Unexpected London - morning
Jul. 9th, 2017 10:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lovingbothI wasn't planning to be in London on Saturday until there was an 'available today only' offer on Wednesday on the East coast main line: £5 for anywhere between the London & Leeds section this weekend. There was nothing particularly interesting in Leeds, so that meant it'd be London. (Although at this point, I had forgotten that Pride was happening in London this weekend!)
L was already booked to do several things. Was JA interested? By the time school had finished and I could ask (she wasn't) most of the morning trains had sold out of this offer, so it was either the 7:05am or waiting until lunchtime. Erk.
Coming back was simple: 10pm. Even though that meant seeing a show wasn't going to be possible, it was going to be a long day. There's very little in the West End available cheaply that I'd be interested in seeing anyway and the much more interesting fringe tends to be further away and more impossible to do with that timing.
Because something that almost always happens on Friday was a day early, by Thursday night, I was convinced that it was tomorrow that I was going to London, so at least I had a light load ready. Fortunately, my phone knew.
..
I was woken at about 5am on Saturday for some very nice sex and didn't get back to sleep, so I was at least awake when the alarm went off at 6. Breakfast, sort a couple of other things, then off to the station.
The journey was good - I'd sensibly picked a seat on the opposite side to the sun, so had some nice views rather than the sun in my face as I caught up on Twitter.
Arriving at about 8:30, I was going to walk to the bi breakfast, but it was clear just from walking along the platform that I'd have cramp problems, especially in my left calf if I did. Ah, there's a cycle station nearer than there used to be..
Although I couldn't find either of our hire keys when looking on Thursday night (or indeed on Friday) it's only slightly more long winded doing it by card, so I was soon off. Great - no calf problem!
After a quick stop at a supermarket by the Brunswick flats, I ended hire #2 near the breakfast venue. I was a bit early, so looked in through the windows of a pub showing the Lions-NZ match, which was coming to the end of the first half. The Lions got a penalty to get close but then the Kiwis got an easy try: clearly they were going to stuff the Lions...
Apparently, last year's breakfast had been relatively quiet for the first half hour, then about fifty people arrived.. That hadn't happened by the time I left, at about 10:30, but it was good to see several people in particular, and many thanks to Libby for organising it.
..
The reason for leaving was that I'd booked an 11am slot for 'It Must Have Been Dark By Then' (starting!) at the British Library. You've given a smartphone with a set of headphones and a slim book. You're then set out into the BL's plaza to read the introduction...
On the phone is an app - which you can get from the Google Play store - that's a map. A blank one, with just your current position as a blue dot on a grid. You're told via the headphones to go off and find some homes. OK.. The start point remains as a grey circle, and your blue dot gets further away from it. Once you tap a button to say you're at some homes, a second grey circle appears to mark your current location and you're directed to read another section of the book. Once you've tapped to say you've done that, another grey circle appears on the map and you're directed to go to it.
But can you? What's in the way? How easy is it to navigate on a more or less blank map?
In my case, I ended up going around two and a half sides of a rectangle. A shorter / quicker route had been possible, but I hadn't gone the right way first and the direct line route was impossible because of the buildings, so going about 70m had taken about 500m.
This basic pattern is repeated, with quests for water, wood and a barrier. Then you go back over your route.
This sounds fairly rubbish, but the combination of the sound (music, voice and ambient recorded sound, often in immersive binaural stereo) and readings make it really thought provoking. They're from three places: near the Latvia / Russia border, the Mississippi delta, and the edge of the Sahara. So the first border - completely arbitrary - was important in living memory, became less so following Stalin's invasion & annexation, and is now important again. Migration has reduced the population. Climate change means the Sahara is moving.
And, for the last section, there's a huge barrier on the delta (if you're on the 'wrong' side of it, you're on your own if there's any sort of problem) and - on my version of the walk, because everyone will have made different choices - I was by a very long fence in the bit to the north of the Regent's Canal. One side, a busy public space with fountains being used by lots of kids, on the other a retail development happening. Even the wall itself was intrusive with its ads, and on the map it doesn't exist. It didn't exist in the past, it won't exist in the future, and again, it's an arbitrary line.
Similarly, for one of the 'now go here' sections, I couldn't do it, even when the distance was made smaller, because someone had said 'mine!' and it was in walled off private space.
As, I said, thought provoking stuff and it'd be interesting to try the app elsewhere. It'd be different without the book, but I'm curious as to what it'd be like in somewhere much more rural - where the texts and sounds are from - than central London.
L was already booked to do several things. Was JA interested? By the time school had finished and I could ask (she wasn't) most of the morning trains had sold out of this offer, so it was either the 7:05am or waiting until lunchtime. Erk.
Coming back was simple: 10pm. Even though that meant seeing a show wasn't going to be possible, it was going to be a long day. There's very little in the West End available cheaply that I'd be interested in seeing anyway and the much more interesting fringe tends to be further away and more impossible to do with that timing.
Because something that almost always happens on Friday was a day early, by Thursday night, I was convinced that it was tomorrow that I was going to London, so at least I had a light load ready. Fortunately, my phone knew.
..
I was woken at about 5am on Saturday for some very nice sex and didn't get back to sleep, so I was at least awake when the alarm went off at 6. Breakfast, sort a couple of other things, then off to the station.
The journey was good - I'd sensibly picked a seat on the opposite side to the sun, so had some nice views rather than the sun in my face as I caught up on Twitter.
Arriving at about 8:30, I was going to walk to the bi breakfast, but it was clear just from walking along the platform that I'd have cramp problems, especially in my left calf if I did. Ah, there's a cycle station nearer than there used to be..
Although I couldn't find either of our hire keys when looking on Thursday night (or indeed on Friday) it's only slightly more long winded doing it by card, so I was soon off. Great - no calf problem!
After a quick stop at a supermarket by the Brunswick flats, I ended hire #2 near the breakfast venue. I was a bit early, so looked in through the windows of a pub showing the Lions-NZ match, which was coming to the end of the first half. The Lions got a penalty to get close but then the Kiwis got an easy try: clearly they were going to stuff the Lions...
Apparently, last year's breakfast had been relatively quiet for the first half hour, then about fifty people arrived.. That hadn't happened by the time I left, at about 10:30, but it was good to see several people in particular, and many thanks to Libby for organising it.
..
The reason for leaving was that I'd booked an 11am slot for 'It Must Have Been Dark By Then' (starting!) at the British Library. You've given a smartphone with a set of headphones and a slim book. You're then set out into the BL's plaza to read the introduction...
On the phone is an app - which you can get from the Google Play store - that's a map. A blank one, with just your current position as a blue dot on a grid. You're told via the headphones to go off and find some homes. OK.. The start point remains as a grey circle, and your blue dot gets further away from it. Once you tap a button to say you're at some homes, a second grey circle appears to mark your current location and you're directed to read another section of the book. Once you've tapped to say you've done that, another grey circle appears on the map and you're directed to go to it.
But can you? What's in the way? How easy is it to navigate on a more or less blank map?
In my case, I ended up going around two and a half sides of a rectangle. A shorter / quicker route had been possible, but I hadn't gone the right way first and the direct line route was impossible because of the buildings, so going about 70m had taken about 500m.
This basic pattern is repeated, with quests for water, wood and a barrier. Then you go back over your route.
This sounds fairly rubbish, but the combination of the sound (music, voice and ambient recorded sound, often in immersive binaural stereo) and readings make it really thought provoking. They're from three places: near the Latvia / Russia border, the Mississippi delta, and the edge of the Sahara. So the first border - completely arbitrary - was important in living memory, became less so following Stalin's invasion & annexation, and is now important again. Migration has reduced the population. Climate change means the Sahara is moving.
And, for the last section, there's a huge barrier on the delta (if you're on the 'wrong' side of it, you're on your own if there's any sort of problem) and - on my version of the walk, because everyone will have made different choices - I was by a very long fence in the bit to the north of the Regent's Canal. One side, a busy public space with fountains being used by lots of kids, on the other a retail development happening. Even the wall itself was intrusive with its ads, and on the map it doesn't exist. It didn't exist in the past, it won't exist in the future, and again, it's an arbitrary line.
Similarly, for one of the 'now go here' sections, I couldn't do it, even when the distance was made smaller, because someone had said 'mine!' and it was in walled off private space.
As, I said, thought provoking stuff and it'd be interesting to try the app elsewhere. It'd be different without the book, but I'm curious as to what it'd be like in somewhere much more rural - where the texts and sounds are from - than central London.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-07-09 02:34 pm (UTC)