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Posted on May 6 2008 by Jag @ 9:27 pm
It’s a moment to behold when you command the bus to stop and you get on and find your seat.
Getting on the Route 79 bus in Kingsbury, London NW9.
(Taken with my cameraphone of course.) A wonderful moment. Enjoy.
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Posted on April 27 2008 by Jag @ 9:06 pm
My mobile phone plays MP3s. Drifting off into daydreams staring at the nothingness of the Metropolitan Line on standing-room-only commutes into London town. Wars on terror, mayoral elections, missing toddlers.
The headlines on the front pages burden upon the soul when haunted by music so sad and so loud in your personal space. But staring at the ordinary can often become extraordinarily and hauntingly beautiful when doing so.
Lost in music staring at the nothingness of London commuting.
(Taken with my cameraphone on the Metropolitan Line towards Baker Street.) Click on the green button below and while it’s loading (be patient; it’s a high quality MP3 but should only take a couple of mins on broadband) put your headphones on and when it’s loaded turn up the volume really loud and click the “play” button and stare intently into the picture; focussing on infinity.
Music is the beautiful voice of Alyssia singing “Tera Pyar” (”Your love”) produced by London’s own Punjabi Hit Squad. This track has dominated the desi music charts in London last couple of months. Enjoy.
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Posted on April 15 2008 by Jag @ 7:24 pm
It’s been a while since my last update here. Busy busy. In the meantime I discovered that Flickr now does video! And I’m actually getting the hang of it. At first I was a bit hesitant at the idea; I mean: why try to compete with YouTube etc. but now I’m beginning to realise the genius of it: a) max 90 second clips: b) perfectly integrated with the way in which stills are handled; c) email upload mechanism preserved for us cameraphone junkies - the net result is that you won’t get pirated videos or user-generated karaoke-diatribe there; instead you’re more likely to get stuff that complements stills very well; and more likely to get cameraphone footage: which, of course is all about real life. We love real ife! Sometimes I have to drive to work instead of taking the buses and trains. If I do this, I have to park in a multi-storey shoppers car park in Slough near my office. The drive up the ramp can seem boring and mundane, but there is something quite exhilerating about it. You get a slight feeling of power as you hit the gas to get to the top and then command the barrier to raise: Driving up the ramp into a multi-storey car park in Slough.
(Taken with my cameraphone of course.) For those new to Flickr, you can get an insight into the Route 79 Flickr lifestyle here.
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Posted on April 6 2008 by Jag @ 10:58 pm
When it snows you can guarantee that there’ll be loads of Flickr people checking in with pictures of the scene from their windows. North West London is rarely graced with such sights, and even rarely in April, so I could not resist doing the same. By the early afternoon a razor-sharp spell of fierce sunshine caused this spectacle to vanish completely. A classic example of the craziness of the weather systems here in the UK.
Morning scene of surreal quality in North West London.
(Taken with my cameraphone.) Enjoyed while it lasted. (You can see my beloved Route 79 bus in this picture; a blaze of colour in an otherwise greyscale frame.)
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Posted on March 26 2008 by Jag @ 9:52 pm
Three chairs lined up just outside the window of an Indian restaurant called “The Bengal” in West London intrigued me somewhat.
Indian Restaurant near Royal Oak in West London.
(Taken with my cameraphone as I walked by on my way to a bus stop.)
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Posted on March 24 2008 by Jag @ 7:59 pm
No, not a type of pizza, but Italian for Spring. You wouldn’t believe it from the crazy weather we’ve been having lately, but Spring has arrived. (Of course, the further-out suburbs of London that occupy the southern hemisphere will be experiencing quite the opposite.) And so with it an exceptionally early Easter Bank Holiday weekend here in UK meant that my lunch on Friday 21st March (yes I know that Spring officially started on the 20th this year) was not spent having the usual Friday fish’n'chips in the office canteen. Instead, the Route 79 posse took advantage of the day off to trip it into town to visit our all-time favourite “chippy”: Mr Fish in Bayswater. And since Friday was the 21st of the month, I selected 21 of my favourite cameraphone snaps of that day and assembled them into a simple musical montage to record the sights and sounds from our quest for quality fish’n'chips - London-style. Click on the green button to get loading, turn up the volume as loud as you can and then use the green button to step through the pics with an imaginary fork in your hand waving it about like an virtuoso conductor and enjoy the trip.
Music is Op. 8/1, RV 269, “Spring” - 3. Danza Pastorale from Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” performed by Venice Baroque Orchestra lead by virtuoso violinist Giuliano Carmignola in what has to be my favourite interpretation of this all-time classic set of violin concertos.
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Posted on March 16 2008 by Jag @ 3:59 pm
Just about everybody who goes to a Thai restaurant at some point in their Thai-food-eating life orders a dish called Pad Thai. It’s Thai street food that’s made it to the tables of the foodies all over the world, and like most noodle dishes is very quick and easy to cook.
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that if it’s too complicated to cook, then it’s probably not how Pad Thai was meant to be. This stuff is made in minutes from food stalls in marketplaces all over Thailand, and in some cases even by vendors in tiny little boats on canals! So it’s got to be easy.
Pad Thai Noodles! No excuse not to make it yourself now.
(Taken with my cameraphone as I served it out ready to eat) The complexity is in the flavour and texture of the end-product, not in the cooking. So try it OK?
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Posted on March 9 2008 by Jag @ 8:42 pm
Someone left a message in these pages the other day requesting that I say seven things about myself. It’s a “meme” you know. A viral “I’ll answer some questions, and then pass it on” sort of thing. Now, the brief is a bit open-ended, but I kind of like that. So, here are seven things about me, some of which some of you will already know, and some which you might not. 1. I live in suburban London. A neighbourhood called Kingsbury. London NW9. And, naturally, my ‘hood, and lots about it, feature in these pages from time to time.
Kingsbury Road, London NW9. My local High Street.
(Taken with cameraphone.) 2. I work in the telecommunications industry. Mobile communications mostly. Wireless. I’ve had loads of mobile phones over the years. Click here for an article I wrote last year which features a musical photo montage of the last ten year’s worth of my mobile phones. Mobile phones are everywhere you know. 3. I love cooking. And I love to share my cooking. Over the years, hundreds of people have written to me thanking me for sharing my recipes. How I have saved their marriages, or how I’ve made their student lives more bearable etc. I have to thank my Mum. Google search index ranks some my recipes very highly as a result. I’m proud of my Mum for that. Thanks Mum! 4. I travel a lot on the buses in North West London. I love London buses. So much so that I name these pages after my local bus route. I have a lot of respect for buses and those who travel on them. Except those disrespectful people who put their dirty feet up on the seats. Sometimes I feel that it is my personal duty and mission to expose this selfish, disgusting habit. Click here to see what I mean. 5. It once took me 9 hours to get home. I used to work in Hammersmith in West London. And one January about five years ago it snowed in London. Only a few centimetres fell, but it brought the country to a standstiil. Anyway, to cut a long story short I ended up going round and round in circles on the Underground trying to find a suitable way out of town so I could get home. I wrote about my story on a website (that no longer exists) and it got spotted by a documentary researcher for Channel 4 TV here in the UK. A year or so later I was asked to take part in a film reconstruction for the documentary, and this was aired on UK national TV in 2005. One of the tube stations I ended up at time and time again after a wild goose chase trying to find any way in which I could get home was Edgware Road, and this formed the basis of my story in the TV documentary. It was screened on 6th of July 2005. The very next morning a Circle Line train at Edgware Road was blown up by a man detonating a ruck-sack full of high-explosives. Travelling the London transport system would never be the same again for quite some time. 6. I love experimenting with words, pictures, movies and sounds on these pages. I’ve produced loads of multimedia, pretend-arty stuff over the years. Here is an example: The other day I had to travel to a borough in the outer suburbs of London called “Prague”. And I had a particular tune in my head whilst doing so. All day; there and back, I could not get that music out of my head. Click on the green button below to experience a musical slideshow that summarises my daytrip to the outskirts of London:
To the outer suburbs and back again
(All pictures taken with my cameraphone.) (Musical intro from Blue Monday by New Order, 1983.) 7. And finally: I love Fish’n'chips! Every Friday I make a point of eating this traditional lunch in my office canteen. And every Friday I take a picture and upload it my Flickr photostream. It’s kind of become my way of saying “Have a great weekend” to all my Flickr friends. That’s it. Hope you had a great weekend, and (for those in the UK) have a safe week, what with the predicted storms and so on. Cheers!
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Posted on February 27 2008 by Jag @ 11:19 pm
Reflecting on the bus journey home the other day, I asked myself: what motivates me to keep these pages going? I mean, I’m paying time and money to keep these pages alive, and I get nothing obviously material back in return. Of course, materials aren’t everything are they?
Upper deck of Route 79 bus
(Taken with cameraphone after boarding it in Kingsbury London NW9.) Of course not. It soon became clear to me exactly why. Quite apart from friendships real and virtual, and some sense of arty satisfaction at mashing up words, images and sounds together and sharing them in a brave attempt to convince myself I can be more of an artist than the scientist that I am during the daytime (even though society unfortunately labels me an engineer), there is one thing that made it starkingly obvious. And this was it. An attempt to write up a brief history of my London neighbourhood about five years ago started to attract comments from people who had memories of the area from the past. And then it dawned upon me (actually it fell like a ton of bricks on me) that there’s a whole load of unwritten history out there; stuff that’s locked away inside people’s heads that probably only gets shared in conversations over cups of tea at gatherings of family and friends. Stuff that goes unrecorded forever. Unrecorded. Unshared. Undiscoverable. Forever.
But I realised that a tiny little fraction of an iota of those memories were being captured on this seemingly insignificant “blog” that I was keeping going out of the goodness of my heart. “Out of the goodness of my heart” I kept telling myself. Until I realised that it’s not out of the goodness of my heart, it’s a sense of absolute duty and obligation. When the comments to various postings started becoming conversations between “old Kingsburians” and I realised there was stuff here that you could never even begin to find in the local history section of WHSmiths in Brent Cross Shopping Centre or the local library I got myself the one and only meaningful reason why I just had to keep these pages alive, no matter what. The privilege of hosting Priceless Memories. And I thank all those who share them here, and those who email privately with even more. I finish this posting with copy of an email sent to me by Ray,who kindly gave me permission to publish his Priceless Memories of his life in my beloved neighbourhood in years gone by:
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Posted on February 20 2008 by Jag @ 8:56 pm
If you haven’t visited the new London Transport Museum yet then you might want to; it’s an excellent place to while away a Sunday afternoon. I did exactly that this weekend just gone, courtesy of a few very sociable fellow flickrites who gathered there to browse and take pics and generally just share the experience. Whilst most turned up with some serious photographic gear, I turned up with my mobile phone and snapped away as usual. Click on the green button in the Shockwave Flash image below to load a musical montage of some of the low-fidelity pictures I took and uploaded whilst there.
London Transport Museum, Covent Garden, London.
(All pictures taken with my cameraphone.) Click the same green button to advance through the pics. The musical accompaniment is an infectiously bubbly track called “Deewana” by Alyssia featuring Dee and the Punjabi Hit Squad, which is itself a real hit on the London urban desi scene at the moment. (Punjabi Hit Squad are THE pioneers of urban Asian/Western fusion beat) Turn up the volume, tap your feet and enjoy!
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Posted on February 16 2008 by Jag @ 3:07 pm
It’s a about a mile long and cuts through residential Kingsbury, London NW9, from Honeypot Lane in the West to Stag Lane in the East. People live here; the road is almost one hundred per-cent residential, save for a row of schools that provides for one of the largest concentrations of school-children in the country. (You can imagine what the traffic is like here during school-run hours.) The Jubilee Line runs beneath it. A village called Roe Green extends right off it. It’s served by London bus route 305, which for the first part at least, can be flagged down or stopped anywhere you like. Not that there’s anywhere for the bus to pull into; because people live here you see, and so their cars live here too. And these days a lot of people have cars, and a lot of people have more than one car. So a lot of people who live here sacrifice their front gardens for concrete driveways so that they can put their cars somewhere. And still the road is chock-a-block lined with parked cars. So most mornings at around half past eight, amidst the huddles of children marching their way to school, you will see huddles of lazier children at the Honeypot Lane end waiting for the bus, flag it down from between parked cars, board, and then alight less than a few minutes walk further up. A procession of cars will follow the bus all the way, each one complete with child clutching lunchbox and book-bag.
Princes Avenue, Kingsbury, London NW9
(Taken with cameraphone from just outside Kingsbury High, headed towards Honeypot Lane.)
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Posted on February 4 2008 by Jag @ 10:00 pm
Think.
(Taken with cameraphone at a crossing outside Morrisons supermarket, Queensbury, London NW9.) Think about the step-change you need. Stop. Stop thinking about the useless stuff. Like what to cook for dinner tonight, or what to do with all the clutter that’s building up on your Facebook profile. Or what’s going to happen next in the book that you’re reading. Stop worrying about the guy who jumped a red at the traffic lights outside Tesco in Slough, or when you’re going to get round to tippexing your house number on the front of the wheelie-bin. Worry about where you’re going next, and what you’re gonna do if you don’t sort out that BIG STUFF that’s been niggling at the back of your mind. Because it’s not longer at the back, it’s at the front. And soon you’re going to be losing sleep over it. You don’t need this. But it’ll remain there. It has a legitimate leave to remain. An indefinite entry-visa. Unless you do something about it. Words have always been a romantic preoccupation of yours, speaking far louder than your actions ever could. But it’s time to face the truth: There were many times in your life when you left it to fate and you got lucky with the consequences, but you’ve been lucky far too long, and one day it’ll come back and bite really hard. Actually, it already has, but you’re in denial. No more. Do something. Think about it. And take care crossing the road whilst you’re at it. A good citizen waits for The Green Man.
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Posted on January 29 2008 by Jag @ 7:25 pm
The opening lyrics to a song called Slow Train to Dawn by UK band The The from their Infected album released in1986. Fast forward to Paddington Station, 2008; I’m running for a fast train to Slough:
Running for a fast train to Slough at Paddington Station.
(By cameraphone.)
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Posted on January 27 2008 by Jag @ 9:15 am
There’s a place in my neighbourhood not far from me where as you walk up the street that seems to go uphill slightly, when you get to the top you will be astonished by the view.
A sweeping view of Brent from High Meadow Crescent, Kingsbury NW9.
(Taken almost exactly three years ago today.) There’s a guy who lives in East london who has a jam jar with 33 folded-up bits of paper in it. Each bit of paper has the name of a London Borough written on it. And each month (amongst much, much more great stuff on his blog pages) he pulls one out at random and visits that borough and writes about it. But he’s done it 15 times already. So there are only 18 boroughs left. Until yesterday that is; he pulled out Brent! (Which is mine!) That guy is Diamond Geezer. Check out his mini-review of the London Borough of Brent.
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Posted on January 22 2008 by Jag @ 11:16 pm
Some people just can’t be bothered. In this case I think it’s not too much of a problem due to the fact that there is plenty of space, but conventional rules are just that: you follow the rules because everyone does, and it’s only if everyone does, that the harmony of “order” that so characterises human intelligence and civility gives rise to community and sense of belonging.
It might just be harmless, but the action of this customer in the car park speaks volumes about attitude. “I’m alright Jack” means that others will notice the same, and practise the same. Order breaks down and this leads to chaos, anarchy and everyone unto themselves and not a care in the world for others. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it ….
Speaks volumes about attitude.
(Taken with my cameraphone in Morrisons supermarket car park Queensbury, London NW9.) … or perhaps I’m just becoming more grumpy as I get older.
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