blahflowers

( 'Convergence' )
( The Other Reviews )

I'm a bit rusty at this, trying to ease myself back in to writing... again.

To promote the new Paddington Bear movie there was one of those gotta find them all!' things towards the end of last year with plaster models of Paddington decorated by anyone foolish enough to pick up their phones when the promoters called. I found almost all of them, of the ones I didn't, one was at Heathrow and I wasn't going to go all the way there just to get a picture of that, one was in Covent Garden but I just couldn't find it (the place was so busy with Christmas shoppers I suspect it hadn't been put out the day I visited for fear of blocking foot traffic even further) and one I just plain forgot about. As with the elephants and the Easter eggs of previous years the decorations were a mix of inspired, amusing and dull. The ones above are probably my favourites but again you can see (almost all) the rest on my Flickr.

It's a regret for me that I didn't get more of the London LOOP done last year. Partly I didn't have time, partly I just clean forgot about it for a chunk of the summer and partly people I was going to walk with weren't available. In the end I walked two sections totalling around 20 miles by myself in October before the days got too short. Transport for London have apparently taken down the website with all the details for the London LOOP and all the other chain walks in London. Certainly doing these two sections I found it often difficult to work out which way I was supposed to go and several times went completely the wrong way and had to double back. So far I've been saved from disaster because the route has still been in the bounds of my London A-Z. The next walk goes outside that. I think on the ground signage is being vandalised and not being replaced or repaired which is a shame. I finished up the year in the commuter land beyond South Croydon. Must do better this year.

Two walks I did in August. The first was down to Richmond Park. I passed through it briefly when doing the Capital Ring several years ago and although I meant to go back often since then I'd never quite got my act together to do it. I will need to visit it again, my thought was that I would do a complete, or near complete, walk around the perimeter starting from one of the north gates and either finish there or, at least a western gate so I could walk into Richmond. What happened in the end was that I made it about a third of the way around and then joined the Capital Ring route through the middle and down to Richmond station. In my defence I had walked down from North Sheen station and detoured into the cemetery first. Oh well, there's always next summer.

I don't know whether it's just me but whenever I've seen a suggestion about walking along the Regents Canal path it always seems to be talking about the Western side of the Regents Canal. The route from Warwick Avenue along the path to Camden Lock is not very long that seems to be one that is often recommended. I have never seen anything suggesting to people that once the canal re-emerges from under Islington but it's worth people's time to continue alongside it. But then, until last August I wasn't really consciously aware that the Regents Canal did come out from the underground again, so maybe my ignorance of the latter is the reason for my ignorance of the former also. Of the two sides I think the East actually beats the West. From Little Venice to Camden Town the canal is mostly in a gully, uninteresting stone and then overhanging trees at Regents Park. Sure, you might get a glance of a warthog or some rare bird as you go past the zoo but it's unlikely. The eastern side has a variety of different views, the canal is now closer to street level so you could stop off Haggerston and visit the Hackney City Farm or take a break in Victoria Park. At Mile End you bypass the aggressive swans and, if you walk away from the river for a short while you can cross over the Mile End Road via the green bridge. True, the canal does reach the Thames through uninspired Limehouse attempts to redevelop itself as a playground for the ultra rich and their yachts but it's still a worthy journey and you can continue west through Shadwell, which I've always found to be a curious collection of narrow streets. Even Wapping has its charm now that the News International stench has finally been lifted.

This photo was from just before I joined the eastern Regents Park path. Found in Duncan Terrace Gardens near the Angel tube station it brings the concept of close neighbourhood housing, such as the tower blocks that loom nearby, to nest boxes. I was here at the wrong time of year to see, I wonder if any of these boxes get used by birds in the spring?

And so, we reach a month when there's so much to choose from. This was the month when T.F.L. had their display of buses through the ages up the length of Regent Street. This was the month that the Serpentine Gallery showed yet again that giving stupid amounts of money to artists won't dissuade them from vomiting terrible pavilion designs in your back garden. But in the end it was Brazil day in Trafalgar Square for the World Cup kick-off (boom tish!) with the people demonstrating up on the terrace and the life-size table football down by the lions. I was surprised by the fact I got quite into watching football this summer. If you treat the England team as the clowns on at the start then it becomes quite exciting when they're out of the way to watch the trapeze acts, the would-be lion tamer's and the high wire performers. I picked a team to support only because one of the players was named after a Marvel superhero.

The other picture is of David Rosenberg, who took a party of us on a fascinating tour of Islington and Clerkenwell, pointing out the offices of the A.N.C-in-exile, Lenin's flat and the graves of clowns. His website is East End Walks and you should all go on at least one of them this year.

Earlier this year I took a strange and powerful dislike to walking places where I had been before. Maybe it was some lingering remnant from the several years I spent walking London's streets, then I could pretty much guarantee that even if the area I was walking through was not particularly pretty it would at least be somewhere I had not seen before. This led to some strange expeditions such as walking from Peckham to Brockwell Park, then to Brixton Hill and eventually onwards to Tooting Bec Common, after doing a circuit of which I came home via Balham station which meant I went past the Bedford, somewhere I had visited many times but only to be part of the audience for recordings of the Mark Thomas Comedy Product in the very late 90s. The top photo was taken outside a junk shop on Brixton Hill. I have no idea whether this machine actually worked but if it did then I hope the shopkeeper took enough care of it and that it came to find another home.

Yeah, it's a cheat but for my second photo from this month I'm going back to Longitude Punk'd and would direct anyone interested to my previous review. Later in the year I went to the National Maritime Museum down the hill which was doing a 'proper' exhibition on longitude which I much preferred.

I hurt myself the day I took the first picture. I'm still to this day not exactly sure how. I was doing a lot of kneeling down to take photos of Ben Wilson's tiny paintings on the chewing gum people had spat out on the Millennium Bridge and afterwards my legs obviously decided I had slighted them in some way and so were painful for several days after. Considering my moderate out-of-shapeness I wonder why I don't get this sort of thing happening to me more often rather than once out of the blue and then, so far, never again.

Not included here are the first pictures from my first foray into cake baking. They're all up in my Facebook photos instead. Someone had found and posted a link to a recipe for brownies almost entirely chocolate and including mini Cadbury's creme eggs. Rather than just say "that's cool" and move on I decided to actually try it for once. It was an epic undertaking as it was a three stage recipe which involved cooling time between each part and we started cooking in the evening so it wasn't finished until several days later. When it was done we sampled it and realised that it was both delicious so full of sugar that eating it made Popeyes reaction to spinach seem positively half-hearted. Since then I've started trying other cake recipes with some success.

I had read about Candy Chang's 'Before I Die' somewhere only a few days before I came across this London installation. I don't know how long it lasted on Borough High Street but it's now tucked away in one of the passages of Borough Market, as I discovered ten months later while looking for Paddington Bears.

Wow, I mean wow. I've seen episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus that had more narrative cohesion than that. I accept that you could write an eighty-minute episode of a television programme using the 'cut-up' technique but I never thought you'd be allowed to broadcast it in prime time. When did I meet Steven Moffat? Because surely I must have met him, we got drunk, and I challenged him to make every episode of Doctor Who more wretched, stupid and full of loathing for everybody than the last. I re-watched last Christmas's episode a few days ago just to reassure myself that it was as terrible as I remembered. Oh for those carefree halcyon days when the Doctor could destroy a Dalek fleet by regenerating. We were so happy then. Tonight's episode didn't just ignore what makes a good Doctor Who story, it ignored making a good story period. The two things that remained constant was that it was set in the Victorian erathat the Doctor now seems to go to every other episode and that every actor played the same role all the way through the episode, clearly they are waiting for episode four before having Peter Capaldi play Emmanuelle and Jenna Coleman played Pontius Pilate while the Doctor is played by a box of tissues, because The Man doesn't get to tell Moffat how to write a script Godsdamnit!

I don't really want to summarise the plot because doing so would require me spending more time thinking about it than Moffat did. Also, there is just the vaguest possibility that I have been pranked and shown something completely different to what the rest of the world saw. What I saw was a dinosaur appearing in Victorian London and coughing up the Tardis. Victorians aren't particularly alarmed by the appearance of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, they're probably blasé after that Christmas when the giant robot trampled half of London. Indeed no one tries to do anything to remove the dinosaur despite the fact it stalks around Westminster for at least half a day presumably eating people and shifting everywhere. It then catches on fire and dies. We will later find out this is due to robots that want to use part of its eyes to repair their spaceship. Of course, one might point out that if you set fire to something that you run the risk of destroying whatever it is you're after but as we know Steven Moffat writes these scripts based entirely on the visuals and his clever dialogue and everything else is for those spotty virgins he hates that are called 'fans'. Clara, meanwhile, is for some reason having immense difficulty getting to grips with the idea that the Doctor has regenerated into an older body. Let's ignore the fact that three episodes ago she took a ride in the Doctor's lifestream and saw every incarnation of him and hung out with the War Doctor for a while as well. Let's ignore this because Moffat certainly is. If you want to have a character express surprise that the doctor is now an 'old man' then in Victorian London you've got the choice of three characters who could be the audience surrogate for that story point: Vastra, Jenny or Strax, don't have it be the woman who in the previous episode saw the Doctor as an old man. He still has some of the more annoying habits of his previous incarnation such as the delusion that he can understand what non-verbal lifeforms are saying, the Eleventh Doctor claimed that babies were capable of having conversations much more advanced than ten-year-olds, the Twelfth Doctor can apparently talk to the animals, or at least understand them. Yes, it turns out that 'The Name of the Doctor' is actually Doolittle.

Anyway, Vastra takes the Doctor and Clara in while he recovers only for him to escape and live on the streets as the Tramp for a bit. Clara is a bit put out by this but doesn't really do anything to find him because clearly the Doctor's not in any danger at all in a confused and amnesiac state in Victorian London. They finally come together in a restaurant, both thinking the other has placed a newspaper ad to attract them, clearly the 'Bad Wolf' of this season. This restaurant is full of robots similar to the clockwork robots from the Madame de Pompadour episode except for the small difference of being completely different. We know that in recent years the show has had to reuse sets and costumes to save money, this is the first time that I'm aware of a show reusing the same story, especially considering the way Steven Moffat repeatedly draws attention to this as though he wants to win a BAFTA for recycling. The robots have been stuck on earth for millennia replacing worn out parts with human limbs because if you're a robot with access to metals then clearly you ignore that in favour of human flesh which, even if you have the means to keep it in good working order when separated from its original owner, still only has a working life of a couple of decades. I'd say that Moffat started writing a Jack the Ripper story and then realised late in the day that he'd already had Vastra dispose of Jack and changed it to except that was series and series ago and we know what Moffat thinks about continuity.

The Doctor and Clara dick around for an unedifying amount of time, everyone fights robots that only attack them if they breathe, the Doctor goes for a flight with the head robot in a balloon seemingly made of human skin, persuades the robot to kill itself which for some reason kills all the others and then goes off in the Tardis before coming back for Clara. That summarises the last twenty-five minutes or so, it's odd that Moffat has been given extra time for this episode when he clearly doesn't need it and has to resort to an awful lot of padding. The robot is doing what it's doing in order to fulfil a confused desire to reach the promised land. After the Doctor persuades it to kill itself it wakes up in a garden with a mysterious woman who tells it that it's in heaven. Whether this is whimsy, it's killed enough people that it somehow has developed a human soul and gets to go to heaven despite, you know, killing loads of people, or whether this is a more material place we may find out in a future episode but I really don't care. We have a final scene in Glasgow where Clara finally reconciles herself to the new Doctor by talking on the phone to the old one before he regenerated and that is the one genuinely interesting and emotional part of the episode where Clara and the Doctor open up to one another and it is far, far too brief.

As I suspect might have been hinted by the above I hated this. And I hated it pretty much entirely for the writing. The lazy, self-congratulatory writing. I can't believe that if Steven Moffat wasn't in charge of Doctor Who that the scripts he turns in would be considered acceptable. He has written nothing of the quality of what he wrote in the Russell T. Davies era and each week approaches the show as a collage of interesting images rather than a story. There's an interesting tale to tell each week but he seems absolutely uninterested in telling it. The actors tried very hard, the Victorian team are great as ever but Jenna Coleman was never particularly interesting beyond the mystery of Clara and Peter Capaldi, just like David Tennant, is sidelined in his first episode so we don't get a chance to see him shine. Next week is apparently 'Daleks killing lots of people' week, so the recycling of episodes hasn't stopped yet.

Two quick reviews before I head out.

( 'Beautiful Darkness' )
( 'Andre The Giant' )

At some point the bumper for Bryan Singer's production company 'Bad Hat Harry' has changed from two comic characters to being one based on 'The Usual Suspects'. It makes sense, if you try and subliminally remind people of your one good film maybe they'll think the film they are about to see is as good as that one. Oh boy oh boy, 'X-Men: Days of Future Past' is not a good film.

( (Spoilers, although strictly speaking this is such a linear film that you will know exactly what happens before the Fox logo fades away at the start) )

Still, the X-Franchise limps on, showing that when it comes to development of the property those behind the film show no signs of either evolution or intelligent design. And we've got Guardians of the Galaxy in a short while, hopefully showing how comics movies should be made, if we're lucky.