picture heavy high & low places

straight in with two pictures from my travels yesterday, imagine the sun traveling from one to the other...

i'd walked dinah to her work around 6:30 and i knew i had an hour before the sunset so i cycled upstream to get the right kind of bend in the river for these pictures...

my last post being about high & low states of mind, today i'm talking about the high & low places i've been going to in the last couple of days... maybe i should thin down that gig advert at the top... make sure people know that the blog continues as normal just underneath...

so those pictures directly above, whilst also bringing attention to the blog under the advert... are the low... the water level... although had i been able to actually get right down to the water i would have done, these are from the thames path...

today i was cycling around listening to my shuffle and i decided to go check out the barbican highwalk again... that strange mix of inside and outside, like burroughs talks about in his dream book, the city of the dead, loosely based on tangiers where he spent many years... spaces that are domestic but suddenly become streets, covered to uncovered... you can travel (i cycled, but one could walk) along one stretch of high walk and suddenly you're in the barbican arts centre, carry on far enough (particularly unnerving if cycling) and you come out into the outside again...

no satisfactory pictures of the highwalks... plenty of the towers... i'll have to return on another day and try and catch the walks...

it's a very utopian idea... no cars at all obviously... also forbidden to cycle (although i was breaking that rule)... reminds me of mineapolis...

i realised today that i absolutely love cycling in pedestrian places... listening to my shuffle, sometimes going really slowly, very aware of the rightfully pedestrian... enjoying being an interloper... illegal of course... and the more i do it the more likely i'll get caught by the police and fined (£10 spot fine i think it is... maybe more)... but i do love it...

after the barbican i headed west, passing by st ethelreda's catholic church, the oldest catholic church in london...
a long and chequered history, used to house a beautifully out of tune grand piano in its crypt, sadly no more, in fact today i couldn't get into the crypt at all but i know that they got rid of it a few summers ago,

i headed further west, finding myself on the pavement of the strand... still drifting slowly, listening largely to semble, saw somerset house and rolled in, wondered what it would be like to cycle through those fountains but they're down some steps... not wanting to dismount i rolled down a slope to the right, into a place i'd never seen before, steps led down quite a way, to the bottom of a spiral staircase that led up a long, long way...

so i carried my lovely £10 bike down the stairs and locked it up at the foot of this spiral staircase.. black metal affair, fire escape... (if i'd tilted my camera even more directly down you could have seen the bike in this picture)...

climbed a long way up until i got out onto the roof of the building it was attached to, stepped over into a kind of path, again the fire escape, saw two signs pointing in opposite directions for the fire escape, one back the way i'd come, the other onwards up a ladder, which of course i followed...

i pity the people following that sign in the event of a real fire, it ends somewhat precariously at a brick wall high above the city where i sat for a little while and took pictures...

odd mixture of high & low, being able to see down into these arches that are below the level of the somerset house open square, at one point i could see a pillared archway through which i could see cars crossing the river @ waterloo bridge, i look forward to looking at that same pillared archway from the south side of the river...

also looking forward to returning to this place on a sunnier day, the slight rain made it scarier than it needed to be... once dinah has finished working at the producers i'll take her up there as you can just see the big producers billboard on the theatre... i can imagine us now, giving it the finger joyously...

i realised by the time i'd got down to ground level that i'd left some marking in st ethelreda's so i jumped on my bike, this time swapping headphones for helmet, raced through the streets, passing a crowd awaiting dan brown's judgement at the law courts... picked up the cardboard envelope with the marking in it and headed home...

satisfying discoveries

x