sierra_le_oli

Interesting pattern of damaged wall around an Underground sign:

I couldn't regret the turning of the seasons this morning. Light mist over grass, wind blowing orange-yellow leaves out of the trees, dogs running along the dirt track... and a leaf suddenly seizing hold of my ear. Either it was trying to nick my iPod or the squirrels have developed a brain attack system.

Anyhow, I can't believe this exists in dirty old London.

This is seriously brilliant. London, Paris, Rome, etc. turned into Wee Planets by Alexandre Duret-Lutz. There's an older set of photos of Paris and France too. (via @LDN)

At 5 this morning, I was not woken up by a woman on the phone speaking German. Unlike yesterday.

According to the landlord the German couple who lived here moved away about five years ago. The correspondence has only recently dried up. Official letters, postcards... wedding invitations!

In the building in Paris, letters mostly went into a pile at the bottom of the stairs (despite the charming letterboxes). Some of them were addressed to people who hadn't lived there for at least half a year. It was the handwritten letters from places like Ethiopia that got me. No return address, so the senders might never know why they didn't receive a reply.

Previously, in Leiden, I'd decided to carry out a vigorous campaign of "retour afzender" on letters that didn't belong. The stream dried up after only two months. But that was one house (sort of) with only four people in it. With six flats in one building, I felt like I should only tackle letters for our flat, though even then I soon got tired of the letters NPAI (n'habite pas à l'adresse indiquée).

You might think that the moral of all this waffle is about sending out a change of address in a timely fashion. However, I was still picking mail up in Paris two years after the move (unsurprisingly, the digicode hadn't been changed.)

Stick to e-mail?

After 100 days, the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square is empty once more. 2,400 people all spent one hour on the plinth doing whatever they wanted in the name of Antony Gormley's One & Other project.

The project attracted the predictable "but is it art?" wankery, even before it ended on Tuesday. Well, it might not always have been art, but what it was, was absolutely worthwhile.

I managed to get to Trafalgar Square a couple of times, most recently while searching for Unseen Academicals. But mostly my experience came courtesy of the excellent coverage provided by various O&O droids. I'll miss having the live feed sitting in the corner of my screen and the accompanying Twitter convo alongside it.

There's a very nice final highlights video available. The rest of the highlights are worth browsing through as well.

The thing I'll remember most about this project is just how lovely the participants were. There were a few randoms up there but people seemed so stoked at being able to take part. Have just noticed the Telegraph say they "seem to symbolise something about the indefatigability of the human spirit", which is a more arty way of putting it. :-)

I hope there'll be a similar project sometime in the future, but outside of London.