This Is This

The pictures in this blog are thumbnails. While you are invited to click them for larger versions, and explore more pictures at your leisure, please keep your hands and feet inside the blog at all times.

Hey, it’s good to be here. Thanks for having me back.

The last couple of days I have been entrenched in Bush House, a beautiful old building which looks like this:

… although it might as well have been called (snork) Bushed House, because I have been feeling tired, and the early starts in Central London means I had to set off before I normally would than if I were leaving for the Big British Castle in Wood Lane.

Bush House is the home of the World Service and it’s hard to talk about the place without using words like bastion and corridors. Groups of busy people click past on stone floors that feel two feet thick, staff who speak Arabic in serious metre. Posters remind you that hundreds of millions of people are the audience right now.

Anachronistic features are built into the architecture, like ashtrays that pop out of the walls, like the flip-out ones cars used to have in the doorwells. Post shutes with legal disclaimers run parallel to the main stairways, reminding us why mail rooms were always on the ground floor, and why it is bad luck to send a letter from a basement.

I’ve been getting home later, which means less time for anything. Night before last, I got home, ate some leftovers I couldn’t be bothered to heat and watched Top Gear with my son. I tried to resist telling him I saw Richard Hammond the day before (he works in my building), but I lasted only a few moments.

After I put the kids to bed I watched a documentary about the battle of the Somme, then made a marguerita, a proper one though, none of this mix stuff. I mean a double shot of tequila, a shot of cointreau, a shot of lime juice, crushed ice and that’s it. I enjoyed it with a bag of nuts, an antihistamine and the second half of Pushing Tin. I slept like a baby who had just washed down a Zirtec with a proper marguerita.

I should add that the Zirtec was medicinal and I would have had it with or without the booze. I’m not going down a slippery slope or anything – I’m not that good a writer yet. Although I should make up a name for it. A puritonic. A dry bogey. I could crush the antihistamine and top the frosted glass with it. Or just do slammers with a Beconaze hit chaser. I’m on to something here.

Writers, though - we’ve got the weekend song tomorrow with the latest volley in the fusilade of tunes I routinely fire off to scare of the crows, and I’ll close with Mark Twain, who called music: “that magician of magicians; who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.”

Have a great weekend.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 8:48 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.