Tag Archives: london

Buggy battles

Posted on by
1

Buggy

 

All public transport buses in London have dedicated areas for buggies (baby strollers, push-chairs etc.) Other passengers need to, or are made to feel that they need to, move out of the way so that a buggy can be parked in the designated area.  So far so good. Many child carers use their childrens. buggies as shopping trolleys, often overloaded with bags of merchandise. Often, the child or children being transported in the buggies are removed from them during the bus journey and then occupy a passener seat. The empty buggies then simply take up space that could be used by other passengers on a crowded vehicle.

Now, there are clear signs by the designated ‘buggy area’ that state quite clearly that the area is also for use by persons confined to wheelchairs. These signs also make it very clear that wheelchair users have priority over buggies in the special area on the bus.

Clashes, often quite uncivil, occur if too many carers pushing buggies are competing for the the limited space available for buggies and wheelchairs. Or, even worse, battles can break out between whelchair users who want to board a bus and buggy owners, who are already on board the bus. Both the child carers and the wheelchair-bound  people can often behave quite unpleasantly. Unlike the wheelchair occupant, almost all baby buggies can be folded up and placed in the luggage area that is available on every bus.

Yesterday, it was a sunny afternoon and I was travelling in a bus past Swiss Cottage in north west London. The buggy/wheelchair area was occupied by two baby buggies and a folded buggy was in the luggage area. We stopped at a bus stop where a man in a wheelchair was waiting. He wanted to board the bus, but the owners of the buggies occupying the designated area would neither fold their buggies nor leave the bus to make space for the priority user, the wheel chair user. The bus driver had to get out to sort out the stand-off. He wanted the buggy users to disembark, but they would not budge. In the end, the wheel chair bound fellow behaved decently, saying he would wait for the next bus.

In my opinion, both wheelchair passengers and buggy pushers can easily manage to wait  (especially when the weather is good) until a bus arrives with sufficient space. After all, the wheelchair user is sitting and waiting as is the buggy borne child, who is often far too big and independently mobile to be confined to a buggy. What do you think, dear reader?

 

 

Picture from: https://www.britax-roemer.co.uk/pushchairs/strollers

It has its uses

Posted on by
Reply

Psychedelic headscarf_240

 

In the UK, unlike some countries in Europe, we have a fairly liberal attitude towards Moslem women covering their heads and faces to a greater or lesser extent. In the last dental practice where I worked until I retired, our patients came from all over the world. A not insignicant number of our female patients were Moslems who wore some kind of head covering. A few of them insisted on being treated by female dentists, but most of them did not mind seeing one of the male dentists.

One of my female Moslem patients came to the UK from a north African country. She always wore a loose-fitting headscarf, but did not cover up her face. One day, she needed to have a front (incisor) tooth removed. I explained to her that the situation was such that she would have be without any replacement for it for 24 hours – I cannot remember why. 

“Will you be able to cope without that tooth for a day. The gap will show every time you speak or smile,” I said.

Picking up the end of the scarf she was wearing, she covered her mouth with it, and then said humorously:

“This has its uses!“

And with that comment, she allowed me to remove the troublesome tooth, and then left the surgery with her face covered. She looked like a typical Moslem woman wearing a face-covering. Nobody would have guessed that she was missing a front tooth.

Conducted by an Albanian

Posted on by
Reply

OLSI 1

 

The Victorian gothic St Stephens Church in Gloucester Road has great acoustics for orchestral music. On the evening of the 15th of June 2019, we attended a wonderful concert of “Symphonic Dances” performed by the London City Philharmonic Orchestra. I have been to several other concerts where this ensemble has played. This time the orchestra had been enlarged so considerably that it only just fitted into the space available for them at the east end of the church. This magnificent collection of first-class musicians was masterfully and sensitively conducted by the Albanian conductor Olsi Qinami, who studied at the Academy of Arts in Tirana and then at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris.

The ambitious programme consisted of three symphonic dance pieces, all composed in the USA. Variations on a Shaker Theme by Aaron Copeland (1900-90), son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, got the concert off to a tuneful start. This was followed by a memorably good rendering of the vibrant Symphonic Dances by Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), son of Ukranian Jewish parents. This exciting piece contains familiar tunes from Bernstein’s musical drama West Side Story. After an interval, there was a piece, Symphonic Dances, composed late in the life of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), who emigrated to the USA from Russia in 1918.

The three pieces were all by composers, whose families had ‘roots’ in the former Russian Empire, but each of them was completely different. All three were highly enjoyable. Olsi Qinami seemed to be able to get the best out of the orchestra seemingly effortlessly. He stood on his podium calmly without any dramatic gestures and achieved wonders with his large well-disciplined orchestra, which according to the programme notes contains players from all over the world including two with Albanian names (Pranvera Govori, violinist, and Idlir Shytu, cellist).

In summary, I am truly pleased that I did not miss this concert. It was pure joy throughout. Although Olsi’s previous concerts have all been outstanding, “Symphonic Dances” was his best so far. I look forward to the next, which will be in St Stephens Church on Saturday, 5th of October 2019.

Flying rats

Posted on by
1

pigeons

 

My late mother was awfully concerned about avoiding germs. For example, every can of food had to be washed before opening it just in case rats or mice had scampered across it in a warehouse.  Also, when we visited toilets in public places in the 1960s, we were told to put toilet paper on the seats so that we would not pick up germs that other users had left behind. Interestingly, in many public toilets nowadays, notably on aeroplanes, disposable toilet seat covers are provided. Mum would have approved of this development.

Recently while rummaging through some old photographs, I came across one of me, aged about 10, in Siena, Italy. I was kneeling on the floor feeding pigeons that had flown on to my hand. As a child, I loved doing this. My parents would buy me a paper cone filled with corn seeds. I would fill my palm with some of these, and then pigeons used to perch on my finger tips and pick up bits of corn with their beaks. I remember that the pigeon’s ‘feet’ felt quite soft. Feeding these creatures was a real treat.

Well, I was not unusual. Many people enjoy feeding birds from their hands. Today, in London’s Kensington Gardens there are flocks of green parakeets that happily feed from visitors’ hands.

The surprising thing was that my germ conscious mother permitted my sister and me to feed pigeons as described already. In New York, pigeons are known as ‘flying rats’. Pigeons are are actually less hygienic than rats and they carry mites, which irritate human skin. I cannot believe that pigeons in Italian cities in the 1960s were any cleaner than those flying about today. Had my mother been aware of the pigeons’ unsavoury lack of hygiene, feeding these creatures would have been totally forbidden to my sister and I. I am pleased that she did not realise that the dear flying rats are so filthy!

Cycles and branches

Posted on by
Reply

bike

 

There are plans to make a cycle super highway through west London. This might make cycling more attractive to people living in the areas it passes through as well as making it safer for cyclists by separating them from other road users. All very well, so far.

In order to creat this cycle thoroughfare, quite a number of well-established old trees will have to be cut down and removed. While cycling no doubt reduces the amount of toxic gases emitted by vehicles, removing the trees cannot be so beneficial to the climate of the future, about which so many people have become concerned.

The authorities have said that the felled trees will be replaced by new trees nearby. That is good, but many trees take a long time to reach the size and ecological efficiency of the trees that will get the chop. A large number of people have protested about the proposed  sacrifice of trees for the cyclists, so we wait with baited breath to see whether the trees will survive or the new cycle route will come to fruition. Being Britain, there will probably be a compromise!

 

Picture by Natalia Goncharova in an exhibition at the Tate Modern, London

Calm sea and Prosperous voyage

Posted on by
Reply

Digital_500

 

A few years before my mother died, I persuaded my parents to invest in a stereo hi-fi system. My mother would only have such a system if it looked nice. So, they settled on a Bang and Olufsen system. Unfortunately, the aesthetically pleasing speakers sounded awful and we replaced them with something less pleasing to look at but which sounded good. When CD’s (compact discs) became available, I added a CD player to the system. By then, my mother was dead and the appearance of the player no longer mattered.

After my mother died, I was living in Kent. I used to visit my father on Sundays. We used to have lunch together in various restaurants in Hampstead village in north-west London. Always, after we had eaten, we used to viit the Waterstones bookshop and the Our Price music shop nearby.  Often, I would purchase a CD to add to my father’s small collection. On one occasion, I bought a CD with some orchestral music by Beethoven.

Some weeks later, I asked my father if he had enjoyed that CD. He said:

“There is something wrong with it. There is complete silence for the first few minutes.”

I said that I would look into this. When I reached his house, our family home, I turned on the hi-fi system and inserted the problematic CD. My father was right. For the first few minutes, there was nothing to be heard.  Then, I looked at the volume adjustment slider which was marked at equally spaced intervals from 0 to 10. I discovered that my father had been using the system with the volume slider set between 0 and 1. 

The first track on the CD was Beethoven’s Opus 12: Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage. The first few minutes of this piece are very quiet, which is why setting the volume so low made it sound silent. My father’s penchant for barely audible low volume background music was the reason for doubting the integrity of the CD, which I had given him.

 

You can listen to the music mentioned above by clicking: H E R E

A tingle down my spine

Posted on by
Reply

 

I enjoy exploring historical places. Well, I know that everywhere has a history, but what I mean is places which contain tangible remnants of their history like the Regency buildings designed by John Nash, built at the beginning of the 19th century around Regents Park in London. They were built when the future George IV was Regent.

Well, there is nothing surprising about these beautiful buildings. That is what I thought until my wife spotted the street lamp posts next to some of the buildings. Each of their bases has a symbol for King George IV. Seeing such mundane objects that must have been in daily use since so long ago sent a tingle down my spine.

The same thing happened to me once when I was driving along a ring road around Munich and I passed a direction sign pointing to Dachau.

Would you trust them with your money?

Posted on by
1

Back in the early 1970s, I had dinner at a cheap and cheerful Chinese restaurant (Lido, which still exists in Gerrard Street) with about 7 friends. 5 of them were studying to be chartered accountants, I was completing my PhD thesis, and ‘J’ had only the most basic of educational qualifications.

The bill arrived. It was £24 for all that we had eaten. That seemed about right. The bill, consisting of three pages stapled together, was examined by all of us.

When J looked at it, she said it was twice what it should have been. This was because the waiter had added the sub totals at the bottom of each page to the individual prices which added together were equal to the sub totals.

We ended up sharing a corrected bill of £12.

What concerned me was that 5 people who were about to become chartered accountants missed the error in the bill which they had perused. Would you have trusted them with your money?

Incidentally, J went on to become a very successful business woman, probably more prosperous than anyone else sitting around that table in Lido.

A few words

Posted on by
2

 

For the past few months I have been working on the manuscript of my latest book. I am not telling you what is going to be about. You will have to wait to find out!

I was reasonably happy about the way it was going, but a little worried that I was including too much about matters distant to the topic on which I was planning to focus. Some of the less relevant material might easily have been considered controversial and possibly hurt the sentiments of some of my potential readers. This worried me somewhat.

A couple of days ago, an old friend, whom we had not seen for a few months, came to dinner at our home. During the meal, I told him what I was writing about. Immediately, he reacted that what I feared was controversial might easily get me into trouble if my text was read by a certain type of person. 

For a couple of hours, I was downcast. I thought that maybe I should just abandon the project, which has taken up so much of my spare time during the last few months.

Next morning, I woke early, feeling inspired. I turned on the computer and removed the ptentially ofensive material from my draft text. Then, I read through what was left of it, and realised that by trimming it down, my text was far better than it had been before. It had become tighter and more focussed on the subject I want to portray.

I am always amazed how important a very few words of advice can be.