'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

Mark Twain wrote that "Dollis Hill comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home I ever occupied", and given I like exploring the far reaches of this great city anyway, that mandated a visit. augstone fancied some daytime drinking - so let's combine the two, we thought, and go for a Dollis Hill pub crawl!
First problem: Dollis Hill has no pubs. Seriously. At its heart, Gladstone Park, and around that, pleasant London suburbia, not dissimilar to the quieter and less exotic regions of Highgate, but less spooky. Gladstone Park, likewise, is a sort of Waterlow or Alexandra Park disrupted by a railway through its midriff - perhaps absent in Twain's day. Maybe those other lands of which Dollis Hill reminds me were also as yet unbuilt, and learned from Dollis Hill's example? My historical sense of London's expansion is patchy, given I tend to regard anything which belongs in London as having always been here*. There are pubs near Dollis Hill, but always just over a road into industrialisation, proletarianism or Irishness. Our original plan was "meet in the pub nearest the station" but, under expert advice, I had checked Fancyapint, just in case, while worrying that Aug might feel this compromised the expeditionary spirit. Thank heavens I did. Its favoured suggestion was full of old Irish soaks, which is fine, and in the midst of some carpentry, which is allowable, but was also playing 'The Wind Beneath My Wings', so we didn't stay. Everything else the web had suggested would be heading back down towards Kilburn, so instead we investigated the Ox & Gate, which had nice leather chairs. The gents here had a huge stash of empty sleeves for hooky p0rn DVDs; clearly these are purchased alongside boy films the mrs would never think to investigate, and then secreted inside the actioner's sleeve. Cunning. We cross the North Circular a bridge too early, passing a supplier of sex equipment on one side and a purveyor on the other. This doesn't seem a particularly libidinous area, but perhaps there's nothing else to do? The reservoir is unusually birdless, having fewer than the tiny pond in Gladstone Park; maybe the ducks really like the naked statue in the park pond, Maybe Mark Twain did too.
We head back via Willesden Green, hoping that not being Dollis Hill proper, there may be pubs. We pass two carpet shops and two auto parts shops before we see anything even faintly resembling one, instead contenting ourselves with Crazy Cock - a Bulgarian restaurant rather than another fleshpot. They have folk music TV playing - does Britain, with all its music channels, have anything of the sort? There are forests and fine jackets, and Aug wants a residency. I knew nothing of Bulgarian cuisine before, in spite of an ancestor helping to underwrite the country's foundation, but can now tell you that they do very fine things with cheese.
Then, via a brief stop at a gastro affair which is at least visible from Willesden Green station, back to the centre. I have always steered clear of the Old Blue Last before, suspecting that anywhere owned by Vice magazine would probably be full of tossers. I am slightly wrong, in that the crowd are not so much hipsters as their larval form. I am reminded of the old moral dilemma - if you could go back in time and kill Bloc Party when they were as yet innocent of their crimes, would it be justified? Not that I could ever see the dilemma, mind. Even in the version which substitutes Hitler, the only worry is the practical consideration of whether that might have given Stalin a freer hand. Anyway, the Old Blue Last still manages its own spot of Pub Fail; they have at least three draught pints off with no glasses over the pumps, the felchratchets. First act on is one Kit Richardson, who looks like Imelda Staunton dressed as Little Boots, and sounds like a third-rate Tori Amos. Do Not Want. The 18 Carat Love Affair, however, are excellent as ever even in this terrible place; there's a song I don't recognise called 'Eleanor' which is every bit as good as the rest of their material. Aug says he doesn't really know who to compare them to, sound-wise, and I know what he means, and I think that's a good thing.
The next band on feature a former member of Special Needs. We don't stay.

Undecided on nu-Skins as yet, though given how much more the first two series were than the first episode let on, I'm certainly planning to keep watching. The new male leads seem more irksome, though, consisting as they do of a lout, a hairstyle and the OCD kid who appears to have escaped from The Big Bang Theory. Still, we have lovely lovely Effy (and I believe I'm now allowed to say that without going on the Register), and scatty Pandora, and the twins and Naomi Campbell seem promising. As does the new teacher, although having Ardal O'Hanlon playing a cross between Roy from The IT Crowd and Dylan Moran strikes one as a sort of mad science experiment in concentrated Irishness.
(Am also watching the third series of Oz, and idly wondering whether there's any possibility of a crossover)

*For instance, that scene in A Knight's Tale with the Eye revolving beside the mediaeval Thames? Perfect.

Have just been down to Seaton to see the hunt meet. One chap we met who'd been going all his life said that lately, every year there are more and more people come to watch, just to spite the ban. So that was political capital well spent there, Tony. Officially speaking, they were just hunting a marathon runner, of course - but whatever they're after, it's magnificent watching them all charge along the seafront and up the hill after it. Personally I was hoping the hounds might go for the unusually fluffy peke (yes, even by peke standards) who kept trying to pick fights with them. Stupid animal.

Less Doctor Who discussion on the friendslist than I'd expect, but then it wasn't really an easy episode to discuss, was it? ( spoilers cut for those playing zombies at the time or otherwise unable to watch )

That aside, mainly caught up with Wallace & Gromit. My big present was an external drive, and since my computer's not here then even unbubblewrapping it would be slightly silly.

What a strange, tiring week it's been. All the stranger for having the shower broken again and thus being obliged to take baths - something I don't think I've done with any regularity for a decade, or at all in about five years. I used to swim loads, but now the mere feeling of being immersed in water seems alien again. Or seemed, for the first couple of times. What adaptable creatures we are - hence our domination of the planet, and hence the crap we'll put up with. Hence the fact that people live near Elverson Road, which is where our last Tubewalk ended, in a proper Local Pub For Local People called The Graduate, (in such an area, one friend suggested, you'd pick such a name in much the same spirit as you might call a pub The Phoenix or The Red Dragon), where the computerised jukebox helpfully informs you that its most-played track is 'Duelling Banjos'. An odd area, Deptford - the beautiful streets and the desolation mixed in with an even smaller grain than is London standard. A little too insistent in its naming, too - Friendly Place and
Friendly Gardens? The latter being perhaps the only time I've ever seen a 'no horses' rule so flagrantly flouted in a small park.
What else? A porthole-warming for curiousbadger, a birthday for hoshuteki and a reflex attempt to give the Noble an LJ tag because it is one of our best friends these days. And Self Non Self, suicideally and chris_damage's new night, where they play all those great songs which clubs tend mysteriously to overlook, like Shellac's 'Prayer To God' and Fad Gadget's 'Collapsing New People' and The Cure once they started making whole worlds with sound instead of pop songs, and all that stuff like the Mary Chain and MBV which I wouldn't really listen to at home but makes for the sort of background noise which tells you you're in the right place.

I was just reading a transcript of a radio show about London's decline, about all the inappropriate housing developments replacing old buildings, and gentrification killing the spirit of the cafes and pubs, and the overcrowding and the decline of the buses. It was a John Betjeman talk from 1939, before the war (though he knew it was coming) which gave London even more to worry about. And yet since then London has had what, four, five more great ages? Sometimes I worry too much about this city; I should remember she can take it.

I know full well that Scarlet's Well made four albums before they started recruiting people I know to the live experience, and Dickon's exit from performing duties was long enough ago for me to acclimatise, but no Kate or Martin? Really?
I still love Scarlet's Well, obviously, because few bands have ever chimed so perfectly with my own little obsessions, but Bid really does need to stop drawing attention to his own minor mistakes when performing. The audience hasn't noticed until you say something, man!

Anybody else coming to see The Indelicates launch one of the albums of the year at Madame Jo Jo's tonight?

An unknown unknown: I was unaware that I did not know whether there are moles in Ireland. Apparently there are not. Whereas the snakes so famously driven out by St Guinness are not absent as such, only "poorly represented".

Since the century turned and everything started going madder, I've often said that there's no such thing as contemporary fiction anymore - you're either writing SF or historical. That Joe Stretch novel about which I was enthusing turned out to be both. Like Atomized, it had a framing narration from the future - but that future stemmed directly and divergently from the book's 'present', and that present must have been the past because the characters kept smoking in bars and cafes. Speaking of which, 2000AD is currently running a Savage strip in which Poptimism's venue, The Cross Kings, is one of the key locations. An alternate Cross Kings in an alternate London, one under neo-Stalinist occupation - but for all the brutalities of life under the Volgan jackboot, there are ashtrays on the pub tables.
In other science fiction news: wasn't 'The Fires of Pompeii' splendid? Having found Tate's performance one of the less dreadful aspects of 'Partners in Crime', here she was definitely the weak link. Not enough to ruin the episode by any means, but I did wish for Martha.

I suppose it was inevitable that should the Guardian publish an eminently sensible article questioning the vogue for China among galleries, and the dubious tone of some of the accompanying commentary, in light of recent reminders of the Chinese regime's failings, then the comments would instantly decline into name-calling and facile moral equivalence.

Finished The Wire last night. Not really ready to talk about it; what is there to say? It is what it is. Maybe in five, ten years - if we last that long - some kids who grew up on it will make something that compares. For now and for myself, I can only say that I'm glad I never got round to getting any LJ icons from it; right now I wouldn't want to identify as anyone in there.

Yes, all 3,000-odd pages, or 4,000-odd if you count Cryptonomicon. And how amazing that it justifies that length - indeed, by the end even seems to be outgrowing it. Only one mention for Hawksmoor? This is scandalous scrimping, Stephenson! He pulls it all together ever more surely as he goes on, losing such small infelicities as slow down at least the opening of the earlier volumes, until in The System Of The World we have just that; a book about the birth of science and economics which itself expresses how they work, itself poetically stamps on the brain the idea of all life understood as information, of cities as circuits, of human ingenuity's ability to outwit humanity's myriad flaws. For the first time in a while, I even have some hope for the future of the species.
Now, of course, I'm fascinated by what he'll do next. Though really it's the sort of achievement after which anyone can justifiably put their feet up and spend the rest of their life down the pub.

Tigers raised in battery conditions and harvested, preparatory to calls for a lifting of the ban on tiger products, would be abhorrent on every level in and of itself. But when one learns that the same facility offers "a bear cycling across a highwire without a safety net", it becomes almost parodically evil. I pray that one day those tigers and bears get their own back on their tormentors.

Why there has never been a Pope John XX. I'd seen reference to this in Jurgen but had always assumed that it must have been Cabell being typically playful - and it still turns out that he glided over some of the absurdities of the situation.