Skirting the issue

An artist's impression of the event witnessed, with some liberties taken for dramatic effect. (Painting by Gil Elvgren, 1952)


One of the nice things about living in a happening place like London is that occasionally you spot a brief vignette of pure humanity that reminds you of the innate comedic potential of everyday situations.

On Saturday morning I was taking the brief District Line journey from Southfields to Wimbledon on my way to do some shopping. In the five minutes or so that the Tube train took to rattle to the end of the line I had a chance to scan the carriage for noteworthy sights. Normally there's nothing to report - just the usual pet peeves of people having pointless loud conversations on their face-sucking mobiles or emitting repetitive tinny Kiss FM shockwaves from their cheap earphone buds.

But as the Tube crawled alongside the Wimbledon platform an unusual sight caught my eye. Now, naturally it's inappropriate to stare at young women on the Tube, so of course I didn't look overlong; just long enough to confirm that yes, my first impression was correct. Here was a young woman who had... (da dum DAAA!) Forgotten Her Skirt.

For some readers this occurrence must bring back memories of school-years nightmares in which you wake up in class to find that certain pivotal articles of schoolwear are absent, thereby sets off gales of student cackling, heckling and finger-pointing, accompanied by the ever-familiar surge of teenage embarrassment. The old 'schoolyard in your undies' nightmare is one familiar to many.

Similarly, those of you who have lived in the more youthful parts of town will be familiar with the famous Walk Of Shame such as that observed by residents of Majoribanks Street in Mt Victoria, Wellington, whereby a flock of work-suited, hung-over and somewhat bedraggled souls try to make their way homewards on a Saturday morning after nocturnal escapades in another's bed. But it would be rather unusual to spot a WoS-er sporting the No-Skirt look. Indeed, in a town like Wellington it would probably result in witnesses emailing the Dominion Post gossip column.

This South London girl had managed to combine the two in an impressive attempt to achieve the maximum possible outbreak of nudging and winking amongst her fellow passengers. Before you start getting ideas, I should point out that No Skirt Girl was not in any danger of being arrested for indecent exposure. She had a perfectly respectable pair of black tights on over her black knickers. I bet she was thanking her lucky stars that she'd left her thong in the dresser on Friday morning.

As the Tube doors opened she bolted for the door and off down the platform, hoping to outrun the other passengers. This proved to be a tactical error, because this simply drew attention to her relative lack of lower attire for those fellow passengers following behind who had yet to notice the absence. Realising her mistake, she attempted to tug the tail of her top down lower, but rather than disguising the lack of said Skirt, this instead served as a kind of flag-waving banner announcing the general area in which interested passers-by could look if they wished to gaze upon the area in which a Skirt usually resides, but in this case was lamentably, unavoidably and inexplicably Absent.

As girlfriends nudged boyfriends, flicked their eyes No-Skirt-Girl-wards and muttered, "look, she's forgotten to finish dressing!", she quickened her pace to outdistance the dozens of other passengers, and tried to merge into the crowd. Only then did she realise her dilemma - to get out of the station she had to ascend a flight of stairs! Striding purposefully onwards, she deployed a complicated and high-risk two-pronged buttock obscuration strategy. With one hand tugging at her shirt-tail, the other hand pulled her wide leather belt down as low as possible to act as an impromptu and largely ineffectual modesty preserver.

In a flash (so to speak) she was gone into the Saturday morning Wimbledon throng, leaving only wonderment in her path. How had said Skirt parted company with its owner in the first place? Had she not thought to pop into Primark and buy a replacement? And in a city as fad-obsessed as London, did she not stop to think of the fearsome consequences of setting off a rage for venturing out on the Underground sans Skirt. The papers would have a field day.

Not that I'm saying it's a bad idea, mind.

BRIDGET:
Message Mr. Cleaver.
Am appalled by message.
Skirt is demonstrably neither sick nor absent.
Appalled by management's blatantly size-ist attitude to skirt.
Suggest management sick, not skirt!

- Bridget Jones' Diary, by Helen Fielding

eT

Into The Mystic

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova perform an excellent acoustic version of Van Morrison's 'Into The Mystic', from his 1970 album 'Moondance'. Recorded at the BBC, 8 April 2008.



[Content may only be available in the UK, I suspect]

A Cook Strait tunnel?

You may or may not find this hard to believe, but I was pondering the idea of a tunnel under Cook Strait the other day. When I did the usual follow-up, plugging the words 'Cook Strait tunnel' into a well-known search engine, I found absolutely nothing. Well, there was this quick discussion on Public Address System, which is a good headline but nothing more. This spurred me into action. So, for no good reason other than to fill a void and secure my place in blogging posterity as (possibly, sort of) the first poster on the topic, here's a brief discussion of the prospects for a Cook Strait tunnel.

It's often mentioned that New Zealand has a similar land area to that of the United Kingdom, the country from which many Pakeha colonists originated. New Zealand has a land area of 268,000 sq km and the UK has 241,500 sq km. While the UK does have the outlying territory of Northern Ireland over the Irish Sea, most of the land area of the UK is easily accessible by road or rail. However, New Zealand is an archipelago split by Cook Strait and Foveaux Strait, which hampers communications and commerce and generally makes getting about a real nuisance. In my years living in Wellington I certainly bemoaned the lack of driving opportunities from the capital – it’s north or nothing – and the car ferries to Picton in the South Island are expensive.

Another island archipelago nation is Japan (land area 374,750 sq km), which is divided amongst four main islands. Japan has the advantages of having relatively narrow channels between its three southern islands, Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku, and the considerable wealth required to connect those islands. Even the broad Tsugaru Strait between Honshu and the northern island of Hokkaido has been conquered by the 53km Seikan Tunnel, 23km of which is underwater.

New Zealand’s Cook Strait is the major break point in the New Zealand economy and the transportation network. On days with foul weather and high winds – and there are many of those days – ferries are held in port and aircraft are grounded, thereby shutting down the only links between the North and South Islands. The cost to business and travellers alike is high.

So I started wondering: has anyone seriously considered a Cook Strait Tunnel? Obviously it would be ridiculously expensive, perhaps beyond the ability of a small country to afford. But in practical terms, is it a workable proposition? The factors to be considered are distance, depth, geology and cost.

Distance

On this front, it’s good news! In theory, that is. Tunnels far longer than the width of Cook Strait have been in operation for years. The shortest distance across the Strait is about 22km from Cape Terawhiti on the North Island to Perano Head on Arapawa Island in the Marlborough Sounds at the top of the South Island.



When we look for examples in other countries, there are several tunnels longer than 22km. The Seikan Tunnel, mentioned above, tops the list. Next is the most well-known to New Zealanders: the Channel Tunnel linking England and France, which has a total length of 50km, of which 39km is underwater. This list shows seven tunnels – six rail tunnels and one road tunnel – longer than the 22km between Terawhiti and Perano.

Depth

Cook Strait has an average depth of 128m. Surveyors charting a course for the Saikan Tunnel found that the western neck of Tsugaru Strait had a maximum depth of 140m, so they sited the tunnel there. The English Channel is much shallower at its narrowest crossing though – only 45 to 60m deep. One consolation is that it’s certainly possible – the admittedly much shorter Eiksund road tunnel in Norway is the deepest undersea tunnel, reaching a depth of 287m below mean sea level at its deepest point. So a Cook Strait tunnel might have to be built at the cutting edge of engineering technology.

Geology

Here I’m on shaky ground, if you’ll excuse the pun. I can draw a straight line from A to B, but I can’t tell you whether the intervening material that has to be drilled through is good or bad. Given the environment of the strait itself, I can't imagine the rocks underneath it will be particularly easy to tunnel through. Not a particularly substantive analysis is it? Perhaps one of these bods might know something.

Topography


There's another factor that makes a Cook Strait tunnel quite challenging. While the narrowest crossing point is 22km wide, the topography of the terrain on either side of the strait is particularly rugged. If a rail tunnel to the South Island was considered, extending the Wellington railhead from the Thorndon station westwards to the coast would take the rail lines up steep slopes to residential Karori (which could certainly do with some livening up, but perhaps not from a busy freight line) and on through hilly terrain that would require numerous tunnels to pierce the ridgelines, which are aligned southwest to northeast.

On the other side of the strait it's just as tricky. Arapawa Island has the same steep hills to negotiate, and it would also require a tunnel or bridge across the Tory Channel to reach the South Island railhead at Picton. Blimey. Oh well, here's a nice picture anyway.



Cost

Okay, here's where the idea falls down. I suspect this will only ever be affordable in the far distant future when silver-suited engineers will lazily instruct a cyborg drill monster to go away and dig the tunnel, leaving them in peace to carry on the crossword in the digital Dominion Post.

Conclusion

I think as a result of this investigation into the prospects for a tunnel under Cook Strait the only thing we can be certain about is that I wouldn't have made a good engineer.

But don't get me started on the idea of a Cook Strait bridge... now that's an idea with potential!

eT

XXXV

Last night there was an enjoyable gathering in Soho to commemorate my 'halfway to 70' birthday. (Sounds pretty scary when you put it that way, doesn't it?). Ten of us dined at Canela, a little Portuguese cafe, and then a a deputation went on to Karaokebox in Frith Street, which is cheek by jowl with the trendiest Soho nightspots like Bar Italia and the Groucho. In our private booth we had an entertaining singing session, which harked back to the halcyon days of the admittedly more rustic charms of the Taste of Korea booths in Willis Street. Felix excelled at her favourite, the Spice Girls' 'Wannabe', while Deb & Jude also did sterling work on Morrissey's 1988 classic 'Every Day Is Like Sunday'. My noble pals indulged me by letting me attempt a Bill Withers number while only possessing approximately 3 percent of the actual soulfulness of the singer himself. They also sat stoically as I fulfilled my long-held ambition to murder the legendarily stratospheric David Bowie vocalisations on the outro to Lou Reed's 'Satellite of Love' ('Satelii-ei... of Looooo-OOO-ooo-ooove...').

Thanks to all who attended for a fun night out on the town!

Muesli on my sock

(Note: This is one of those blog posts that fills in the gaps of other arguably more interesting posts. So you’ll probably be wisest to outsource the reading of this blog to a contractor in Bangalore or something. Turn away now, those of you with low tolerance levels for trivia and minutiae).

The first day back at work after Easter in Napoli was marked with the traditional English religious festival known as the Feast of Holy Engineering Overruns. Railway engineering contractors who had promised hands on hearts that previous diabolical overruns and delays after public holidays would never be repeated, so obviously it was foolish to hope for anything better than slightly less diabolical overruns and delays. While rail delays were previously of little interest to me because I could take the Tube instead, it will come as no surprise to you that the Underground doesn’t extend to Chelmsford, where I now work. So my first day back was blighted by huge delays and marred by a legendary three-and-a-half hour slog to get to work. The best bit was the complete lack of information from the train operator at every step of the journey, presumably because no-one had the slightest idea what was happening. As it happens, on days like that no-one seriously expects you to even get to work, so by turning up at all you win brownie points. I only lamented the lack of plush sofas in our office, which meant I had nothing to punch repeatedly in frustration when I finally got there. And just thinking ahead – there are two more bank holiday weekends in May...

I paid a return visit to the comedy club in Greenwich with Steve & Helen after work one night for a BBC7 radio comedy recording of the sketch show Tilt, a mostly topical comedy revue with a talented cast of young comedians barrelling through quick sketches on newsworthy or just plain silly topics. Two favourites included an interview with Sir Alec Guinness about his new film role as The Incredible Hulk, playing opposite a villain called The Abomination, played by Nigel Havers (these luvvies, so multi-talented); and two Beatle fangirls dissecting McCartney song titles to discover hidden anti-Heather Mills messages. ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ was something along the lines of ‘Am Vex: Mills Lamer Shrew’. One of the comedians was the talented Northern lass Isy Suttie, who we’d seen perform the last time at the club. Here’s an interview from the Edinburgh festival – I love her accent!



On 29 March I braved the rather foul weather and the looming masses to head downhill to Putney, where the 154th annual Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge was taking place. Despite the surging crowds (half poshos, half Antipodeans) and the chilly rain (top marks to the miniskirted girl with red gumboots and bare legs) I enjoyed the occasion. Oxford were clear victors in the end, and I was able to take this shot from the south bank opposite Fulham FC, about a mile west of the starting line at Putney Bridge – Oxford are in the dark vests:



The next day was the first of British Summer Time: three cheers for that, said the soft Aucklander. Although to be fair it has been a mild winter in London by most standards. I decided to remind myself of a proper scary winter by going to see an ice sculpture that had been erected outside the Tate Modern on Bankside. It was an interesting idea, leaving it there to melt in a way that was hopefully going to appear aesthetically pleasing. Actually it wasn’t much to look at, but it did let me imagine London as it might’ve been in The Day After Tomorrow:



I crossed the Millennium Bridge to the north side of the river, and noticed that the Thames was at low ebb, exposing the pebbly shoreline. Having long enjoyed rummaging through the stony beaches around Lambton Harbour in Wellington, turning up polished beach glass and the occasional fragment of 19th century pottery, I thought I’d take a look at a much richer history of a city boasting a couple of thousand years of settlement. I was rewarded with an excellent haul of pottery fragments from the 19th century – or at least I presume so, because that was the last period in which durable pottery would’ve been regularly shipped up and down the river. But the best find was a rusty headless nail of some sort. (Don't get all excited now). I’ve had a look on the internet to try to date it, but I’m not sure what it was used for or how old it is. I think it’s handmade, and the lack of a head makes it look pre-19th century to me, but then what do I know about nails?



As I walked past St Paul's to take a bus back to the West End, the bells were ringing out in an impressive display that cascaded over the city and gave the tourists something to remember:



That evening I settled down to watch Anthony Minghella’s last production: the telemovie of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. I was unprepared for just how charming it turned out to be. American singer Jill Scott was perfect as Precious Ramotswe, and the whole production was effortlessly entertaining and ultimately a joyful celebration of African life and a tribute to the spirit of optimism that imbues the books. The beautiful Botswana scenery will surely be seen again, although sadly with another helmsman, given Minghella’s recent death. A good way to finish on a high, and it could well make a transatlantic star out of Scott too.

I also went to see Juno in Wimbledon after work one weeknight, before it closed. I can see why it’s been so popular – it’s a top performance from the perky Ellen Page, and the comic touches are warm-hearted without being too saccharine… at least until the end. But by then you can allow them a happy ending, even if it’s rather shoehorned in. I initially described it as Napoleon Dynamite gets Knocked Up, which is a little glib but at least it permits me to indulge my penchant for italics.

There’s been a little socialising here and there too. Last Friday I met up with some former CC colleagues at the Pitcher & Piano in Kingsway for Alex & Philippa’s farewell drinks – they’re heading back to live in Perth. I was able to catch up with team-mate Estelle and hear about her interesting public affairs internship. The next night I caught up with Steve & Fiona at Borough Markets and had dinner back at their apartment with some of their pals.

I’ve already waxed lyrical about the splendid snowfall that blanketed London that Sunday, but I didn’t mention that when I was suiting up in my warmest gear to head outside I noticed that I’d managed to scrape some muesli from my breakfast plate right onto my warm fuzzy socks. Hence the title of this post. Not a life-changing moment by any means, nor a title that’s particularly representative of the past several weeks, but as I stand a fair chance of boosting my blog traffic both from Swiss people and from sock fanciers, I thought ‘why not?’

Later that afternoon I paid a visit to the V&A, having not seen the collections in ten years. I was surprised to find so much I’d not remembered, and spent several hours enjoying the collections. A particular highlight for me was the Cast Court – two huge spaces filled with 19th century casts of some of the best stonework of Europe and the British Isles. The hectic jumble of statues was appealing. On one side resided a stately copy of Michelangelo’s David posing in front of a cheery orange wall, while on the other a full-sized replica of Trajan’s Column (admittedly in two halves, one next to the other) loomed over the 10th century high cross from Monasterboice in Ireland. Jennifer, Hayley, Laura and I paid a visit to see this particular cross and its fierce carved Viking warriors on our Irish trip in 1997.





I’ll have to return to the V&A, and certainly sooner than 2018. Before I sign off, I should mention this story from today's paper, which I've reproduced in the VFE blog. Made me laugh, innit?

eT

Snow!

There was an odd sort of noise at the bedroom window when I woke up this morning. It sounded a bit like rain... no, snow! I'd missed the only snowfall of the winter in London over Easter when I was in Napoli, but this was a real snowstorm. Big fluffy flakes were whirling around the tower blocks and encrusting the parked cars and foliage below, and the drifts were already piling up. Snow doesn't usually settle in London - it's too far south and there's so much concrete around. So this was a rare treat.

I rugged up and ventured out, crunching through the soft snow in my Dr Martens, heading for the Common to get some pictures. It was just like The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe out there - thick layers of snow on every leaf and branch. But it wasn't particularly cold - I was fine when I took my gloves off. In the centre of Wimbledon Common near the windmill dozens of families had gathered to build snowmen or take their kids sledding. Dogs were having a great time - I watched one spaniel puppy chasing snowballs for the first time: "Okay, I'll fetch it... hey, where's it gone? Oh, you've thrown another one. Cool! I'll find that one then. Hey, I thought it was here somewhere..." And another little pup was loving bouncing in and out of the drifts, his stubby legs pumping crazily. What a super morning in London!