Tag: photo

At the Victoria and Albert museum.

This is a wall of mediaeval carved faces in the V & A, all gazing at the opposite wall.

I have always been fascinated by this glass object that hangs in the main atrium of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I don’t know much about it, but it is so weird and compelling that I can’t resist. It wasn’t this dark – I was tryig to catch the flare of light around the sides of it.

This is a picture of a picture by David Goldblatt of Strijdom Square in Pretoria, now known as something else. JG Strijdom was one of the several people credited with being the “father of apartheid”, and this square in central Pretoria was one of the many examples of an architectural style that can only be described as ‘brute Afrikaner’. When we were kids we spent some time in this square, being as it was, close to where we had speech lessons (do kids still take speech lessons – learning how to recite poetry and read?), and I remember waiting here many times for Elizabeth’s class to finish so we could go home.

I also remember my mother being very entertained by the fact that one year after rag week a group of students had planted empty beer bottles in Strijdom’s ears.

At some point in the late nineties, the parkade under Strijdom Square collapsed, sending old JG’s head plummeting into the depths. A more fitting end I cannot imagine.

Well, so much for the paperless office. This is the desk of an unidentified reporter, and well, it looks like many other reporters’ desks that I’ve seen over the years. I am an anomaly in that I can usually see my keyboard, mouse and phone, and can even find a place for my coffee cup.

Holland Park is one of London’s many parks, and one of my favourite. It’s not hugely touristy, not being close to major attractions, or famous in and of itself, so it tends to have people just kind of hanging out, exercising, picnicking, playing frisbee, just doing stuff. It’s a great place to people-watch, in fact.

This is the unlikely sight that greets visitors to the office of both The Independent newspaper (as well as its sister publication, “i” and the London Evening Standard), along with The Daily Mail (and Metro). That’s the esteemed Lord Northcliffe under the fountain, the man who invented the tabloid newspaper, and that’s a couch shaped like a giant pair of lips.

OK.

I’m baking today. It’s a bank holiday, and tomorrow there is a three-hour-long academic meeting. Way back when, I promised my colleagues that if they distrubuted my survey request to all of their former students, I would bake them cookies for this meeting. I don’t know whether they have done that, but since then I’ve also had to deal with the chaos of getting people to double-mark sixty project modules, and while it is part of everyone’s job, I do feel like I’ve been asking favours of people, so I figured I’d bake cookies. These are hamentashcen, which I love, although filled with plum jam, not poppyseeds, this time.

There is a discussion going on among friends of mine about cats on the backs of couches (yes, I know, we have such intellectual and high-brow conversations), and well, this is my contribution: Giles on the back of the couch.