Man inside a clock at Paddington

 There's a man trapped in a clock outside Paddington station! He is forever cleaning the face and drawing new hands on the glass. Okay, it's not a real man, though he does look very realistic. 

It is a fascinating work of art. An actor dressed in a 19th century three piece suite, he sometimes puts on a  top hat. He is dressed as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who was the architect of Paddington station.  

The man is constantly cleaning the clock face and he also cleans the minute and hour hands then has to redraw them. The creator is a Dutch artist, Maarten Baas. He has made a series of human filled clocks, called Real Time clocks. The first was in Milan in 2009 and another is in Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. 

On a different day, it's a different time. In this photo he is wearing his hat -

Note that the lines on the photos and videos are not seen in real life, they are due to the camera shutter speed.

The  videos are a 12-hour recorded performance. This first video, he puts on his hat and takes it off at the end -

In this video he is without his hat -

The clock is on 50 Eastbourne Terrace, which is next to Paddington station. 

The statue of Brunel at platform 8, in the station -

Paddington station was designed by Brunel and opened in 1854. Brunel is buried in Kensal Green cemetery, which I visited in 2020.

And of course, Paddington himself -

Storms Dudley, Eunice and Franklin

 Storms Dudley, Eunice and Franklin hit the UK over about 5 days, from 18 Feb 2022. Dudley hardly affected the London area. Eunice was definitely the worst.

As the storms were following each other from the west, and initially just the west had red warnings, I didn't expect London to be badly affected. But then red warnings were issued for London -

Weather forecast on 18th morning -

Eunice turned out to be not as bad as predicted, but still did a lot of damage. In my road, 2 large mature trees came down. One squashed a car -

And the beehives opposite my window suffered, several of them came apart. Don't know what happened to the bees, there was no sign of them. Luckily one of the beekeepers arrived the same morning and put the hives back together again but there was no sign of the bees flying around.

On Tue 22 I read an article in the Newsshopper about a London beekeeper who also had 40 of his 80 hives overturned and with the roofs off. He expects thousands of the bees to die  as the bees were exposed to the rain.

Good old Brucie!

Storm Franklin wasn't too bad in London. Again it mostly hit the north.

Lions in London, Born Free’s Year of the Lion

Last year there were elephants in central London, this year there are lions. There were 2 main groups of elephants in 2021. The Kings Road elephants were made from an invasive weed found in India. The Spitalfields elephants were made of bronze. The 2022 pride of lions is also made of bronze. 

They are located in Millenium Green, which is a very small park opposite the Old Vic theatre and close to Waterloo station. The sculptures were installed here to raise awareness and money for the Born Free charity.

This charity was founded by actor Bill Travers MBE, and this year would have been his 100th Birthday. Born Free are celebrating his life and work by designating 2022 as Born Free’s Year of the Lion. 

Bill Travers played George Adamson in the 1966 film Born Free. It was based on the true story of George and Joy Adamson who were the pioneers of lion conservation in Africa. Having shot an aggressive lion and lioness, they saved the cub called Elsa and returned her to the wild.  

Bill Travers's Land Rover that featured in the 1966 film, with Elsa standing on the front, with the Old Vic behind -

It was shocking to read that this lion cub was kept in an apartment in Paris as recently as 2017 -

Black, the last lion to perform in a circus in Bulgaria -

It is good to know that these rescued lions are now living out their days at Born Free's big cat sanctuary in South Africa. Another lion sculpture is of Christian, the cub purchased from Harrods in 1969 and successfully returned to the wild.

Information about the artists Gillie and Marc . They also created the well known Rabbitwoman and Dogman which I mentioned on my elephants in Spitalfields blog. 

The story of George and Joy Adamson, Elsa and Born Free -

There will be a UK-wide exhibition featuring the 25 life-size, bronze lion sculptures to raise awareness and vital funds for the Born Free charity. The lions will be at Waterloo until the end of March. See the itinerary. 

Calcutta street scenes 1988, India

 I was talking to a friend about Calcutta and decided to dig out my photos from 1988, when I was travelling around India. This led me to taking photos of the photos for this blog. I then found my travel diaries to do this text. However I didn't find any photos of the sights, so maybe I took those with my slide camera, rather than the film one. So the photos here are mostly just street scenes.

I had been working my way anticlockwise around India, Prior to Calcutta, I was in Puri, one of the four holiest cities in India and home of the Jagannath Temple. From Puri I took the Jagannath Express, an overnight train to Calcutta. Arrived at Calcutta's Howrah station the next morning and from there took a minibus to Sudder Street, which was the cheap accommodation centre. 

Calcutta was in the process of having an underground tube system being built and just one section was open, it gets delayed as the annual monsoon fills up what has previously been dug out. I went just 2 stops from Esplanade for 1Rs (7p). I don't seem to have any photos of the underground.

Calcutta was (at the time) the world's 4th largest city and was very busy, noisy and polluted. According to my Lonely Planet guide book it was the only place in India to still have hand pulled rickshaws and there were trams coming at you from all directions, strange double decker buses towed by a big lorry. A New Zealand friend pretending to pull a rickshaw -

And a rickshaw wallah waiting for business by a street barber -

A tram with a ladies only carriage -

Sugar cane, collecting water and wash time -

Some shops and a cinema -

I actually went to a cinema, to see Poltergeist 2, for 4 Rs. Whilst I was in Calcutta, it was the festival of Holi, aka the festival of colours as people throw lots of powders and coloured water - hence the purple colour 2 photos above and also these -  

This is the Howrah Bridge, a balanced cantilever bridge over the Hooghly River. Howrah is on the west bank, Calcutta on the east. 

Some ghat scenes -

Flower market by Howrah bridge -

And general street scenes - 

The Dakshineswar Kali Temple -

And finally, the famous rat park, at Curzon Park where hundreds of rats lived in a meshed enclosure. People would feed the rats. However it seems the rats have now gone.

These photos were taken 34 years ago. Although I've been back to India since, I haven't been back to Calcutta, or Kolkata as it was named in 2001.