I'm going to change the world
Welcome.
Some enforced days off. The cab is in for its yearly overhaul and relicencing. Time for some culture. There is a long queue outside the National Gallery, but round the corner is the recently refurbished National Portrait Gallery. Some are familiar, some are very skillful, and some are inimitably of their time. I like Meredith Frampton, but I feel like a tourist, and I thin
What’s with the British fetish for metals and silly uniforms.
General Grant mostly dressed like a disheveled private, and he was instrumental in the North winning the war between the States.
if someone judges you by your hair or dress f==k[em
Is it the Catholics who say that feeling sorry for others is a sin? A Scottish lady left £60 in cash in the cab yesterday, and I put it in an envelope, addressed "By Hand. FAO The Scottish Lady..." and posted it today in her concierge-less, Mayfair apartment block, and maybe it was to create art, but maybe it taught me a lesson. A lady with a highly disabled boy going to North Finchley last night, a lady with learning difficulties going to Old Street this afternoon, both from King's Cross. Why not do such jobs for free and create more art? In any case, I'm going up north again for a few days' holiday before the mayhem of xxxxmas, paid for with my money.
Actually, he didn't. He was too busy freeing the slaves. And inventing modern warfare.
I'm saying that Stonewall Jackson was trash himself. Him, Lee, and all the rest of them Rebs.
Somebody left an umbrella in the cab a couple of months ago. Well-made, a good size, and a good shade of navy blue. Nothing fancy, just a nice, old-fashioned, unostentatious umbrella. Exactly the kind I would choose were I ever to buy one. I would liked to have trekked over to West Ham bus garage to hand it in, but the Law of Diminishing Returns prevented me from doing so. I don't think I have ever owned one before, and today was the first time I have used it. I can go for my morning walk round Battersea Park in the rain without getting wet? What a fantastic invention. One thing you notice is how many people own and use them. Except your hand holding it gets cold. Now all I need is someone to leave some good gloves.
My grandmother's paternal uncle won the VC in WW1. He was from Lincolnshire, born into a family of farmworkers of about 13 children, two of whom (twins) died shortly after birth. Her mother was from the south side of Dublin. Or something like that; her handwriting in a long letter to my father telling the history is somewhat illegible. My father grew up in Grantham, and there's three more military Sharpes on the wall of St. Wulfram's church there. The best spire in all England, it has been said. The army was the only alternative to working on the land, it seems. I'd heard about him intermittently through childhood, and here I am finally standing by his grave in a cemetery almost in the shadow of Lincoln Cathedral, an astonishing building, and there's the VC, along with his other medals, in a museum down the road. "... and I said didn't you read about it in the paper, and he said I can't bloody read, and it's only a bloody medal..." The stuff of fairy tale.
Interesting to read and try to reconstruct what happened. He must have gotten down into the trench and then rolled it up. But 240 yards is a long long way.
There is a bit more about it:
Being the only survivor of the initial part of the assault, for his commander had been killed, Sharpe was in charge and led his colleagues across a misty and muddied battlefield. Armed with 30 hand grenades in pouches strapped to their uniforms his men were being shot down as they approached the German trench. Sharpe, similarly armed, found himself standing alone with the enemy running in all directions while his bombs took deadly effect. He took a fifty yard trench, was joined by four soldiers from another regiment and attacked the enemy once more, this time by dint of the accuracy of their bombing taking a much larger trench of 250 yards.
(Quote taken from a Pickworth Village site, which for some reason is deemed insecure, so I won't post the link.)
The
in which it took place was an "unmitigated disaster", to the extent that it precipitated a . Unmitigated!
The accent in south/mid-Lincolnshire is unusually nondescript. Go to neighbouring counties and you will find strong regional accents, but here is somehow a zone of phonetic neutrality; meshing perhaps with the flatness of the landscape. Grantham is nice enough in places, but like so much of provincial England, everywhere is the odour of economic decay, and subsequent loss of identity. On the bus ride back to Lincoln, through the winter grime on the windows and the gloom of the dusk, there are less agreeable ways of spending an afternoon than gazing out at the church spires in the land that he fought for.
Like Americans, apparently, Fahrenheit is the only temperature scale I can relate to. But I draw the line at working in 25C. Which is probably negligible as I have recently discovered the secret of taxi-driving, which is to start early in the morning. A game-changer. So it's a Sunday afternoon off, and now that I get free travel, I can pay an overdue visit to my friend's bar in Winchmore Hill. Without lapsing into Real Ale Twats territory, it's CAMRA top five bars in 2024, and a pint of Hammerton's N7 has complexity. There's some guy playing guitar in there who has plainly spent thousands of hours studying Robert Johnson and the origins of popular music. Solid guitarist. If you were in a bar in Memphis, and this guy were playing in the corner, trust me you would not object.
Class reunion today. They are me, I suppose.
Manny Fizzotti was the guitarist. Goes with drinking.
Midsummer. Four years to the day since my brother died. Obligatory to go drinking in Camden and Marylebone. Such has been the ongoing heat that the rose garden in Regent's Park has well peaked. He had the sell-your-soul-for-alcohol gene and I don't, or whatever the latest objective explanation of that is. We both needed a little more guidance. You played this album a lot, I mentioned to him on his deathbed. Good album.
