Branded...

I finally went to the Minnellium Dome last night...

Yes, I know, only eight years late, but nearly everything they planned for the minnellium was late. And still doesn't work. It's a British thing.

In those eight years, I've flown over it, driven under it, sailed past it, tubed through it, but never actually been in it.

It's bloody clever actually. On a very narrow peninsula they've managed to thread the Jubilee Line under the Blackwall Tunnels - that's four tunnels under the Thames in total - and construct this very iconic building on top. (Although I suppose it's not really a building - just a big tent - and the buildings underneath it are fairly ordinary.)



And, of course, for about the last seven years of the eight, no-one in their right mind wanted to go there because it was an ill-conceived, publicly-funded white elephant full of crap. It was all cultural - Mind Zone, Body Zone, Spiritual Zone - and no-one wanted to spend their "lee-zhure" time doing all that nonsense, even if it was inside a triumph of civil engineering...

So what happened?

Well, firstly, someone decided it would be better if it were full of things people actually wanted to do - shop, eat, go to cinema, see Bryan Adams in November (OK, not the last one...)

Secondly, someone else decided it would be good if people could actually get there, so they built the aforementioned tube line...

But most important, branding happened.

Someone, probably in what Eddie Izzard calls one of those "4 o'clock in the morning, stroky-beard meetings", came up with the ludicrous suggestion of calling it after a phone company.

O₂ is one of the most successful marketing exercises of all time. The phone company used to be BT Cellnet - deeply untrendy and lagging massively behind the likes of Orange and Vodafone. No clear identity and losing money and subscribers.

But now, the strength of the brand is overwhelming. It can be identified by the subtle blue fade of the corporate colour, the little subscript ₂, the bubbles, Sean Bean being all northern and reassuring on the ads, etc.



And now, not only has it made the Dome very cool and trendy, every person who goes there (23 000 watching Kylie last night, not to mention all the people eating and drinking and watching films) gets the brand lasered right through their eyeballs into their brains at every available opportunity.

The branding is so successful that The O₂ is the only fully commercial organisation to have what is effectively a free advert on that other icon, the tube map...



Now that is bloody clever...

Not all it's Cracked up to be..

Right, I can't claim to understand all modern art, and I'm from the same school of aesthetic criticism as are many people from the Midlands, (chief amongst them my sister and Paul), where we speak as we find. ("Well, in't it just some bits o' metal and teabags?")

But I do try. After all, I have a degree, and so by law I must spend some of my down time being cultural and nodding sagely at stuff.

And so here is Shibboleth in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, an installation by Doris Salcedo.



It's a big crack in the floor. Quite deep, and running the length of the building, it starts off very thin...



...and widens...



...splits...



...goes off down dead ends, presumably to get that woman's shoes...



...and finally disappears under the wall at the other end.



It's meant to make us think about racism and colonialism. Which it really doesn't, because it's exceptionally easy to step from one side to the other, in precisely the way that I imagine it's not if you're on the receiving end of racism. It was, of course, impossible for anyone in a wheelchair to cross it at certain points, but she doesn't claim it's about that.



Maybe I missed something.

What it was making people think about (me and all the snatched conversations I heard while I was there) was exactly how she did it. Pneumatic drills? Moulds? Poured concrete? Screeds? (and how will they fill it in again afterwards?)

And of course, if it is supposed to say something about modern society, what it really says is "How stupid are people these days that an army of guides has to hand out leaflets telling them not to fall down it?"



And how to get your camera back...

Biltmore (and Booze...)

Biltmore is America's largest private residence. It's also quite old for America.

This means it gets quite busy and you follow Americans round who say things like "Oh My God!!! It's, like, so AMAZING that they could build something like this 100 years ago...!!!"

I think if you took them to, let's say, Chatsworth, or a castle, they would probably go into meltdown.

None of this is to say it's not impressive...



...because it is.

But it's not really that old.

It was built with proper plumbing, lifts, electricity, central heating etc., by the Vanderbilt family on the proceeds of their trade and commerce. (So at least it was earned and not just inherited...) Today, they don't live there, it's just a going concern as a tourist attraction. You can't take photos inside so if you want to see what it's like, you'll have to look at the website. Or go yourself.

Some of the best views are from, and in, the formal gardens and grounds...



...which are huge.

About three miles from the house, but still in the grounds, is a converted dairy which is now a winery...



If you're not driving, you can taste up to eight wines, guided by a professional wine professional. Ours didn't seem to be counting how many we tasted. The plan is that if you taste eight each, you buy eight each, thus enabling the whole enterprise to do better as a winery than it ever did selling milk. We tasted at least eight each and bought three bottles in total, so we probably weren't the best customers.

But back in Greensboro later that evening, we drank the wine and discovered that it was cheaper in Harris Teeter anyway...

Grey Skies, More Towers...

...and no Pancakes* :-(

The weather wasn't great in London today and the Thames looked steely and very threatening. At 7.2m, it was the highest tide this year so far and at times it looked in danger of coming over the edge...



I worry about these things. Time to get up high!

It's officially Tower week. Already been up the Spinnaker Tower and there are plenty in London to keep the theme going.

Firstly, the Monument. A tower in all but name, built to commemorate the Great Fire. All you need to know about its history and purpose is here...



...Bakers, Puddings, Christopher Wren etc.

The last time I climbed the 311 steps to the top was pre-1981. I know this because my Gran climbed them too, kept going by the fact that an American on the way down told her there was a café at the top**.

But the views are good, even on a grey day...



...up and down...



Next Tower is The Tower of London.



Again, not been here for a very long time, but it seems to have smartened up its act. Lots of interactive touch-screen stuff and the Queen Elizabeth II Travelators to take you past the Crown Jewels. God forbid you might actually want to stop and look.

It was not very busy, surprisingly, but such tourist groups as there were...



...just took photos of all the predictable things.



Of course, I would never do that.

And finally on to Tower Bridge.



Iconic, obviously, but going in and up is better for the views it offers of other things...



..than the views it offers of itself...



You can go in the Engine Room now too. Which is impressive...



...until you realise that these engines don't work the bridge anymore. That's all done by the new-fangled electricity now.

Finished off the day by going to see Boeing-Boeing at the Comedy Theatre. Don't normally like farces, but this one had Michelle Gomez from Green Wing and Feel the Force in it and she was effortlessly brilliant!

*Apologies to The Street family, who didn't have me there to flambé anything this year...
** There isn't...

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More photos on...

Paris in a Day (7): And we're done...

Still fairly bright and sunny at nearly 6pm and I risked life and limb by standing in the middle of the Champs-Elysées to get this photo. (Only took about 3 seconds, which is why it's wonky, but I worried for the Japanese tourists trying to get the same photo using a tripod. Perhaps they are still there...)



Of course, The Arc de Triomphe is actually a war memorial. (Why don't we call it the Triumphal Arch in English? We don't refer to the Eiffel Tower in French. There must be a reason...) The purpose of war memorials, according to Irwin in The History Boys, is to allow countries to forget their own atrocities by masking them with remembrance. At the Arc de Triomphe they do that at 6.30pm every day at the Tomb of the Unknown Solider...



...but we had to leave just before that and only passed the veterans on our way back to the bus. However, the security for the ceremony was gathering...



...and posing for the cameras of about a billion tourists. It was strange to see armed soldiers patrolling the railway stations and the popular tourist attractions. Of course here they had a ceremonial purpose too, but everywhere else it was just part of French security. I'm not sure whether it made me feel safer or not.

Up the 284 steps to the top (this is actually going down, but it was an identical staircase)...



...and the views were worth it. This is towards La Défense and you can see La Grande Arche in the distance.



That's another of ex-president Mitterand's "Grands Projets" to add to the Pyramid at the (closed) Louvre. Another is La Bibliothèque Nationale de France in the east of Paris, which is four "bookend-style" glass towers - only after it was built and they moved in did they realise that the sunlight was irreparably damaging the books.



Sunset, so time to get back. Eurostar turns into a pumpkin at midnight.

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Toutes les photos sur flickr...

Paris in a Day (5): La Cathédrale est ouverte...!

Finally, somewhere is open!



...and they have cleaned it. (Or at least they have cleaned the front for people to take photos - round the back it's still a bit grotty.)

With it being too windy at the Eiffel Tower and Tuesday at the Louvre, Notre Dame was swarming with people. Thousands outside and even more thousands inside.

Unlike British cathedrals there's no "voluntary" admission charge which you feel duty-bound to pay as you walk past the steely-eyed women on the desk. There are a couple of nuns shaking plates for you to drop a few coins, but they have found a far more effective method of raising the millions needed to keep the building in good repair (and to keep the front clean)...

Someone (possibly one of the nuns) has been to IKEA and bought billions of tea-lights. They are all stacked up along the aisles next to money boxes and little vending machines. Pay between €2-5 and you can light one and leave it there. Again, the donation is voluntary, but try lighting one without paying and see what looks you get. If there were a few thousand fewer people milling about and there was a bit of choral singing echoing round in the background, the candles would make the whole experience very spirtually uplifting. But there weren't and there wasn't and so they didn't.

Nothing left to do except demonstrate my continuing ineptitude when it comes to taking photos of stained-glass windows...



Didn't see the Hunchback, either.

Walking to the Isle of Wight...

...or at least that what it seems like when you walk to Hurst Castle from Keyhaven.

I shall demonstrate with this rudimentary map...



...and with this photo...



But it's worth it when you get there because, TARDIS-like, it's bigger on the inside than it appears from the outside. For a kick-off, it's very long and has two looping sections...



...to the east and the west of Henry VIII's orginal fort in the middle. The end of Hurst Spit is much bigger than I thought, too, with room for a lighthouse and a couple of cottages. (Briefly considered that it would be nice to live there, but then weighed up nice view against no Tesco home delivery, no broadband and 1½ mile walk to car and decided against it.)

The central fort was completed in 1544 and then it was added to and modernised during the Napoleonic Wars and then used again in the World Wars...



Evidence of all this "Changing Rooms" activity can still be seen and explored and it gives the whole structure a very hotch-potch kind of style...



...but you get a real sense of what it must have been like as a working fort. Not least when you use the toilets, which are the original outisde urinals used by the garrison and even have a plaque telling you about them.

You can see how the fort made this part of the Solent easier to defend. Just over the water on the island are...



...Fort Albert and The Needles, the latter helping to funnel ships into the cannons of the former. Not forgetting, of course, the cannons and guns at Hurst, which were (are still ) big...



And when you've seen enough, there's also a ferry back to Keyhaven...



...which is probably the best £2.50 I've spent all holiday.

Slideshow of all photos on...

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OCD Footnote: This is the second Henry VIII-themed tourist attraction with the initials H.C. I have visited in 48 hours, which beats other attempts at organised tourism hands down...