The smallest library in the world.

Love only bicycle.

It is without doubt the most photographed bicycle in London: parked outside the pink mews house that served as Kiera Knightly's home in 'Love actually' it has featured in thousands of photographs and selfies by tourists from around the planet.

Sent from my iPhone

Snow shoes in Notting Hill.

Fly fishing for hare in Kensington Gardens.

A guest blog by Jan Nieupjur.

Country pursuits are few and far between in London so you can imagine my delight on being invited to an evening's fly fishing in Kensington Gardens by my old pal Buffy.

Imagining trout rising in the Serpentine I packed my rod and favourite flies and headed west to his mews pied a terre in Notting Hill. Buffy answered the door with tears streaming down his cheeks.
"My god Buffy, what on earth is the matter". I exclaimed.
"Just cutting bait, old chap". Was his reply and he went on to explain that far from stalking trout in the Serpentine we would be after the Husk of hares that had colonized Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Apparently Princess Diana had released a breeding pair from Kensington Palace in order to piss off Charles, they were his favourite pets and she felt received more affection than she, shortly after their marriage.

The hares bred like rabbits and today there are more than 2,000 of the critters living in the meadows. Early on the Hares developed nocturnal habits and are rarely seen during daylight hours. An annual cull takes place in February, carried out by the Coldstream Guards armed with high powered air rifles fitted with night sights, as the local communities blithely sleep on unaware of the ongoing carnage nearby.

Buffy has set up the Kensington hare fishing club in order to take advantage of this bounty. fishing is of course banned in the Serpentine but there is no such constraint to fishing in the grass. Twilight was the optimum time for catching the hares which came out to gambol as the park quietened for the night.

The cause of Buffy's tears was laid out on the butchers block in his well equipped kitchen.

 

Preparing bait.

 "Horse radish". Buffy exclaimed with relish. Apparently, through much trial and error, this was the best bait for the job. A 'tail' of horse radish was wound into the fly and proved to be irresistible to the animals. Buffy went on to tell me that he had previously used asparagus but found that it often disintegrated on casting. The fibrous horse radish however, grown on his roof, not only had the required stringiness to stay on the hook but also the whiteness of its flesh made it easy for the hares to spot in the gloaming.

After preparing a dozen flies, more lure than a fly to my mind, we filled our hip flasks with cherry brandy and set out.

Kensington gardens at dusk is a magical place, lit by the amber metropolitan glow and swathed in a faint winter mist, silent but for the cough of foxes, grunts of alfresco lovers and the rustle of rough sleepers bedding. we arrived at Buffy's chosen spot, close to the Diana memorial ditch on the southern bank of the serpentine.

"They seem to congregate here, probably where the first pair were released". Said buffy.

I remember, long ago stocking the memorial with a dozen rainbow trout for a spot of sport many years ago after I had been arrested for fishing in the Serpentine. I was arrested for that too.



Illegally fishing the Serpentine.

We set up our rigs and, with some scepticism on my part,  cast our lures. to my astonishment and joy the hares rose to our bait as cast after cast we snagged them. Once hooked the animals fought hard, cutting zigzag courses through the meadow, one or two were lost when the line snagged on a tree. I was using a 10lb mono filament line and made a mental note to upgrade to a 20lb braided line next time.

By 10.00 pm we had a decent bag of 17 animals, no specimens but all of a good size, and as the last of the cherry brandy slid down our gullets decided to call it a night.

"Just time to catch the Cow before last orders'. Exclaimed Buffy.

Later, back at Buffy's house we hung the beasts on olive trees for the night ready for butchering the following day. We sat late into the night, celebrating our success with a bottle or two, listening the urban foxes as they congregated beneath the hung hares, salivating frustration.



Hare in an olive tree.



Line caught Kensington hare.
"Je weet nooit hoe een koe een haas vangt". I muttered in my drunkenness.
Well I Know now!

The lies that bind us.

I love you, she told me
I know, I replied
we held each other closely
each knowing we lied....

A Christmas tragedy.

Regents Park Christmas, not a mouse stirred
the fondue burned on the hob
setting alight the zoological caff
the meerkats were not doing their job...

No alarm was raised by any a beast
not gecko lion llama nor gnu
they all slept on contentedly
as an aardvark died in the zoo.

Yes an aardvark died in the zoo
an aardvark died in the zoo
while the keepers were listening to Flanders and Swann
an aardvark died in the zoo.

By the time the fire brigade got there
by an extremely circuitous route
the aardvark had met an untimely end
perfectly roasted en croute.

Now it's hungry work putting fires out
as any a fire crew will attest
so they fell upon that poor aardvark
in a mob of high visibility vests.

Yes an aardvark died in the zoo
an aardvark died in the zoo
it was not consumed by the ravaging fire
but by the ravenous Camden fire crew.

At the end of the meal, the aardvark all ate
they belatedly decided to thank it
so toasts were drunk and cheers went up
for that perfect pig in fire blanket.



Apologies to McGonagall.

The muse with a Borderline Personality Disorder.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote: “All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”

For the muse her secret life makes a mockery of both her public and private lives which are nothing more than a facade created in order to conceal the real person.

What follows is a sad tale of how mental health problems can cause profound misery to all who come into contact with one individual who is probably unaware of her illness.

Divorcing parents could lose children if they try to turn them against partner

Interesting article in the Guardian:

Divorcing parents could be denied contact with their children if they try to turn them against their former partner, under a “groundbreaking” process being trialled by the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass).

The phenomenon where one parent poisons their child against the other is known as parental alienation, the ultimate aim of which is to persuade the child to permanently exclude that parent from their life.

Cafcass said it had recently realised parental alienation occured in significant numbers of the 125,000 cases it dealt with each year. 

Sarah Parsons, the assistant director of Cafcass, said: “We are increasingly recognising that parental alienation is a feature in many of our cases and have realised that it’s absolutely vital that we take the initiative. Our new approach is groundbreaking.”

The new approach will initially give parents the chance to change their behaviour with the help of intense therapy. Alienating parents who do not respond will not be allowed to have their children live with them. 

In addition, contact between the parent and child could be restricted or refused for a number of months. In the most extreme cases, the alienating parent will be permanently banned from any contact with their child.

Read on HERE

Amanda Palmer - Mother.

I've taken the following from Amanda Palmers Facebook. Worth a read:

i've need to share a thread that i just wrote on twitter. listen.
first of all, i’ve never seen a more overwhelmingly emotional & respectful high-five reaction & from my community for *anything* i’ve made. so thank you. but something is really freaking me out:

in my entire career, i’ve never heard such silence from the press. a few of my personal allies covered this video (thanks to Xeni Jardin at boing boing and Holly Cara Price at huffington post) but despite doing my usualpress-release to the US and UK the day this video came out, the non-response has been deafening. not one single major press outlet will cover it.

i’m like: is it me? am i old and irrelevant? is it the video too hard for people? are there really *no journalists* anymore, like some of my writer friends have been telling me? is it really possible to make a project so massive and not even get a mention from a single music blog? it’s so WEIRD.

and i find myself thinking: what if i didn’t have the patreon? i would be SO FUCKED. i have never believed more than NOW that my community is becoming the Media Itself and that i have to turn my fragile-ego-self away from the idea that the press is going to validate my hard work.

and how ironic, given my vide & all of trump’s hatred of the Fake News Media. but maybe it’s like the death of anything dear. maybe we have to collectively grieve the death of Old Media and celebrate whatever is taking its place, and make that thing work.

in closing: this platform you are reading right now is strangling my reach, the media won’t alert you, i’m not on a record label. so if you want to support me, there is only one channel left to assure i can still work and connect and survive, and it’s the patreon. please, join. the end.

it looks like i'm going to need you more than i thought.

and fuck it.

we can do this ourselves, it's always better that way anyway.

i'm pro-webcasting tonight from a super-sold-out show at london's union chapel, start time is 7:15 and i'll post here. come join me and the rest of the weirdos.

Obese children to be banned from 'Trick or treating' on Halloween.

It was announced today that obese children will be barred from the annual begging and gorging festival.

Extra police officers will be on duty on Saturday evening checking the BMI's of all suspect kids. Those who are seen to be overweight will be sent home with a stern warning to their parents.

It has been suggested by health experts that appetite suppressants such as cigarettes or amphetamines should be provided as an alternative to sweets.

Many parents are furious, especially those who have spent a fortune on 'Fat Donald Trump' costumes for their thin children. They fear that their children will be wrongly penalised and may turn to donuts as a means of relieving stress.

Boris Johnson failed to comment.




Disappointment at Halloween.

HOPE.

The bottom line is hope.

Without hope there is nothing; no ambition, no desire, nothing.

Hope is an horizon painted on a sheet of glass and seemingly forever out of reach; something to aim for, a goal...

Until you find yourself forced up against that sheet of glass.

There is nothing beyond it.

Living with COPD

Photo: David Petch.

This should really be titled: Dying with COPD.  I'm desperately trying to find humour in this situation but there is none.

When I was a child I would, when in the bath, cover my face with a wet flannel. For some reason I got pleasure from this until breathing became difficult. I now spend 24 hours a day sucking air through that wet flannel and I cannot remove it. I cannot fill my lungs. All I can do is reminisce.

My GP has given up. The regime of drugs no longer brings much relief. I have been told that I must call an ambulance should things worsen. I'm pretty much house bound except for wheezing struggles to the local supermarket or an occasional pint at the nearest pub.  I spend my days wondering if it is now time to call that ambulance.

I've been considering the blogs and what I should, or should not, delete. I have decided to delete all save Pre-Pentimento and the poetry blog which may be of interest to a child in time. The rest is going including the video's on youtube apart from one, for the same reason. I shall be adding video diaries while I can.

I am collating letters, emails, statements and photographs relating to the past 5 years prior to publication. This is being done in order that I might have a say in explaining the shitty mess that the past couple of years have been.

More later...

Nightmare.

There is an island, at least I think it is an island, it may well be a peninsula or a land locked continental state; I crossed no borders to get there, nor any sea that I can recall, one minute I was not there and then I was there and once there I thought of it as an island but one without any sea views or any boat to escape by not that I or any-one else on that island thought of escape for there was no-where to escape to that we knew of. We often inspected an unreliable bright place in the sky that constantly changed shape or position and sometimes vanished completely leaving us with little doubt that it offered no reliable refuge and what should happen if we arrived there on a day when it chose not to be there. How silly we would feel and how silly we should look to anyone who happened to be casually glancing that way at that time. And there was not a sea between us and that bright place upon which we could launch our hastily constructed balsa wood rafts necessary for an escape. And anyway none of us could swim and what should happen to us if some tsunami chanced our way and tossed us from our rafts and caused us to regret our foolish actions.

The island is a republic, or at least I imagine it is a republic for it has as absolute ruler a fraudulently elected despot of unimaginable cruelty and sublime poor taste. 

We live in crude dwellings while the Emperor lives in a palace constructed from the bones of our dead ancestors, the chandeliers that illuminate his grand rooms are formed from the delicate skeletons of stillborn children, we light our hovels with crude oil lamps that hardly light our hovels at all.

These oil lamps are each contained in a small pink cube manufactured from some strangely terrible material that reeks of fear and whimpers. Each cube, on one facet carries a cameo of the emperor in full regalia astride an unknown beast of his own design.

We have no beasts on this island, the emperors ate them long ago so we are resigned to imagining strange beasts, invariably forged in our nightmares.

We are each responsible for our own pink cube, we must tend the lamp and trim the wick. We must ensure the lamp never falls from it single strand of silk that rots in this tropical climate and must be replaced every hour on the hour, we have no clocks so must estimate the passing of each hour, we are natural comedians in that we have an innate sense of timing. We are not permitted to laugh under any circumstances. We take our comedy very seriously indeed!

The only law that we can rely on states that should one lamp go out or should one pink cube fall and smash on the packed earth floor below then the entire population of the island (save the Emperor) will be put to death. Put to death by whom we do not know but the threat alone is enough to keep us constantly tending our pink cubes (snatching cat-naps and meals (we have no sex lives to speak of) between re-stringing and wick-trimming) to ensure that they remain aloft and alight.

Fuck this for a game of soldiers. We are all going to die anyway, is it not better to die a free man and with dignity rather than tending the pink vanity of a bully and a tyrant.