As I told myself I would, I spent the day tidying.  But it ended up being tidying of a rather peculiar and imperfect sort, with which I suspect most of us are guiltily familiar.  Basically what I did was take a festeringly huge pile of paper, and do two things to it.  First, I threw out some of the more obviously expendable pieces of paper.  And second, I divided the bits of paper into piles according to the size of the paper.  Not by content, by size.  Well, there was a bit of content sorting, but far less than there should have been.  The result looks tidy, but is merely chaos of a more visually organised sort.

But the really good thing is that chucking out and arranging by size has caused the festering paper heap to shrink to about half its previous size, even though I didn’t chuck out anything like half of it.

All of which, although nothing like perfect, is still a definite achievement.  Despite reducing the amount of temporary shelving that has been cluttering up my home, I have still managed to free up quite a bit of surface space, which will make any future attempts at tidying a lot easier.

But all of the above is to understate the happiness I now feel.  Having gone through all the paper, even though I have not done much with most of it, it now no longer afflicts me with the power of the unknown.  I now have its measure.  Before, it loomed over me like an unexplored mountain range.  Now it is more like a big garden.  The plants are not where I want them, but the weeds have taken a severe beating, and I now know my way around.  My subconscious will now throw up lots of new ideas about what the next act of ordering and/or eliminating might be.

Plus, while doing all of the above, I sort of became addicted to the process.  I have some entertaining to do over the next couple of days, but when that is done, I need to get back to the tidying, before this addiction has gone.

None of which may be very exciting to you.  But this is my blog, and I expect one day to be rereading this myself, very fondly.  This posting is not so much me entertaining you.  It is me rewarding me.  Me, you might say, giving myself a pat on the back.

Quite often, I settle down to write something for here, and end up with something which would go equally well at Samizdata.  Whenever I realise this, I tend to put whatever it is at Samizdata, and leave only the less political and more “trivial” (the “s because trivia is often not at all trivial) stuff for here.  Often, these are pieces that I would never have written had I not started out writing them for here.

Today I just did this again, in a piece about people who are F4BF (famous for being famous), and about the contribution that such persons make to the world.

The rest of today is set aside for more tidying up, so that may well be it, for here, for today.

The Londonist logo looks like this:

But under this logo, here, is an illustrated piece about how that logo might have looked rather different.  London, says the piece, might have acquired itself an Eiffel Tower of its own, at Wembley.  Seriously, the various towers that were apparently under consideration include at least two that look remarkably like the Parisian original, despite Eiffel himself not wanting to be involved:

Towards the close of the 19th century, rail magnate Sir Edward Watkin was intent on all manner of ambitious schemes, including a tunnel under the Channel (it’ll never work). He also dreamt of a gigantic tower, to rival the wonder of Paris and draw tourists to his rail network. Gustave Eiffel was himself unsuccessfully approached to design the behemoth, before the commission was eventually opened out to competition. Some of the entries are presented below.

The illustrations that follow are well worth a look.

In this age of primitively simulated 3D reality, superimposed upon dull old reality itself even as you wander about in reality, the day is surely approaching when you can wander around a city and see it not as it is, but as you would prefer it, at any rate as far as more distant buildings are concerned.  It might be rather hard to walk along a street that has been obliterated by a huge skyscraper, or to visit a skyscraper that was never built.  But your preferred view of St Paul’s could be preserved from a distance.  Or, you could insert a London Eiffel Tower, and see how you like that.

It’s not that I am a hair fetishist.  It’s more that I dislike faces, as in: I dislike photoing the faces of my fellow photoers, by which I mean photoing the faces of strangers.  And then sticking their faces on the www.  Or merely looking as if I might be doing that.  Bad form.  Not done.  Especially with face recognition just getting bigger and bigger as a thing people worry about.

One way to not do this is to wait until they hold their cameras in front of their faces.  Another is to simply photo them from behind.  I do that a lot.

Which means that I find myself photoing a lot of hair, and a lot of hair styles.

And that is how I found myself noticing the deliberately bald look, so often sported by gentlemen these days.

And that is why I photoed this advert, which I chanced upon recently in a tube train:

I was standing up at the time.  Which was lucky, because I was consequently able to take this photo without even the appearance that I might instead have been photoing the face of the man sitting underneath the advert.  Many is the amusing tube advert I have refrained from photoing, in order not to arouse such fears, and maybe then cause A Scene.

More information about this impressive looking product here.

Last night, I promised I’d keep an eye and a camera open for Merry Christmas signage during my walking about today, and I did, but I didn’t find any such signs.  But I did find another sort of sign, which I liked because it contained lots of London’s Big Things, and I photoed it.  And then, when I got back home after dining out with my mates, I discovered that it had the words “Merry Christmas” at the top of it.  How about that?!?:

Here is the website of this enterprise.  I have a vague recollection of having gone inside this place, once upon a time.  It was, of course, shut today.

I am collecting these graphic renditions of London’s Big things.  You see them everywhere, if you look, frequently on the sides of white vans.

Merry Christmas.  As in, I hope you had a good Christmas Day, and are having a good Christmas break because it almost Boxing Day now.

I like the roof clutter reflected in the window.

LATER: More Merry Christmas designage (dezeenage) here

The idea was that, all alone in my snuggery, I would do lots of tidying up.  I have done some, but mostly I have been reading Anthony Beevor’s book, misleadingly entitled ”D-Day”, and unmisleadingly subtitled “The Battle for Normandy”.  For Beevor’s story goes from the early agonising about whether (because of the weather), and if so exactly when, the landings would be launched, right up until the German catastrophe that was the Falaise Pocket.  Then as now, despite much behind the scenes agonising, the short-term weather forecaster got it spot on, despite having far less to go on than his equivalents have now.

There’s nothing like the misfortunes of others to cheer you up.  Which is a terrible thing to say and I wouldn’t say it if there was any chance that my bad attitude was able to reach back into the past and make the sufferings of those soldiers, and all those French people caught up in the fighting, even worse.  But it won’t do that.  And anyway, what I mean is, I am really just acknowledging how much worse things were for that generation than they have been for mine.

And then, come Christmas time, there was the Battle of the Bulge for all the participants in this book to put up with, if they’d not already been killed, or injured and stretchered off.

I haven’t been reading this book solidly, in its correct order.  I have been dipping into it, reading about this or that episode, pretty much at random.  Today I was reading about how Brittany was liberated, which until now I knew very little about.  It helps a lot having been to all the towns and cities that get a mention.

Earlier, I read about what those Hawker Typhoons did, known to me until now only as an oil painting.  What the Typhoons did was destroy a hell of a lot fewer counter-attacking German tanks than they claimed at the time and ever since, but they scared the hell out of the German tank guys, which was almost as effective.  The counter-attack was duly snuffed out.

And when that book has finished entertaining me, I have another book, full of more evidence concerning how nice my life has been, this time about something that happened a year earlier.  Kursk.

How to say that I am at home alone over Christmas without you feeling sorry for me?  I can’t do it, but please: don’t.  In exchange, I won’t feel sorry for you that you are reading this instead of having “fun”.

Each to his or her own, but I love it that holidays, for me, really are holidays, rather than just burdens of a different sort to the more usual ones.  Don’t get me wrong, burdens are often well worth bearing, as when I visit GodDaughter 2’s family in Brittany, and must bear the burdens of living in an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar facilities and unfamiliar routines and with the fear of inflicting various sorts of offence and inconvenience upon everyone, with them being too polite to say.  But, these are still burdens.  This Christmas, as is my usual habit, I have been ensconced in my little snuggery, with no burdens at all.

I haven’t been fobbing you people off with nothing but silly old photos because I’ve been gadding about around town, catching up with friends and family and attending swanky functions.  No gadding about.  I’ve been fobbing you off with photos because I have been relaxing, even more than usual.

Here’s another silly photo, to wish you all a Merry Christmas.  I haven’t found any Merry Christmas messages out in the streets lately, so here is a Christmassy photo that I think I took in Oxford Street, definitely in December 2008:

Which tells me that I was fascinated by Bald Blokes Taking Photos for quite a while before I had worked this out in the fully conscious part of my head.  I love how green he is.

On Christmas Day itself I will not be alone, for I am to have a Christmas lunch with friends.  This will bring with it the burden of having to travel across London on Christmas Day, which basically means two very long walks.  (I don’t know how to Uber, since you ask.  I’d rather walk.) If I come across any Merry Christmas messages while walking, and manage to photo them, I’ll pass them on.

Here are two Wheel photos I took in March of this year.

The first one needs another go, to line up that rather dim reflection of it with the Thing itself.  The top of the reflection is in the right spot, but the bottom needs to be looked at from lower.

That isn’t enough to be an Official Destination, but next time I’m passing by that spot, and if I remember, I’ll try to do this photo again, better:

This one, on the other hand, already looks fine to me:

An earlier photo along the same lines is to be seen in this 2010 posting.

The year approaches its end, and I am trawling through my year’s archives to put together one of those My Year In Pictures postings for Samizdata.

Which is how I came across this photo, that I took in January of this year:

That won’t make the cut, I don’t think.  Too much about me.  Too little about The World, etc.  But, I do like it.

My official purpose in visiting Tottenham, way back when I did, was to take a look at whatever I could see of the rebuilding of the Tottenham Hotspur football ground, so I didn’t pause to work out what was happening with this:

Which I now regret.  I didn’t even give those buses, stopped at traffic lights if I remember it correctly, a chance to get out of the way.

Interesting shadows.  Interesting reflections bounced off windows.  But, the two on top of each other?  How come?  Think about it.  These two things have no business being right on top of each other.  Do they?

I was able to work out what was happening with these photos, taken moments earlier.  But the exact explanation of the above photo will presumably remain a mystery.

Earlier this evening I was out and about in central London, and although it was dark, I distinctly remember that I needed to take a photo.  I remember this because there was no SD card in my camera, and I had to activate one of the spares that I always keep tucked away in my left hand inside jacket pocket.

But what did I photo?  I can’t remember.  Let’s take a look.

Ah yes, this:

This being … well, see above.  Actually, I already knew when I started this.

What’s new about this scene since last I was there is not that this edifice now exists, when previously it did not.  What is new is that the area around it is less cluttered, and now you can see the thing.

I think it looks cool.  Also it photos well in the dark.

No way you could build a thing like this before there were computers to sort out all those bits of glass and metal, all different, all exactly the size they need to be.

Indeed:

On the left: Iceland (Lower Marsh), 50p.  On the right: Tesco (Warwick Way), 75p.

Identical bottles, with the same green tops.  But the Tesco one is, I believe, ever so slightly darker.  Is it perhaps fifty per cent more concentrated?

That fog and gloom that I mentioned yesterday seems to have been a more than merely local circumstance.  It caused Travel Chaos and got national media attention.  Follow that link and see pictures of airplanes, trains, cyclists and people, in fog.

Or stay here and enjoy a few more of my foggy photos, or cranes with their tops in the clouds, and roof clutter with more distant roof clutter just that little bit vaguer than usual.  Westminster Abbey looking very vague:

Quite a contrast with a day like this.

By the way, that peculiar red spike (2,1) is on the top of the Channel 4 headquarters.  And while looking for a photo that includes this spike, I have just discovered that C4 might be about to leave this building and go to Birmingham.  Blog and learn.

This morning I was out and about in the greyness and gloom of Victoria, and the more entertaining things I saw was this guy, wearing a suit.  And a swimming cap.  He was talking with a guy wearing a Santa elf hat, outside a pub, and inside the pub was a table full of more guys in strange headgear.  Mr Swimming Cap and Mr Elf had to be part of that.  Some kind of office or re-union pre-Christmas get-together, presumably.  With a strange headgear theme.

Click to get the bigger picture.  I now wish I’d got more of the suit.

I like how the hat is wrinkled, like an alien in a cheap and ancient SF movie, before this kind of thing was done properly.

Indeed.  Photoed by me in the Victoria Station branch of W.H. Smith, last week.

Friday is my day for other creatures, and you can’t get more other creatury than Fantastic Beasts, can you?

And here is Where to Find Them.  Well, it’s one of the places to find them:

All the Penguin Modern Classics that they are selling occupy just the one alcove.  Thirty books to read in a lifetime, one alcove.  And Fantastic Beasts, one alcove.  The J.K. Rowling juggernaut rumbles on.

And that’s not even to mention Robert Galbraith.