Symbolic Forest

I always enjoy W’s parties, even the ones I can’t remember afterwards.^* And, because it was their wedding, this one seemed extra-special.

I’d been given the job of semi-official photographer, so I tried to stay more or less sober. It also gave me an excuse to constantly rush around the building shoving my camera into people’s faces. I would probably have done this regardless, but it was nice to have an excuse for it.

Eventually, people started dancing, so there was nothing for it but to put the camera down and bounce around like a mad thing. I don’t think I did anyone any serious injuries, but equally I’m not going to be winning any dancing prizes in the near future. Then, when I was exhausted, I’d flop down on the sofa for five minutes before picking up the camera again and repeating the cycle. If I saw someone posing for someone else’s camera, I’d try to quickly grab a sneaky shot from the side. Hopefully all the other party guests think they look good in profile. The main room was lit by beautiful blue fairy lights: it looked wonderful, but it was so dark that half the time I had no idea what I was photographing.^**

I was still emotional by the end of the evening. I hugged W before I left, and wanted to tell him: have a wonderful life together. W and P make an amazing couple, and everyone who knows them wants them to be happy forever after.

If you want to see the rest of the wedding photos – not that they will be of much interest unless you know P and W yourself, of course – most of them are here.

* such as the one where I got so drunk I collapsed in a flowerbed. There are quite a lot of people in London who have no clue what my name is, but if you say “you know, the one who collapsed in the flowerbed at W’s party” will know exactly who you mean.

** One technical photo tip: I was lucky that the house has very light, almost-white walls and ceilings throughout. This means that – if you have a swivel-head flashgun with good automatic metering – you can point your flash directly up at the ceiling to get nice, even, flattering lighting. It does mean, though, that the photo lighting is nothing like the original scene. This photo was taken in a room barely light enough to not walk into other people, and all the light comes from the flashgun attached to the camera.

Keyword noise: bounce flash, celebration, Civil Partnership, London, marriage, party, photography, travel, wedding.

I had no idea what to expect at the wedding. I’ve, unsurprisingly, never been to a Civil Partnership Ceremony before; but equally, I’ve never been to any sort of civil wedding before.

The wedding started late, and the registrar seemed a little stressed. “Sorry for the delay,” she said, “but the couple at the previous wedding weren’t sure it was going ahead.” You could sense a long, long backstory behind that sentence.

The ceremony was short. W and P strode up the aisle together, and the registrar explained what they were getting into. They faced each other, and looked into each other’s eyes as they gave their declarations and vows. My eyes were slightly damp, and they received a long, long round of applause, which seemed to surprise the registrar. “You are a popular couple,” she said. And, bar the posing for photos, it was already over. W and P are Registered Partners. We all rolled out into the garden for champagne.

Keyword noise: celebration, Civil Partnership, friends, London, marriage, photography, wedding.

Well, I had planned to go shopping. I didn’t want to go to any record shops, because that always leads to me spending much more money that I’d intended. So, I was going to go to one of my favourite London shopping streets, Lower Marsh.

Lower Marsh is quite an obscure place, near the Old Vic theatre, and running down the side of Waterloo Station. For an obscure street, though, it has a bizarre and fascinating variety of shops. There’s rather geeky bookstore Ian Allan, top fetish clothing store Honour [link not really SFW], and blogging bookshop Crockatt & Powell.^*

The plan I had, you see, was to stroll into Crockett & Powell, spend too much money on interesting-looking books, and try to casually slip blogging into the conversation. “This is a fascinating shop – I only found out about it because I read your blog,” or something along those lines. Unfortunately, as I’d spent rather too long scurrying around Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture in the Tate Modern, I was running a bit late and didn’t have time to get there. Meeting people for dinner, by the time I reached Waterloo I barely had time to catch the tube and get where I was meant to be going. No time to buy any books,^** or do any blog-stalking. Disappointing.

* Update, August 25^th 2020: Sadly, Crockatt & Powell closed in 2009.

** or fetish gear, for that matter.

Keyword noise: books, bookshops, Ian Allan, London, Lower Marsh, shopping, Waterloo.

Deciding to do something cultural whilst in the Big City, I visited Tate Modern to see Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment, her Turbine Hall installation made up of thousands of plastic casts of cardboard boxes.

As I’d visited the work warehouse earlier in the day, my first reaction was: “this isn’t a very neat warehouse”. My second reaction was “ooh, I could just do with a cup of tea”, because the stacks and stacks of white boxes make me think of a giant pile of sugar lumps.^* One leak in the roof, and the whole thing would just dissolve.

It was good to see, though, that kids love Embankment. They were all over it, playing hide and seek, darting in and out between piles of boxes. It’s good to have art that you can get inside and move around in, and use for your own purposes like that. The kids might not be thinking about the plight of London’s homeless, but Art^** isn’t just for the artist’s purposes. It’s what you make of it that counts.

* In fact, I’m tempted to make a model replica of Embankment entirely out of sugar cubes and starch paste.

** With a capital A, of course.

Keyword noise: art, children, Embankment, gallery, holiday, London, playing, Rachel Whiteread, sculpture, Tate Modern, Turbine Hall.

As a prelude to next week’s run of posts about my trip to W and P’s wedding at the weekend: here’s some photos of picturesque Barking.

Keyword noise: abbey, Barking, Barking Abbey, cemetery, church, East London, London, photography, river, River Roding, ruin.

Gordon has written something very interesting about why he likes reading blogs.

…now and again I’m still taken aback when I read something on a blog that I hadn’t previously considered. … I mean when someone, as part of a post, mentions something specific about themselves that I hadn’t previously noted.

You should go and read the whole thing, because it’s good. Essentially,^* he loves the occasional sudden reminders that you don’t know much about even your regular reads. There are fundamental parts of their personalities that don’t get mentioned.

Personally, when I started this blog, I particularly wanted to hide certain things. Well, “hide” is the wrong word – “omit” would be better. So, there are lots of things about myself that I don’t talk about, largely because they would be really quite boring to most people. Some of the things on the original list, though, have probably seeped through by now. It makes me wonder, though: those of you who read this site even though you don’t know me personally, or from one of the messageboard sites I post on. Do you care that you don’t know very much about me?^**

* and, Gordon, if you’re reading this, I hope I’m not misrepresenting you by my overly-trimmed summary

** For one thing, your mental picture of me is probably better-looking than reality.

Keyword noise: anonymity, blogging, imagination, personality.

Well, I’m back at the office again, pleased to see that WordPress‘s advance-publishing feature works as advertised, to get Saturday’s post up whilst I was still waking up in my hotel bed in Barking.

I had a wonderful weekend away, got a bit emotional at W and P’s wedding, and danced very enthusiastically at their wedding party. I’ll be posting more about it in the next few days, partly because I’m going away again next week, and “what I did on my holidays” will be easy to get written in advance. So, coming soon on this blog: flirting by chocolate, failed blogstalking, sugarcube art (with hide and seek), a stressed registrar, adventures on the District Line, posing for photos, fairy lights, laughter, and lashings and lashings of ginger beer champagne.

Photos will be coming too, once I get my rolls and rolls of film back from the chemists, and get them all scanned. I’m old-fashioned, me.

Keyword noise: Civil Partnership, holiday, London, travel, wedding.

Big Dave At The Office is making a move back onto the dating scene. He’s mostly doing this, as far as I can tell, by playing darts.

I knew he was on his dad’s darts team, playing weekly at various dodgy-sounding pubs round the area.^* I knew, too, that there was a woman on the team – also there with her dad – who he was getting friendly with; but that as she isn’t single, nothing had happened.

“So, I was at the darts last Thursday,” says Big Dave, “and you remember that lass I was telling you about? She wasn’t there, but her dad just comes up to us and says: ‘Why haven’t you boned my daughter yet?’ As if he’s insulted that I haven’t, or something.”

“But I thought she wasn’t single?”

“Well, yeah,” said Dave. “Anyway, this week, I was stood talking to her after the match, and her dad comes up to us again. And he says to her: ‘Why haven’t you let him bone you yet?’ I think he’s trying to drop hints.”

“Subtle,” I said. “Very subtle. What does he say to her boyfriend?”

“Well, I dunno,” he replied. “But we’re kind of going on a date on Saturday.”

If I hear how he gets on, I will keep you posted.

* such as the one where local pre-teens will hang about in the car park offering to get you practically anything for twenty quid, and if you take them up on it, will return with a freshly-nicked anything within a couple of hours.

Keyword noise: Big Dave, colleagues, darts, dating, gossip.

Just another brief snippets post. Tonight I’m busily packing, because tomorrow I’m zooming off to London. Hurrah!

One thing that’s been on my mind recently: when the government came up with Civil Partnerships, did they deliberately invent as cumbersome a term as they could, so that people would end up calling it marriage? Consider these two statements:

“My friends W and P are holding a civil partnership registration ceremony.”

“My friends W and P are getting married.”

Now, which of those are people actually going to say?

I’m only in London for the weekend, sadly. I will be spending most of the weekend trying to find the register office on Bow Road, because my friends W and P are getting married there.^* Most of what I know about Bow Road, I learned here.

(someone should probably explain to me some time that London is more than just its railway system. In fact, there are entire areas of London with no trains. That’s what the rumours say, anyway. I don’t think there’s any way to actually get to those places.)

Someone recently reached this site by searching for “shimura curves mailing list”. I don’t know much about pure maths, but I asked someone from the band Shimura Curves, and they do indeed have one.^**

To close, a sign which has been hanging around our redecorated offices lately. It made me smile:

WET PAINT!
Please be careful
Touching up drives me CRAZY.

I have to admit, I often feel the same way too. Have a nice weekend yourselves.

* Except that they’re not. Because they’re registering a civil partnership. But you knew that.

** Update, August 24_{th 2020:} I am presuming this mailing list no longer exists, as it was hosted on Yahoo Groups.

Keyword noise: Bow Road, Civil Partnership, London, marriage, music, Shimura Curves, wedding, wet paint.

People often say that the honours system is old-fashioned and out-dated. There are many good reasons to criticise it: the unofficial system of honours-for-cash,^* or the automatic medals given to high mandarins of the Civil Service. I don’t even see the point of awarding honours to sportsmen, or celebrities.

Sometimes, though, there are people who do deserve to be recognised. Occasionally, during an ordinary day, some people do something heroic. Even though I only have a very slight link to those events, it’s still painful for me to think about what they had to deal with, and what they saw, heard and smelled.

One thing I know, though, is that many more people than these 20 were deeply involved, and have received nothing. If anything is wrong with the honours system, it’s that there’s always a cut-off point. There’s always a point after which people stop being officially heroes.

* which was a much more serious problem in the 1920s, when the Liberal government even had a price-list for various honours.

Keyword noise: awards, heroism, honours, July 7th, medals, terrorism.