Babies Everywhere

There seem to be babies everywhere.

Maybe because I have a baby I notice it more, but spring really feels like spring this year. Albeit a bit late. The April showers are now May showers, there is a pidgeon roosting in our garden, goslings on the Thames and human babies popping out left, right and centre.

I may shave my winter beard off in celebration and really get into the spring of things. I want to eat asparagus, purple sprouting brocoli and rhubarb crumble. Maybe some lamb. Or baby sheep as they are called by, er, sheep.

I wonder if they'd let me fish off the back of the Thames Clipper? Like a Marlin fisherman, casting off the stern. I don't fancy I'd catch many Marlin though. Eel have to make do...

Piering Into The Mind

We were just pulling up to Masthouse Terrace Pier and I was thinking about my mum's visit last weekend. I was feeling guilty because she's just had a heart operation and I got the boat times wrong which meant we had to disembark the boat early and walk back to Greenwich from Masthouse.

I was utterly flabbergasted to find that the boat docked at Masthouse was, in fact, called Norma (like my mum).

Jung would have called this Synchronicity. His notion of synchronicity is "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events". Which, in a nutshell, means that coincidence is meaningful. All very well, but what does it mean?

Interpreations of the mum-boat coincidence welcome.

Artefacts

I always stop to consider the giant red pillars and what they might have once supported. Or whether they indeed supported anything at all. There's just so many possibilities to consider each time they are observed.

London is full of these possibilities made up of layers upon layers of artefacts. Unfinished, abandoned or reappropriated buildings, objects and things.

It made me think of an article I read the other day about a housing scheme in London, whereby old properties are cleaned up and rented out cheaply to groups of 'guardians', who basically get a cheap place to live in return for ensuring the safety and integrity of the building. The company running the scheme (www.camelotproperties.com) suggested that the scheme was 'particularly suitable' for key workers.

So old, temporary, rough and shared housing is 'particularly suitable' for our most important workers eh?

Bloody Big Boat

I was confronted by this awesome sight this morning. 'Pauline' passed Greenwich and anchored just a couple of hundred metres west of the pier. She was being pulled along by two tug boats. So, in fact, she was 'tugged' up the river.

I never realised the Thames was so deep. I never imagined seeing a vessel of this size this far up the river. I wonder what she was doing here?

I couldn't help thinking what a great houseboat she would make. Extreme open plan living. You could have several football pitches, a bowling alley, squash court, disco and large go-kart track all in your living room. You could even use the giant fog horn as your doorbell.

The heating bill would be astronomical and dusting would be a nightmare. I don't think I'll bother.

Event Horizon

I was excited this morning. I knew that the Gormley sculptures were on the horizon and I was eager to spot them from the boat.

I should've remembered the telescopic lens though! However my memory is terrible and I don't have one anyway.

The critics are talking about how the rooftop scultures represent Man's smallness in the face of the cosmos. I think this is wrong. To me they represent Man's responsibility in the face of the cosmos. They are awesome, immediate, apparent, poised, expectant. Man's future is on the horizon and we need to address it; which we typically don't do because we are both literally and metaphorically enclosed by the city itself. There is largely no horizon in a city, so Gormley has created one.