Speakers' Corner

The Sunday before last Shelley and I made the trip out to Hyde Park to visit Speakers' Corner, that 'democratic' institution which has been around since the time of Marx, where anybody (but anybody) can get up and talk to their heart's content.



The social dissidents who might have spoken there in earlier years seem to have disappeared now, as the place is increasingly dominated by attention seekers and religious extremists. Take this warm and friendly character for example, expounding upon his justifications for the killing of innocents in jihad. Lovely. He got way too much attention.



We soon tired of the ranting, and found this ridiculous lion-dog to follow around and take pictures of instead. What a good dog.

Oh, my hair is so bad I just want to...

Some shops have undeniably excellent names, like the dry-cleaners at Turnham Green, "Turn 'em Clean". Genius - you can't beat that. Others, well they just don't get it; like this uni-sex hair salon in New Cross - "Curl Up and Dry". Sure it's a play on words, but why would somebody who paid for a perm and blow dry at this place want to curl up and die?



This one (again in New Cross) is of the same calibre. Would you buy Italian designer shoes/bags (that is what they sell) from a place called "Shade Enterprises"?

The Best Coffee in London

When Julian and I first arrived in London, we were dismayed by the lack of quality coffee. Either it was too hot (you had to wait 15 mins for it to cool down enough to drink it), too cold, or just downright unpleasant. We tried a variety of places: big chains, little independent coffee houses and market stalls and we just couldn't find anything that rivaled our high Australian standards.
That is, until Gerrod and Kristy came to London.



Every couple of months we have 'sleep over' weekends, where we get to drink as much good coffee as we want (if we are at their place), eat as many pancakes as we want (if we're at our place) and generally find somewhere new to explore around our local area. On previous visits we discovered the industrial wasteland that surrounds the Thames barrier, and were fortunate enough to find some genuine "mock" gothic ruins. We tried out our Frizbee skills during our last weekend. I'm not as good as you might imagine.







Who knows what exciting things are in store for us crazy cats in the future.

The many faces of Mrs Lewis

When my year seven students are undertaking a test and have finished before the other students, I allow them to draw on the back of their test paper, to keep them quiet. Sometimes they draw superheroes, sometimes they draw their pets, and one kid really likes drawing pictures of tasty snack foods such as delicious steaming fruit pies. I often am lucky enough to find pictures of me- the labels help me to recognise myself. These are a couple that I found on the last set of papers I marked.

Barbeque

On our first wednesday night in Biloxi, we went to The Shed. We had been told Americans like their barbeque, and it turns out that some of them do. Barbeque in the US means a whole lot of slow cooked meat, whacked in a box, and given to you to eat with not quite enough serviettes to remove the evidence of the meal from your face.



This place had it all. A swamp out the back, a broken fish in a broken phone box, and best of all, the fantastic American 'shed' girls who called out names as orders were up in their very southern accents. "Baaaaaaaaart, Baaaaaaaaart"



It sure was tasty, and it gave us our first 'cultural' experience of Mississippi.