Is your Christmas lickin' good?

Wishing you a Merry Christmas with, I hope, a more succulent bird than the colonel will produce at KFC.  Photo taken on Rye Lane, from top deck of bus on a sunny, winter's day.

Spark and Byrne

Here’s my book FECKHAM PECKHAM displayed in the shop window of Review bookshop -- best bookshop in Peckham -- close to Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye. What an honour! 

Sharing the love

Just what is it that I love about Peckham, excluding words like: exuberant, colourful, crazy, thrusting, energetic, in-your-face, unpretentious? Apart from those qualities, it’s the notion that all life is there. Some bit of ‘all life’ can be found there doing its thing… often with attitude.

Take a butchers

Rye Lane in Peckham must have a dozen butcher shops. Now, there’s a new, trend-setting boy on the block. Note the modern (boudoir?) wall-paper! This butcher sells only red meat: beef, lamb and goat. The place is stream-lined and the background music is contemporary. All the other butcher establishments, except this one, sell a range of goods from parrot fish to plantain; peppers to yams. All of them sell chickens that can only be described as scrawny, except this one. No chickens. 

Skulduggery

Posters on the underground photographed while I waited for the tube to Piccadilly Circus and from there a short walk, sunny in a chilled way, to the Royal Academy, or as Brian Sewell calls it, the ‘grand old whore of Piccadilly’. Indeed there is something unbridled about the place as if at any moment it might lift its skirts and reveal polka-dot pantaloons. On this occasion, it was bronze sculpture that had the place heaving.