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You've got fifteen minutes. Decide.
May. 31st, 2011 10:55 amSeeing as how it was a bank holiday this weekend, I saw this as an ideal opportunity to sit round the house in my underpants looking at pictures of saucy ladies on the internet Play far too much Third Age: Total War Drink myself into a sick-stained unconsciousness get out and about round the vibrant diverse city I live in and do something I wouldn't normally do.
I'm a great believer in in doing different stuff: I think it's good for my brain to be shown a variety of things and it also makes writing LJ posts a lot easier, and so on Sunday my faltering steps took me off to an open day at http://www.19princeletstreet.org.uk/ in East London.
It's one of those old buildings redolent with history of the sort which London is crammed. All of them different in their history but crammed with the weight of centuries of human experience which hangs over you as you wander around and makes you talk in a low voice, as if you don't want to be rude to the memories the place contains. 19 Princelet Street was originally built by Huguenot silk weavers after their expulsion from France and since then has been home to waves of migrants as they've passed through the area, because that's how East London has worked over the years. Migrants arrive, set up home, work hard, get a bit of money, become respectable, and then leave because all these immigrants lower the tone. So it is that once the Huguenots moved out, the jews moved in (and built a Synagogue in the garden), and then they left and waves of african, asian and Sri Lankan migrants moved in, used the building, and then moved on in their turn and the building is now a dedicated little museum relecting these shifts in life of the area.
Anyway, one of the displays was a pile of luggage tags where people were invited the answer the question: You have fifteen minutes to pack before you leave home - and possibly your home country - forever. What do you take? People had written things like 'books' and 'photographs' and so on.
The answers the she-David and I gave gave a clear indication as to the differences in our personalities. She wrote "Teabags and marmite". I wrote "Bullion". Her thinking was that if you're leaving you'd better take some creature comforts for the trip. My thinking was that with bullion you can get creature comforts wherever you end up. It's why portable wealth like jewellry, Japanese netsuke and rare comics are so prized and valuable in unstable areas of the world - you can just grab something small and leg it.
But it's an interesting question, so question for the day: Labour have won the 2015 general election. The jackboots are on the street. You have one small suitcase and fifteen minutes to pack before getting the heck out of dodge.
What do you take?
I'm a great believer in in doing different stuff: I think it's good for my brain to be shown a variety of things and it also makes writing LJ posts a lot easier, and so on Sunday my faltering steps took me off to an open day at http://www.19princeletstreet.org.uk/ in East London.
It's one of those old buildings redolent with history of the sort which London is crammed. All of them different in their history but crammed with the weight of centuries of human experience which hangs over you as you wander around and makes you talk in a low voice, as if you don't want to be rude to the memories the place contains. 19 Princelet Street was originally built by Huguenot silk weavers after their expulsion from France and since then has been home to waves of migrants as they've passed through the area, because that's how East London has worked over the years. Migrants arrive, set up home, work hard, get a bit of money, become respectable, and then leave because all these immigrants lower the tone. So it is that once the Huguenots moved out, the jews moved in (and built a Synagogue in the garden), and then they left and waves of african, asian and Sri Lankan migrants moved in, used the building, and then moved on in their turn and the building is now a dedicated little museum relecting these shifts in life of the area.
Anyway, one of the displays was a pile of luggage tags where people were invited the answer the question: You have fifteen minutes to pack before you leave home - and possibly your home country - forever. What do you take? People had written things like 'books' and 'photographs' and so on.
The answers the she-David and I gave gave a clear indication as to the differences in our personalities. She wrote "Teabags and marmite". I wrote "Bullion". Her thinking was that if you're leaving you'd better take some creature comforts for the trip. My thinking was that with bullion you can get creature comforts wherever you end up. It's why portable wealth like jewellry, Japanese netsuke and rare comics are so prized and valuable in unstable areas of the world - you can just grab something small and leg it.
But it's an interesting question, so question for the day: Labour have won the 2015 general election. The jackboots are on the street. You have one small suitcase and fifteen minutes to pack before getting the heck out of dodge.
What do you take?
