Cagnacci's Repentant Magdalene – Room 1 at The National Gallery

I went to the press viewing of this gorgeous painting last Tuesday.
Go see it – it's lovely.
I took some pics – they turned out to be rubbish...

... but not as rubbish as the front wall by the National Gallery's portico entrance on Trafalgar Square where the 'performers' who stand on bits of wrought iron dressed as Star Wars characters leave their empty drinks cups.

Happy New Year... and a positive resolution

Whoosh!  Is it just me, or did 2014 fly by very quickly indeed?

Happy New Year from some of my favourite ghostsigns

Hovis, Haig, Dunphy, Supper, Brymay, Pring, Dowell's, Harper, Sally, Gillette, Girling and Daren

2014 wasn't that good a year for me for many reasons. And I let myself get irked by too many extraneous things – people on buses, walking blindly out of shops, talking utter rubbish, littering, being rude, insensitive, selfish or self-obsessed etc. Not to mention the phone companies and the banks.

And, as you know if you have read my rants about The Pointy Thing, the Garden Bridge and the Dubaiification of London, I have been becoming very worn down by the huge architectural changes that are happening in London leaving almost no area untouched by an 'iconic' lump of glass.
There are some very rich people with the ability to hold a pen and sign their name who are changing great swathes of London in the sweep of an arm. I don't see the extent of this kind of architectural rape happening in, say, Rome, Madrid or Brussels, and it saddens me.

But I must rise above these ugly towers; I have to stop getting so agitated.
So here is my plan for 2015... 
From now on, I resolve to [try to!] write only about the things that please me. After all, it was the little details that got me started with this blog, and that's what it says on the mast head.
I apologise if a few gripes slip in occasionally, but I will try to make them succinct or witty, or both.

One more thing.... 
People have written to me saying that they are having a problem leaving comments on here. Hence why I get so few.
I have fixed the problem now – please try again – it's nice to know you are out there ;-)

All the best for a positive and prosperous year,
Jane

Food waste and fat waists

Recently I was at a market and happened to notice that by the end of the day a food stall selling 'artisan' pastries and cakes had barely sold half of its stock. OK, some of it could possibly be re-hashed into other products (their bread pudding made with croissants was yummy!), but the bulk of it would surely have to be binned.
It got me thinking about how the cost of the basic ingredients is, in many cases, minimal (cupcakes anyone?!) yet the retail prices have to factor in all the estimated wastage.
Food waste disgusts me. Here, in the UK and the western world, we are paying over the odds for simple items and throwing away good, edible, unsold or uneaten food. A lot of fruit and veg available in the UK is being imported from around the world, and a large percentage of that also ends up being thrown away as either unfit to sell or, once bought, it's mouldy/inedible in a day or two.
Include 'sell by' and 'use by' dates, and the whole thing gets really ugly. One big compost heap – though I bet no one's thought of that.
And, in contrast to all this, there are still people in the world without access to the basic ingredients needed to make simple meals. Go figure.
I put the TV on this morning for a bit of homogenised BBC News and it seems some genius has suggested that the world's food shortage could be blamed on obese people!
These lardy buckets do indeed eat too much, but this 'epidemic' of families of overweight waddlers seems to me to have begun at roughly the same time as MacDonald's started to offer supersize portions. Ditto kingsize Mars Bars, buckets of fizzy drink and crisp packets containing enough calories to feed a family of four. There were no obese people about when I was at school; just one fat boy in my class, though he did eat a lot of sweets.
Here's an interesting statistic... according to the BBC item, the US contains one third of the obese people on this planet yet the country only accounts for 6% of the world's population.
I wonder if we can also blame these American obese people for the strange weather we are having this year... perhaps them being concentrated in one place like this is causing the planet to go off-balance?
On the subject of food, and particularly fast food, if you haven't already seen it, watch the fascinating 'The Men Who Made Us Fat'. The first episode was last week – find it on BBC iPlayer. Fascinating and scary.

Cafes, cafés, caffs and other similar places to eat in London
Top: Archway, Oxford St, Holloway, Stoke Newington
Middle: Sloane Square, Islington, Holborn, Holloway
Bottom: Crouch End, Smithfield, Finsbury Park

Cleaning up the South Bank

Leaving the Royal Festival Hall and walking up the stairs to the northern side of the Jubilee Bridge a few weeks ago I was disgusted (of Hollloway) to notice how filthy the 'clear' side panels were. And I noticed that the metal strips that run either side of the whole length of the bridge(s) are also grimy.
It reminded me that when I was in Roturua, NZ, a few years ago I saw a woman cleaner, armed with a trolley full of sprays, cloths and sponges, ambling up the street cleaning the street furniture by hand quickly and efficiently. No noise, no machines, no fuss; just a bit of elbow grease.
Here in London, and perhaps the whole of the UK, we build iconic structures and 'modernise' our public transport, but then let it all get filthy within weeks. For instance, I have often witnessed electric-powered rotary cleaners being used on areas with square corners. Need I say more?!
Specifically, on the underground, the lovely yellow and blue tiles at Kings Cross were replaced with small silver grey tiles that have, within just one year become dull with patchy areas showing exactly where new batches of grout were mixed. These same badly-laid grubby little grey tiles have also been used on linking sections of other platforms, especially within the Jubilee line, whose concrete utilitarian design now just looks like the builders upped and left without finishing anything – and on a Waterloo platform recently I noticed that the leaning bars along the platform were only clean in the places that people lean on them. Ugh.
Don't get me wrong; I am not a cleanliness freak (just see the build up of dust in my house!) but the above seems to contradict all the health and safety nonsense we see and hear – don't touch this/that; wash your hands etc. The government, our councils and LRT are sending out mixed messages. Surely we ought to be keeping things looking the best they can be, and especially so this year with all the extra people expected for the Olympics?
Let's get cleaning... in the case of the Jubilee Bridge(s), I reckon it would take less than a day for a handful of people to get them looking all sparkly again.
So, to the promo bit.... I am glad to report that there is a clean-up incentive happening along the South Bank at the moment. A group of 'clean artists', headed by Moose Curtis, are creating reverse/negative graffiti along various stretches along the Thames. See more here and watch a short vid about it here.
A great idea. Some promo pics of the event are at the bottom of this post but, in Jane's London style, here are some of my own rubbish photos: