Ganapati

Street food followed by a mini-thali with mango juice.  Yum.  Am now stuffed.
Ganapati on Holly Grove

Poem of the Week? (a true story...)

Oxford Circus

As I sat in my suit on the tube
A woman tapped my knee and said,
'You know it's only Thursday, don't you?'

I was bemused (and probably looked it),
So she explained as she left,
'Your socks say Friday'.

On Troy

A really nice cryptic today with a theme of the Trojan War.  Many thanks Brendan.  One complaint (a niggle, perhaps) was that "Looter of antiquities" was equated to Elgin. 

Which from my (albeit limited) understanding just isn't true.

Olympia versus Perseus

So, with the Olympics over things have started to go back to normal. Last night I lay out on the old trampoline in the back garden to try and spot some Perseids. The peak time for these was really a few days ago, when the Olympics were still in full swing. I’d forgotten about the meteors then – however there should still be some to see.


Tricky, though, as from a SE London garden only a limited amount of sky can be seen, because of the surrounding trees and buildings, and that is heavily affected by sodium light glare. And there quite a few clouds. Anyway, after about fifteen or twenty minutes I hadn’t seen any flashes and gave up.

Still, it was enjoyable. Some of us may be lying back on an old, broken trampoline, but we are looking at the stars…

On Dartmoor

A few weeks back we went to Dartmoor for a few days.  To give  sense of how long ago this seems, we left before the Olympics started.

The Nunhead Olympics - 1

So we got up sprightly and early (and ill-tempered initially, because of the early start) and made our way by fast, efficient London transport (no, really, it was) to the Olympic Archery in St John's Wood.  Lord's to be precise:-

We watched Larry Godfrey from the UK (not GB, despite all the 'Team GB' hype, grump, grump) fail to get through to the quarter finals:-

But he did it with good grace and we were all very involved.  I enjoyed the event - in fact, rather like John Finnemore on the Now Show Olympics Live this week, I discovered it is really good fun watching people who are really extremely good indeed at doing something do that thing, and it does seem to matter if complete strangers you happen to share a country with turn out to be even better at that thing than some other complete stangers who live further away.  Who'd have thought it?

The targets are light years away from where the archers stand, and they don't get many chances to get it right.  Basically, they just stand and shoot.  Two compete at a time, and if at the end of their competition it is all square, they just shoot one more arrow each and nearest to the middle wins.  Quite brutal.

It turns out that South Korean people really like archery, there were a lot in the stands, and their archers are really quite good at it (three went through to the quarter finals).  So I learnt quite a lot too. 

Nunhead Green at Night

... a few weeks ago...