Istanbul

On the shores of the Bosphorus, they once built a city beyond reproach.

Now the successors of Suleymān the Magnificent clamour for EU membership, and on their trams they put up warning posters such as these.

I thought it was a warning against wearing scary masks on public transport (or perhaps a reminder that what seems like a devil with horns on the 9.45 to Zeytinburnu may in fact be a chubby businessman with a juvenile sense of humour). But apparently the sign says Please give priority to passengers who are alighting.

Music, Food and Drink

My friend Saha once made a list of ten things he likes about London. As may be expected, the list was misguided and pretentious, and my own list – if I were to make one – would look completely different. Except for one item: Buskers on the Underground, which featured at no. 8.

At peak hour at Bank station, with hundreds of lawyers and bankers hurrying past, Simon and Garfunkel assume a special significance: Slow down, you move too fast / Got to make the moment last...

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An eatery in Central London claims to have invented this snack which they call a ‘shwrap’, but which is basically unsliced Mazikushi. The packaging says:

Eating shwrap promotes peace and harmony, increases brain size and makes you more attractive to the opposite sex.*

*Or same sex – clever shwrap can determine orientation.

As if being blamed for tsunamis was not bad enough, gay people are also getting a limited choice of shwrap.

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On Friday evening after work I had this conversation with my friend.

Me: I had a tough day at work. I came home and decided to drown my sorrows in drink.

Friend: What did you do?

Me: I ate a liqueur chocolate.

Friend: Nice. Manly thing to do.

CARTOONIED

Language Log had this hilarious post last week, called A doubtful benevolence: Mark Twain on spelling. I was reading it today at work, and by the time I got to the part about sicisiors, I was laughing uncontrollably and causing heads to turn in consternation.

Nearly as hilarious is the passage where Twain talks about a Good Spelling prize that was awarded at his school, and it reminded me of a funny story from my own school days.

My friend and I went for an inter-school spelling competition, and we had a round where a scrambled word would come up on the screen. The teams had to hit the buzzer and come up with the right word (sometimes there was more than one right word, but any one would do).

One of the words on the screen was CARTOONIED. This can be rearranged to form both COORDINATE and DECORATION, and these were evidently the words they were looking for. My friend hit the buzzer a split second after the word came up, and said, “Carotenoid.” And the person who was conducting the competition didn’t even have the word on his card, and they had to check a dictionary to confirm that the word actually exists, and I will never forget the look on his face.

We didn’t win the competition that year – we came a close second – but that one perfect moment was worth more to me than a first prize.

The Age of Convenience

I like people who, for no apparent reason, opt to do something the hard way. I don’t mean people who achieve heroic feats like climbing Everest without oxygen. For complex personal reasons, out of sheer bloodymindedness, or just for fun, ordinary people doing ordinary things sometimes reject the easy way out.

There are examples even on my blogroll. In his carpentry workshop, Tommy makes things out of wood, using lumber which he mills himself. Randall Munroe doesn’t allow ads on his website. When most of us chose soft corporate jobs, Anuj started out practising at the Delhi High Court, and if there is a harder way to make a living in the legal profession, I don’t know of it. My father types with two fingers – though (a) he is not on my blogroll, and (b) he doesn’t do it out of choice.

I rarely fall into this category myself because I am lazy. But in school I once solved all the problems in a Trigonometry textbook using nothing but Euclid. For a web site which I designed last year, I initially wrote the code from scratch, i.e. on Notepad, and I had fun doing it.

These days Sarbajeet and I work late and usually have dinner in the office. So we cook only on weekends, but on the other hand, we never cheat – which is to say, we never use ready-made sauces and pastes. Some of the more elaborate dishes occupy us for an entire evening: just shopping for mushroom bourguignon took us the better part of an hour.

Saha takes photographs on black-and-white film, on a camera with a dysfunctional light-meter. He took one of me a few months back, on Baker Street with a camera-strap round my neck and a fuzzy double-decker bus in the background. He had asked me to “pose, but not look like you are posing.” I hate it when people take photos of me, and usually I hate the results even more, but this photo is one of the few exceptions.

Saha had it developed in India, and this – not the photo itself, not the fact that it was taken on black-and-white film and developed by hand – was what I liked best: it arrived in an envelope which said “Thanks for indulging. - Saha.”

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

Our firm allows us a fixed number of days off every year, but in recognition of the fact that “some individuals may like to be flexible with their holiday entitlement,” they also allow us to buy or sell holiday entitlements up to a limit. The price of a holiday is the same whether you are selling or buying, and it is a function of your salary.

Most people – that is, most normal people – would be satisfied to go along with this arrangement. But these are finance lawyers we are talking about. I know of people who buy holidays, and years later, when they have been promoted and have a higher salary, sell them off at a higher price.

In fact, since an employee’s future career progression is indeterminate, and since the salary even for a given level is revised every year, I think I see the possibility of a futures market in holidays. Hmm...

In related news, a Google search for <"life, liberty and the pursuit of" -happiness> produces some interesting results: Life, liberty and the pursuit of broadband; Life, liberty and the pursuit of nachos; Life, liberty and the pursuit of catgirls.

I’ll only buy a book for the way it looks / And then I stick it on the shelf again

“It’ll be freezing out there! Go someplace warm, like Spain or Greece.” “It’s way too late you idiot. Ticket prices will have gone through the roof.” “Oh, but it’s a shame not to spend Christmas in London.”

And last but not least, our vacation destination has a system of issuing visas on arrival, which may well be perfectly reliable and legitimate. But I am paranoid about visas and things, and visa-on-arrival looks decidedly shady to me. I am convinced we will be turned back at the airport.

But despite everything, the Quaker and I booked tickets yesterday. No doubt, he has his own reasons for wishing to visit a faraway city at the coldest time of the year. For me, it all comes down to a book. Or more particularly, a book cover.

Fox in the Snow

We are now well into November (in case you haven’t looked at a calendar lately) and London has become decidedly cold. This morning in the lift, another trainee remarked, “It’s so cold! I don’t know how you can come in wearing only a jacket. Brr.”

I did not know that people said ‘Brr’ in real life.

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Last night I saw a fox, just outside our housing complex. It was strolling along the street, as cool as you like. I knew there are foxes in London; I just wasn’t expecting to see one in a locality as irredeemably urban as Canary Wharf.

There are not many things that can make me smile when returning from work at well past midnight, but this did.

Genevieve

The early history of automobile legislation makes for diverting reading. In the United Kingdom, the Locomotive Acts passed in the latter part of the 19th century stipulated that self-propelled vehicles must be preceded by a man on foot carrying a red flag, to enforce a walking pace and to warn others of the approach of a self-propelled machine.

In 1895, John Henry Knight built Britain’s first petrol-powered motor vehicle and while driving it through Farnham, Surrey, was stopped by the Superintendent of Police and charged with using a locomotive without a licence.

On 30 July 1896, the House of Commons debated the speed limit for light locomotives (vehicles with an unladen weight of under 3 tons, i.e. what we now call ‘cars’). Many members considered that 10 miles an hour would be sufficient, but the reckless Mr. Chaplin had other ideas:

On the other hand, 14 miles as a maximum he did not think was at all unreasonable. [Cries of "Oh!"]

The Locomotives on Highways Act passed that year finally repealed the notorious Red Flag Law, and on a wet Saturday in November that year, thirty vehicles set off from London to Brighton to celebrate the event. This tradition still continues in the form of the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run, the longest running motoring event in the world, open only to cars built before 1905.

On Saturday, the cars lined up on Regent Street in all their glory. The grand old ladies, who bore names like Miss Elizabeth and Genevieve, were the cynosure of all eyes, but as is my wont, I was taking photos of the people.