It's a London Life

Sunshine, clear blue skies, turqouise water, a top note of sun block, drinks by the rooftop pool (espresso martini anyone?), hot gay guys, assorted metrosexuals sucking their bellies in, bikini babes, tanned milfs & their off-spring, and slackers with laptops. On a Monday in central London ... pray tell, where is this Nirvana? In Shoreditch E1 of course, central London's staycation capital, Shoreditch House. As the heavenly hegemony of foreign travel has trickled down from the aristocratic heights of 'the grand tour', to 'wintering' on the riviera, to tanning in St. Tropez with Bardot, to package holidays in Spain, to Club 18-30, to budget airline travel, to second home ownership, to journeys to peripheral airports ... modern travel has become nothing more than a hellish experience for most of us. So why do we do it when all the above is right here on our doorstep? Following the adage 'build it and they will come', Nick Jones' Shoreditch Hotspot* has...

Kunst Alert! Kunst Alert! Take a walk through "London's trendy Hoxton Square", stumbling through the detritus as you go & head straight into the White Cube. Prepare to be amazed.  Then gorge yourself with Kunst ... with Marcus Harvey's "White Riot" as your starter, main & dessert. Kunst factor: 11/10 Another free in Olde London Town.

We've known it for some time and now we have the proof. That's right, Gordon Brown is not of this earth. Having firstly co-engineered a global economic disaster with that other alien G Bush (same intitals too) and secondly further weakened our military strength by encouraging nuclear disarment, Gordon Brown's real masters have this morning been revealed hovering threateningly over the Houses of Parliament in white blobs captured on camera by Mr Derek Burden of Leverington, Cambs. In an unnatributed quoute  Mr Burdon said "It's just like something from Dr Who". Indeed. Did Andrew T.Davies have a hand in this we wonder? We should be told. Read the Telegraph article here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/5007735/UFOs-photographed-over-London.html

Growing up in my grandparents house meant we were greeted every morning by a moody, squint-eyed, cigar-chomping, stetson-wearing cowboy, staring down at us from his position above the gas-fire. Shee-it, I must have seen that picture on a daily basis for at least 15 years. A couple of decades later and The Man With No Name is still with us, dissing 'the pussy generation ' and telling us how it is, in this month's Esquire magazine. Most noticeably of all ol' 'No Name' reveals a zen-like mastery of the creative process with platitude such as: ' "We've come this far, let's not ruin it by thinking." Children teach you that you can still be humbled by life, that you learn something new all the time. That's the secret to life, really -- never stop learning. It's the secret to career. I'm still working because I learn something new all the time. It's the secret to relationships. Never think you've got it all. We were doing In ...

At college I thought Architecture was the chosen course for dreary middle class morons but 20 years hence I find myself marvelling at Prague's Baroque churches, Ancient Rome's Parthenon, the cliff-hugging marvels of Positano and even the floodlit NFT on the Southbank. So, of course, last Thursday night meant a trip to the Barbican for the 'Le Corbusier' exhibition. What to expect from a person who calls themself 'Le Corbusier'? A certain pretense, peut etre? Well, I wasn't disappointed. Whilst strolling around the first floor of the exhibition a gentlemen next to me suddenly started to declaim ("I am an acrobat of forms, player with forms ...") from the balcony in a mid-atlantic accent as a mournful flute joined in. And was that a discordant piano turning the duo into a trio? It was indeed. How fantastic. A post modern (remember that term?) musical performance (of Xennakis) during a modernist architectural exhibition in the Barbican. It all fell in...

Sometimes living in London is the shits ... and you wonder why we do it. Then there are times that I think it's the greatest place to be. Today it's the latter. So I'm working at an agency down on the river Thames behind the Globe theatre at London Bridge and I'm wondering what to do for lunch as I don't feel particularly hungry, so I decide to go for a walk around Tate Modern. I've done it many times before so nothing new there. What is new is that for once, somebody has decided to hang some fantastic art on those huge walls. I say for once because for a year it has been completely uninspiring and bland but not anymore. So why not pop down there (missing out the Turbine Hall) and go straight for the third floor and feast your eyes on some fantastic paintings that you may never have seen before e.g. 'Tobacco versus Red Chief' by Jean Michel Basquiat(which is much more impressive than this jpeg may suggest).You can see whatthe Carnegie museum says about i...

Primrose Hill is an amazing place to live. What's more we now have our own piste, if only for one day. To recap: It's Monday 2nd February, it's been snowing all night (as predicted for days before), and in the early light just before dawn (7.45am) it's still snowing. What to do? Get out there and make the most of it, of course ... When I got to the top there were already 20 or so children and parents who quite natutrally had decided that they we're going to have some fun and take the day off. As you'd imagine, with no piste grooming facilities it was real back to basics stuff, but pretty soon there were a couple of jumps and things got a bit more lively... But by 9.30 am, and with hundreds more people recklessly throwing themselves down the hill on sheets of cardboard, plastic, trays, whatever ... it was time to leave the latecomers to it.