blahflowers

The Naked Bike Ride earned me my first slapped hand from Flickr who took down a video I'd posted of people cycling by, despite me following the rules by marking it as potentially naughty, because of course we must think of all those children who use Flickr for looking for everyday people's bodies naked. All the photos I took seemed to survive. What was irritating though was about a month after I posted it Flickr sent me an email saying that they were taking down one of my images for breaching their guidelines but not identifying what it was. Not posting much nudity on my Flickr it only took me a few minutes by process of elimination to work out what it was, but if the complaint had been somewhat more insane then Flickr effectively make it impossible for the user to defend anything they post up, despite the fact the user owns the image.

Very good Serpentine Gallery pavilion this year, though they did make up for it by having a public sculpture nearby of one rock on top of another called, yes, 'One Rock on Top of Another'. Ah, bless the Serpentine Gallery. They are there, all year round, giving the public what the public expect modern art to be.

I did read Robert Newman's new book, 'The Trade Secret'. It's too long by about fifty pages but beyond that I'd recommend it as a decent if trad story in an unusual time and place. In the other picture, I'm not immune to a bit of fanservice.

Well, people had made a baby, so I got introduced to them in February, even if they spent most of the time asleep. This has been the closest I've been to the entire growing process beyond the first-hand experience we all get and it's been often fascinating if occasionally alarming. In my walking of London I was largely concentrating on the west side of my map, Notting Hill and Westbourne Grove, where these two photos were taken. The latter, like Maida Vale later on in the year was bland, Notting Hill had a certain faded glamour, like a movie starlet some forty years past it's prime, but who looks their best in Winter?

Walking around the Heygate was an odd experience, a Brutalist ghost-town , now empty except for the occasional film-crew ('Attack the Block' was apparently filmed here) and the Fire Brigade checking for squatters. I do wonder where everyone that lived here was moved to. There did seem to be some hold-outs in the middle of the estate and a community garden but a winter garden doesn't look that disimilar from a deserted garden. I remembered a visit to another deserted estate building years ago and wondered what Roger Hiorns could do with the Heygate, enough chemicals and time.

Went down to Brighton to see friends before heading on to my own family for Christmas. Had the misfortune of travelling down on the day of the big fire at Preston Park or maybe it was fortune as I did manage to make it from Haywards Heath in to Brighton, though far worse than passing through Preston Park was waiting outside Brighton stages for ages for a platform to become available. The next day my route was not towards London but across country towards Ashford International, so getting away from Brighton was much easier.

Oh well, see you next December!

I remember it took a while to get this photo, not just because the guy doing the bubbles would sometimes not get interesting shapes as he was making the bubbles but because there were children running around trying to pop the bubbles as soon as he made them.Positioning myself so the bubble would be generated between him and me, and taking the snap before the kids ruined it took several tries. I was down in Brighton several weekends around this time, helping a friend empty out their flat in preparation for the move. This is possibly the weekend where, when I turned up the weather was almost Summery and we sat on the front step of my friends house for a while appreciating the sun then, as I walked around Brighton it gradually got colder and more and more overcast until there were wintry showers and then a hail storm. And then on the SUnday it was sunny again.

I'm still really pleased with how that Shepherd's Pie turned out. If I bothered to have resolutions I really want to do more cooking of new recipes in 2013, especially as I've borrowed a food processor to experiment with. I fancy the idea of making my own steak and kidney pie.

Another month where I didn't take a whole huge number of photos. Still, it's not every day you walk down the road to find a bouncy Stonehenge has been set up for area kids. In fact, it's only happened once that I can remember. At least the rule board had a sense of humour.

I went on Boris' silly cable car extravagance on the afternoon of a day where a sudden and heavy shower had come out of seemingly nowhere while a friend and I had dinner in a pub before he headed off to see some people about a house he was considering moving in to. I made the journey unnecessarily long, I now realise, by doing it by bus, which meant going through Greenwich and almost to Charlton, before switching to a bus to the 02 arena. I probably should have just got myself on the Jubilee Line and gone out that way, but what can I say, us South Londoners just don't think about that Tube malarky as a way of getting around.

There was a very large queue outside the cable car hall. But it turned out that this wasn't a queue of people waiting to go through the gates but to buy tickets. If you're a Londoner with an Oyster card, getting in is quick and easy. However, why would Londoners, unless they are curious weirdos like me, bother with the cable car? It's going from the 02 arena, not exactly a centre of activity during the day, to an undistinguished area of what could be called 'the north bank of the Thames' where you will need to catch a DLR train to go anywhere of any note. So the bulk of the people going on it will be tourists who have to buy cumbersome paper tickets. I must admit I don't know if this is genius or stupidity on the part of Boris. Still, Diamond Geezer is keeping an eye on it. And, as wastes of money go, it was fun to ride on.

It would be a lie to claim that the Queen's Jubilee celebrations inconvenienced me, I was working for the bits that weren't an actual public holiday and, at the time, had a meeting with someone from Trading Standards about a company that had fraudulently invoiced for work they had never done, then a friend was holding a 'let's avoid the Jubilee' party. The photograph of the Queen dolls was taken in South Kensington about a week after the Jubilee weekend.

The odd thing about this year is that I don't really remember bad weather being much of a factor. By which I mean that I don't remember it stopping me getting out and doing things much, and I'm someone who prefers not to go out in the rain unless it's something I absolutely have to do. That day sticks in my mind as a bright and sunny day when I had a particularly bad hayfever attack while walking and so was weaving along the street sneezing in to an already sodden handkerchief.

The other picture is from Abbotsbury Swannery, visited during a family holiday in South Devon. During the days the weather behaved itself until the Thursday when I was coming back from Exeter by train, when the rain poured down and didn't stop, following me all the way back to London and then Peckham, while staying with my family for the rest of the week. At the Swannery we arrived just before one of the big feedings of the day, which are the things that draw the biggest crowds. In separate pens the breeding pairs would be with their chicks, which are obviously full of cute.

Didn't take a lot of photos in April. No surprise really, my photographs are mainly what I see when I am out and about and, if I don't go to many new places then the chances of finding stuff to take photos of is lower. The Cross Bones Graveyard was quite a strange find, starting as a cemetery for prostitutes and having it's remit expanded to pretty much anyone, there was a ribbon for Ken Campbell I found in there.

Wow, it really is tough to go through all those photographs I took to try and find my two favourites. Ask me again this evening and I'll change my mind. You can see all my photographs here. I'm very pleased that I managed to find every egg, except for the Chapman egg which I don't think was ever released into the wild. It was difficult, the brave volunteers running the event had produced maps that were works of conceptual art rather than in any way accurate to the geography of the city but the community that congregated on places like Facebook had each others backs, helping people find eggs they just couldn't spot, alerting people when eggs either went missing or were returned and enjoying the experience. When eggs were inside shops and institutions they seemed to be accepting or, at the least, resigned to the fact that all these people coming through the door were doing so only to take photographs and then leave, rather than spend money. The one exception to this was a Mayfair bank who refused to let people come in to take photographs of the egg in their window and insisted everyone had to take their pictures through the highly reflective glass instead. They really didn't seem to understand the point at all.

I suppose my favourites of the lot were those that played with, or I suppose the preferred Late Review term would be 'interrogated', the shape of the egg itself. Lattice eggs, eggs transformed into pillboxes or lodged in concrete blocks, there was a lot more play on display here than with the simple decorating of the elephants that was done several years ago. Was that just the people that they approached this time? Did the egg shape offer more opportunities than the elephant? And will we get something similar in 2014?

Finally, congratulations to Jane Morgan, proving that while 'talent borrows and genius steals' then an artist on a deadline recycles.

I have been to Kilburn precisely twice in my life. Both times to go to the Tricycle Theatre. Both times to see Mark Thomas. Both times I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Westminster Cathedral, on the other hand, was something of a disappointment. Not only does Rome hold on to all it's wealth for itself, rather than putting it to use to help raise the poor and destitute out of their misery, it doesn't even spread it around it's own churches, so that Westminster has a 'work-in-process' look almost a hundred and twenty years after the ground was broken. It's also has the problem that it's one selling point to tourists, it's tall tower, is distinctly behind the times. It's becoming increasingly crowded around by tall buildings that are for nothing more than places for people to smoke on and so the only decent views left are southwards towards Vauxhall and the river. Still, Joseph and Cynthia liked it, so that is something I suppose.

Hopefully, one year on from when I took this picture, I will be up the top of another tall London building, The Shard. Limited numbers of tickets are being given away to Southwark residents via their local libraries, starting Wednesday. Take something official and current that proves you live in Southwark to any of the libraries when they open, and you may be fortunate to get one of a small number of free tickets for the last week in January 2013.