'd been in only a couple of days prior. Say what you will about the big brother effect, all those CCTV cameras left me feeling safer than if they weren't there. As a friend of mine put it, "Try living in Israel for a year, then move back to London and see how scary it feels".

That being said, I can see my patience for them wearing thin if the new talking camera initiative gets some serious momentum behind it. I can't say as I see a lot of wisdom in the ongoing ASBO program either - generally the British law seems focused almost entirely on the treating the symptoms of crime while paying little heed to addressing the causes and this is displayed rather well by ASBOs. Better to try and brand a child with a mark of cain than to find out why he or she is acting up in the first place? I guess, seeing as how they are so effective at deterring further offenses.

Pollution
Cars are the primary culprit of London's pollution troubles, sparking Mayor Ken Livingstone's congestion charge and low emission zone initiatives. I've talked a bit about this before, in the broad strokes, but I haven't really said anything about my personal experience. I can tell you that the entire time I was in London, when I blew my nose the results were always dark grey going on black. This had only ever happened to me before if I had spent an evening indoors with several heavy smokers, so it was certainly disconcerting when I noticed the same thing after spending an entire day out of doors and romping through St. James park.

I also remember feeling a slight tug on my lungs when I was in certain areas during my first three weeks. That went away as I got used to it but, as is generally the case with these things, getting used to it was a tad more disconcerting.

General Filth
Walk around London's core and you'll probably wonder why London has such a reputation for being a dirty city. Outside the inner core, it's not unusual in a lot of neighborhoods (including my own) to see garbage bags burst open with their guts decorating the sidewalk, on top of the usual littering. The practice of fly tipping is also well exercised in some parts. Coming from Ottawa, you can appreciate how this drove me crazy and took the longest of anything to get used to. I know that part of the reason is the way that local councils charge for rubbish collection, but that can't possibly be the whole story.

When it comes to recycling, I can say that the public attitude generally doesn't match the enthusiasm and PR on the subject which is put out by the government. I could toss out some theories on this, but I don't feel qualified to say anything of great substance. Suffice to say, I found this difficult to reconcile after the first thirty times it came up.

So okay, enough already. Next post I'll see what I can do to sum up the great things about London/England.

--------
Addendum: For those of you who are a fan of Saul Willaims and/or free music of a high quality, may I suggest you head on over to his website to download The Rise and Inevitable Liberation of Niggy Tardust! Interestingly, Trent Reznor has produced the album as well as helping with writing and backing vocals.

Shedding Pounds

Right then, let's look at one of the things about London which ain't so fabulous and which I glossed over while I was there.

Cost of Living
Now, you don't move to the world's second most expensive city (Moscow took the lead, fancy that!) and expect it not to be...you know...costly and if you did, well then you shouldn't have been allowed outside your polyurethane bubble-diaper.

This is something which a few naysayers and honest-meaning worriers brought up during my last few weeks before departure. My response was usually along the lines of "Well, the seven million people living there seem to manage somehow. I'll just have to figure out how they do it". Now, of course, it's not worth getting into how every class and strata of those seven million survive seeing as how I myself don't fit into every demographic - I'm not every man or even every woman.

So the question is, how does some twat who is on the other end of a degree but not working at a highly professional level get by (while pursuing the arts in one form or another)? Well the answers seemed to boil down to...

1) Be a Trustafarian
2) Live with those who begot you
3) Live well outside of the parts of London which generally entice young, idealistic folk to move there (essentially zones one and two).
4) Live with a reasonably large number of house mates (as I did).
5) Squat (for reasons unknown to man or beast, VICE UK repeatedly pushes this option).

The thing I learned over time was that contract work, like what I did at Network Rail and in Barbican, generally pays a decent amount more than entry level work in anything which could lead to a career. The average starting pay in non-temp work is fifteen thousand pounds annual and honestly, (within option four) you have to live incredibly frugally without ever getting sick...unless you are comfortable with contributing to the epic personal debt phenomena England is experiencing. It's not as bad as the housing crisis etc going on in the U.S. but it certainly struck me as a genuine problem, unlike the battalion of pedophiles which news outlets liked to convince the public were inhabiting every corner of England which a parent isn't actively observing.

Giving this, I'm not surprised that property investments are unto a national sport - despite estate agents generally being viewed in the same camp as used car salesmen, lawyers and street corner DVD salesmen. As with just about everything in London, the difference between being a renter and an owner is magnified to extremes that would be comedic if they weren't painfully real.

All this made it very, very difficult to save money and it seemed my options were to work dead end temp jobs that allowed me to save a bit while living in a humble ensuite or I had to look into living in such a manner that I wouldn't be taking advantage of London at all, while working an entry level job. Add on that the vast majority of entry level film work was non-paying and, well...

I appreciate that Toronto isn't a cheap town, but given that Toronto isn't Moscow then by default it has to be more affordable to live in. In fact, so long as I manage to avoid heading to Russia's capital - SOMEHOW - then I shall be living in a more affordable city.

As I've said, I'm not crossing London off my list of places to live forever - but if I return, it will be after I've made myself either a fat wedge or employable at a much higher level.

Addendum: The rest of the Emma Clarke farcical tube announcements. She was fired after London Transport found out about these, which is kind of fair, but I'm not too worried for her as this was but one of several freelance jobs and not her sole bread n' butter. I just wonder what the tube will sound like as they make the transition from her voice to someone else...or if they'll just go on the hunt for an Emma Clarke impersonator!

Emma Clarke - the voice of London tube announcments - does some fun stuff on the side

boomp3.com

Regent's Park Before Dark: Part 2

So on we go, up through the main body of the park's west side - I won't bother with pictures of that as I'm sure you're all familiar with what flat, grassy football fields look like - and then up to Regents Park Canal, which runs along the norther curve of the circular shaped park. Along this canal lay the London Zoo and I would have given it a whirl except entrance was fifteen quid and I would have only had an hour before closing. I quickly realized that that apes and giraffe's would all be from the same places as the apes etc. that I'd seen in Canadian zoos, so it wasn't a big loss. That being said, here's a snap of the portion of the zoo which lay along the canal.And then looking down the other way...Crossing this canal took me to a separate section of the park called Primrose Hill. It's from the highest point of this hill that you can achieve a magnificent view of all sorts of neighborhoods I've been talking about on this site for the past year - Soho, Embankment, Oxford Circus, Westminster, Tottenham Court Road, King's Cross...and if you cast your eyes far enough you can even see such as Shoreditch, Barbican and Canary Wharf to the east (left) or Westminster, Kensington and Hammersmith to the West (right).I took a couple of short MPEG's, the first working from east to west and then the second working the other way, but with more of a zoom. I'd suggest viewing them with the sound off as the wind was high that day, causing a great deal of uncomfortable noise to be picked up by the camera's tiny mike.


The BT telecommunications tower features prominently and perhaps these videos will reinforce what I've said about it being an immensely useful landscape for finding your bearings in North London.Eventually I came down from Primrose Hill and went back along Regent's Park Canal, heading into the North Eastern quadrant of the main park. Spotting a wild boar, I tried to grab a picture through the fence. The durn focus kept on the fence instead of the boar, but I think it's fun to see anyways.Just by the Zoo is, understandably, the headquarters for the ZSL.And now you are joining me as I swung around and starting heading southward along the eastern half of the park.Eventually I came across this little monument which, at a distance, I presumed to be some churchy church church church thing for which I had little interest.Boy, was I wrong!I fully appreciate that, in the final tally, the British going and conquering a quarter of the Earth's land area was not A Particularly Nice Thing and that it entailed some pretty heinous injustices. But it is refreshing to see someone saying "Thanks for the good stuff that came with that!", it's nice to see something which goes against the grain of almost cartoonishly villainous portrayals of imperialists if only for a greater variety of discourse. I remember often enjoying seeing this side of the Indian reaction to the English occupation in the literature I studied in my related University courses - and it wasn't always from the wealthy Brahmin class, either. As I say, though, I'm not endorsing imperialism here so much as I am a plurality of thought!.The ol' BT tower again, as seen from the South-East quadrant of the park.
This is one of the Money Buildings which lay along the eastern side of the park's perimeter. Alas, I cannot recall what it was! I do recall there were a few private residences along this stretch where, as with those homes by the heart of the Thames, the residents are not suffering from a terribly desperate need for your PayPal donations.

Regent's Park Before Dark: Part 1

To my great joy, I came across this while heading up from Baker street tube station towards Regent's park. To my slight disappointment, it turned out to be a real tourist trap. The teenagers in period costumes were kind of adorable in how they were still trying to posture and look cool while being dressed like Victorian shop keeps. I think every single one of them had been made to get the job by their parents - or maybe I'm enough of an old coot that all teenagers constantly look that way to me.

I also think they made the store two big by half, by accident maybe? The Sherlock Holmes books (in numerous versions and editions) along with some Sherlock specific merchandise only took up so much space - the rest was filled with the kind of stuff that only served to remind you that a nation's flag can be printed on just about anything you like. Ah well! I'd say something about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle spinning in his grave, but I reckon he's too decomposed for that now. Dude's corpse ain't the spinner it used to be.All around the outer ring of the park are buildings of this nature. Money-palace's which are owned either by prestigious business colleges, companies or the royals. I figured one picture of them is enough since the architecture has surprisingly little variation. That being said, there were a couple of nice homes on the east side - I reckon they probably go for a couple of bucks and a coy wink.Eventually the birds all fluttered around this old woman in a big storm. The buffeting from their wings came with such force that I had to cover my face. When I was able to steal a peek from between my mighty forearms, all the was left of her was a bloodstained hat and a coupon for a free lapdance at Tesco.The south western corner of Regent's Park seems to have benefited the most from the kind of superior landscaping I've seen in St. James and other pockets of the city. The rough center of the park is circular and features a small cafe, as well as the outdoor theater I visited a few months ago to see Macbeth in.As you head on up into the upper west side of the park you run into more standard fare as well as plenty of football fields....and eventually the zoo, which can be spotted from afar thanks to some new mountain habitats they've constructed.We'll journey up and past those plastic peaks in the next installment. Until then, try rubbing that thing between your legs - I gather people enjoy that?

Thames at Noight - Part 4: The last bits

Man oh man, I got you a first world problem right here.For the last couple of days I have been too sick to blog.Shocking, I know. It makes the potty run out of the body.But these germs which my immune system isn't so familiar with, seem to finally be getting beat back.More complex ideas than "Where are the tissues?" and "I want to live, yet even more I want to die" are starting to form in the imaginationscape.
So yeah, sorry for the quietude and promises which haven't been followed up as quickly as either you or I would like. This is what happens when you get tied to a chair and cock slapped by germs, I guess!

I - I guess!

Thames at Noight - Part 3: Saatchi invasion and Ben (Big)

Thames at Night - Part 2: London Eyeful

Words will come later when my skull drains enough to make room for them to appear.