22 Sep 06 Love in Trafalgar Square
19 Sep 06 Photo Exhibition!
Some exciting news… Two prints of mine have been selected for the London Independent Photography annual exhibition! It’s the first time I’ll have framed work on public display, so it’s quite a thrill, really. I look forward to meeting the other photographers and seeing their images in the show. The details:
London Independent Photography’s 18th Annual Photographic Exhibition
Sunday 15 October - Saturday 28 October 2006
Cottons Atrium at Hay’s Galleria, Southwark (map)
Free admissionRichard Sadler FRPS and Sara Macintosh MA, both of whom have a keen professional eye for exciting, intriguing and engaging work, have selected entries for this 18th annual exhibition, which showcases the best independent photography in London.
19 Sep 06 The Ongoing GP Saga
There’s now a new post category entitled ‘healthcare’ to keep up with the bureaucratic system I’m dealing with here! In my last post I was excited to finally have an appointment with a GP - well it didn’t happen.
I showed up at the ’surgery’ (what’s known as a doctor’s office here) at the scheduled time for my appointment, and waited 25 minutes before my name was called. I walked into the assigned room and sat beside a woman seated at a computer. She entered all the details on the reg form I filled out last week, took my blood pressure and weighed me in. Then she said, “So when you want to make an appointment with a doctor you need to call on a Monday to get an appointment for the following week.” Standard practice at this surgery, apparently. She sent me on my way.
Yesterday morning I called to make an appointment, which meant hitting the redial button about 30 times after a busy signal before connecting through to a human. I am now booked to see an official GP, I hope, for 26 September.
12 Sep 06 Find A Doc
In a couple of hours I have a ‘new patient’ appointment with a GP in my area. Not so interesting or exciting, is it? It is interesting when you consider the difficulty I encountered in arriving at this point.
Way back in February I knew that to receive NHS care it would be necessary to ‘register’ with a GP. I started making calls to practices in my neighbourhood to ask if they were accepting new patients. The first office I called said yes, they were, so I booked an appointment. At the end of the call the receptionist told me there would be a £50 fee for the initial assessment appointment. I asked why NHS didn’t cover the fee and was informed that the practice was private, and NHS would not cover any of their services. I promptly cancelled the appointment and started searching for NHS doctors in the area.
With my shortlist in hand I began walking into practices to find one that felt right. A couple of the offices I visited put me off instantly for such reasons as the waiting room was way overcrowded, the offices appeared unclean or the receptionist was seated behind a cage. I’m of the opinion any person attending their doctor’s office should be comfortable with the service and surroundings.
I quickly learned none of my thoughts mattered. Every patient registering with a GP falls within a catchment area defined by their postal code. This means you cannot see a NHS GP near your office or anywhere you please for that matter, but must attend a practice accepting patients from your address. The shortlist just got shorter.
Feeling deflated, I turned to my local council website for some guidance and discovered the Find A Doc service. You email or call and they provide names of GPs you can see. Back in April I received a ‘list’ of two practices, and just a couple of weeks ago I scouted each of them to choose which I preferred.
The one I preferred was not accepting new patients.
Lots changes in three months I guess, so I called Find A Doc again and received my new shortlist: one practice (the one I didn’t prefer previously). How’s that for healthcare choice?
Yesterday I arrived early (opening time) at the practice and was faced with a lineup at least 25 deep ahead of me. I took a slow breath and chose to wait - I need to finally break in and get my space in the system! Within ten minutes I counted about 25 new people behind me in line.
When I reached the receptionist she immediately asked me what country I was from and I produced my passport. She began to form a sentence that began with “We can’t” or “You don’t”, so I cut in to show my visa, which is valid until 2011. I also needed to provide a proof of address (telephone bill) which was photocopied, and fill out a registration form.
With the number of people in line, how soon could I possibly get in for an appointment? I was amazed to be booked next day, but I expect a long wait regardless.
Why does NHS restrict access to GPs by catchment area? It seems obvious that densely populated, underserved areas will suffer the exact issues I’m dealing with. What happens when the practice I’m attending is no longer accepting patients? The strain will fall on local hospitals.
National healthcare in Canada provides for any person to attend any practice they wish (within their province), provided they are accepting patients. Doesn’t that make more sense? That way every person has freedom of choice and strain on the healthcare system is, ideally, evenly distributed across cities and beyond.
Perhaps NHS is moving in that direction with the recent policy change giving patients some latitude with specialist and hospital care.
For today, though, if I don’t like the doctor I’ve been dealt I’ve just got to suck it up.
30 Aug 06 Days go by
Summer is nearly a distant memory already! The heatwave has long passed and morning chills have set in.
I’ve just finished pulling together my submission for the annual London Independent Photography exhibition coming up in mid-October. I made five prints from images I took for the Street Photography workshop at Tate Modern awhile back, all black and white, 12×18 and mounted for framing. I drop them off tomorrow and should find out by September 10th if any are selected. So cross your fingers for me ;)
This past weekend was great fun with a bank holiday on Monday, which also happened to be Matt’s birthday! We ventured out into the woods for another country walk, this time to Saunderton. The weather was so variable that our trek alternated between clopping through mucky forest paths under a bit of rain to crunching across dry harvested hay fields. In the wetlands we saw hundreds of snails and a few slugs; in the dry it was (you guessed it) sheep, numerous pheasants (that run around in zig-zags), the odd rabbit, horse and a single fawn. There was a surreal minute in the forest too, when rounded the path and entered the Matrix! About 50 feet ahead of us we spotted two goths dressed in long, swinging black leather coats. They slowed down to take photos (and, of course, to give us the opportunity to get a closer look at their outfits). Both wore black leather caps, dark sunglasses, leather pants and boots - all this for a stroll in the country! Surreal.
We stopped through West Wycombe to tour the Hellfire Caves and Tearoom. Sounds a bit strange, doesn’t it? The chalk caves were excavated between 1748–1752 “to provide work for unemployed farm workers following a succession of harvest failures” and for the owner of the land, Sir Francis Dashwood, to hold underground meetings with his member-buddies of the Hellfire Club. The caves are impressively enormous and wind deep underground, though I can’t recall how deep - perhaps 100 meters. Disappointingly, the place is a certifiable tourist trap swarming with kids tearing around in the dark, narrow corridors, so it’s difficult to get a sense of how creepy the caves might have been in the mid-18th century.
In other adventures, I spent part of the weekend visiting with my friend from Chester whose samba band rolled into town to play the Notting Hill Carnival. The band, called Batala, numbered nearly 150 players gathered from the UK and France. Saturday night was kind of preview celebration with all sorts of carnival players performing in a sweaty community hall, and Sunday was a 6+ hour Batala rehearsal at a small university gym.
This section made up about a quarter of the band. It was difficult to photograph in the low-lit gym and because of space limitation I shot down from the observation balcony. Anyway, this day all these players worked incredibly hard preparing for their 4-5 hour carnival parade on Monday. Tuesday morning they were rewarded with a double-page photo spread of their performance in the Guardian! Hot stuff.
14 Aug 06 Some pics from last weekend
I forgot to post these to give you a look at the landscape from our walk last weekend near Lewes.
We crossed all these little hills :) That was the first couple of miles.
A beautiful stud with family, scratching on posts.
Taking the escalator up another little hill.
Most sheeps run away, very skittish creatures. This one was kind enough to pose.
7 Aug 06 Weekend of walking
This weekend we clocked at least 25 miles/40km on foot!
Saturday was lovely, not too hot, so we ventured from home near Aldgate East to Covent Garden and back. It was imperative we stop in at a hardware store to pick up some mouse poison. Yes, after all our humane efforts to stop the mouse madness in Ithaca we have been ‘forced’ to try alternative methods here. This is a new building, so it’s surprising how quickly these peskies infiltrate. The humane traps you buy here do NOT work and I’ve been trapping on my own with a combination approach: corral the mouse behind a rickety arrangement of cardboard boxes then cup it under a tupperware bowl. I’m a champion trapper! First sign, a couple of months ago, there was only one mouse traveling through the building and accessing the cupboard under the sink through holes around the piping. Then the other day I got quite worried when I spotted no less than three mice… in the bedroom. I was working at the computer and glanced down to see one sitting between my feet! My nerves were a bit shot that day :) I was convinced they had nested under the bed, but after a thorough cleanup found that wasn’t the case. They had created a spawning paradise at the back of our storage closet, behind the water heater, in a gaping hole cut to fit the pipes. So we set the humane traps, but they absolutely do not work. Since Friday night there’s been no indication of a return but we just laid out some poison anyway. Stay away rodents!
Sunday we interacted with different, cuter, and much larger animals: sheeps and cows! It was the first walk we chose to do out of Time Out’s Country Walks (near London) books, Volumes One and Two (not to be confused with 50 Walks to Country Pubs). We traveled an hour by train to Lewes, followed the guidebook out of town, up a hill and across a field, and soon discovered we picked one of the tougher walks in the book :) They may not be mountains high as Banff or BC, but there are some huge rolling hills and valleys through the south and we trekked up and down more than a few of them during that 15 miles! In the UK you can cross through farms on privately owned ‘access land‘ without fear of being shot on sight.
Under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (CROW), the public can now walk freely on mapped areas of mountain, moor, heath, down and registered land without the need to stick to paths.
We came across a farmer and son shearing sheep, walked past them onto their fenced property, and further along met with a large herd of friendly curious cattle. We moaned through layers of sweat as we hiked from the first valley up a 700m hill. Direct sun and humidity didn’t make this experience the most pleasant, but luckily later on the clouds overcast. Before we left home we knew Lewes had a lovely castle, but seeing it up close wasn’t meant to be. This walk was pure country, and after walking the final five miles along the river Ouse, where we counted 38 white swans and passed the spot where Virginia Woolf walked into the river to her death, we had no energy left to climb the (relatively small) hill up to the castle.
Some notes on sheep doo doo and cow pies: Some sheep poop out a bundle of blueberry-sized pellets while others don’t. The contrast between the two types is confusing. Cows plop perfectly round 12-inch pies. Attempts to avoid all these hazards were futile, and I’ll just say a crunch underfoot is so much better than a squish…
20 Jul 06 Out the Window, right now
Just snapped these shots, the view from the front window. No exercising at the moment, just soaking up the sun. (this post is dedicated to Mary!)
19 Jul 06 To the beach!
This time I’ll give in and admit there really is a heatwave happening here! Current temperature is 34 degrees, and schools have even closed early. It’s not a good day to be riding the tube, which fits just fine with my plan to stay inside as much as possible.
Especially since I got a bit scorched down at the beach on Sunday :)
The south-coast beach at Brighton isn’t the closest to London. You can get to the east-coast beaches at Essex in about an hour by train, but we’ve wanted to take a Brighton trip for quite awhile and it’s only an extra 15 minute ride. The train departs from Blackfriars Station which is a few tube stops from home.
We arrived in Brighton around 9:30 and it was already sweaty-hot, even at the shore. Ocean! The water was a gorgeous deep aqua colour… but that’s one long stretch of pebbly beach.
Much of the beach is dotted with canvas lounge chairs you can rent for £1.50, but exploring the promenade and pier was more interesting. Just like any town with a beach, there’s a fair number of chippy’s (essentially a concession with a deep-fryer), pub patios and boat rental outlets lining the promenade.
The pier is where all the fun fair action goes on, it houses a gazebo with carnival games and casino slot machines. I blew about £2 playing a silly coinslot game where you drop your coin onto a huge pile of other coins with the goal of hitting a metal sliding thing that pushes all the coins into an even bigger pile. You cross your fingers and hope the big pile shifts just enough so a bunch of coins (ie. the ‘booty’) will fall out, but odds are rather slim I’d say. You might just win 50p though, never know!
Next destination: Crazy Mouse!
With some (just a little) persistence, Matt convinced me to climb aboard a Crazy Mouse coaster car, a ride which from the ground seemed harmless. We had watched others go round and not heard any shrieking. And it’s not like there’s upside-down loops…
But now we know what the ‘Crazy’ part is: just the feeling you’ll launch off the end of the track and over the edge of the pier, crashing into the water 100 feet below while locked into a coaster car. No biggy :) The cars jerk around so rigidly, too, that you can’t help but imagine that loud snap sound you just heard means you’re strapped into that one car in a million bound to go off the rails. It didn’t.
Later, just beyond the mini-golf course, we caught ‘the world’s oldest operating electric train‘ eastward down the beach toward the sand sculpture festival. Housed under a big tent (so you have to pay to see) are several enormous, impressive sand creations made with a Roman theme. We gasped at the skill, time and patience required to achieve such works of art, then giggled at how erotic - even pornographic - some of the sculptures were! Hey, kids admission is only £4.
Away from the beach we shopped a little in the Lanes, a nest of winding streets with all sorts of shops, and Matt bought me a lovely pink purse :) Had a cursory look at the exterior of the Royal Pavillion and ducked out of the heat into the air-conditioned Brighton Museum & Art Gallery which has free admission but was very entertaining, worth every penny.
We had dinner reservations at Terre a Terre, a vegetarian restaurant recommended as the best in the country. From their website:
Forget everything you have ever read or heard about vegetarian food. Forget everything you have ever eaten at vegetarian restaurants. Dining at Terre à Terre is a culinary experience like no other, with intense flavours, sublime textures and a combination of ingredients that few have the imagination or daring to put together.
The food was great, all components works of art, and definitely the best vegetarian we’ve eaten. My dish was Hot Parmesan Dumpling, with Beetroot Chevre Battenberg served with green olive and fresh leaf smash, brunoise of pumpkin and cumin crecy, lentilles de lait, merlot soft sticky onions and rosemary rub. Sounds pretty good right? Lots of supremely rich flavours, the kind I could treat myself to once a year.
Matt had Terre à Tapas a selection of lovelies, hot & cold, served with garlic & herb focaccia (large enough for one hungry person or two to share). The Tapas samplers were beautiful, but not large enough to keep him from ordering dessert.
All that and we were home around 8:30pm, exhausted and crispy.
18 Jul 06 Tower Music Festival
It’s been and gone, but last week Matt and I attended a concert as part of a music festival at the Tower of London. The performances spanned two weeks with headliners including Pet Shop Boys, Jeff Beck, Buddy Guy and James Brown. We had no plans to go, but I got lucky and won tickets for the Madeleine Peyroux show from a community magazine that was delivered to our flat. With tickets selling for £35 each it was a pretty good deal!
The Tower is just a 10 minute walk from our place and we had perfectly beautiful weather for spending the evening in the Tower moat. Ticket holders were encouraged to arrive early and linger on the lawn with picnic and wine before the show started. When you finished up you could check your baskets into a tent for pickup after the concert, just like checking your coat.
Lounging around on the grass in the evening sun was great, but later the audience was herded into rows of uncomfortable, connected plastic chairs. Not so great. There was some space to stand, far back from the stage and behind the banks of seats, but overall the atmosphere was orderly and ‘civilised’.
The opening act, ‘Athena’, was a disappointment - a female singer attempting a vague imitation of Sarah McLachlan meets Tori Amos, without success. Madeleine Peyroux on the other hand, who we had never heard of before the nigh, was a treat. Her voice is more than reminiscent of Billie Holiday’s and she sings several covers, including songs by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed.
GET FED: 