Walk with me through London :)

I recently started focusing on doing walking tours and wrote this piece about some of the tours I lead. Have a read and if you can do join us.

London is a wonderful city full of fun things to do.

This month we are playing host to the amazing Open House/City event and hundreds of magnificent houses will be open to the public and entirely free to visit. The event will be running on the weekend of 16 and 17 September and is the perfect opportunity to visit those places you have always said you wanted to visit, but like most Londoners and the London Eye, never actually get around to visiting.

In honour of this event we have decided to do 5 tours within walking distance  of some of the more wonderful houses on the docket that weekend.  We will also be launching a new tour because this is one of the best weekends to celebrate London. Why not make a day or even weekend of it and join us on our walking tours and actually visit some of the places we talk about on our tours. 

On Saturday the 16th we will be hosting a walking tour of Westminster at 10 a.m. You can plan your day around this 2 hour tour which takes you past some of the great places of Westminster. After the tour why not visit Banqueting House which is where Charles I was executed. Or visit 10 Downing Street (designed by Sir Christopher Wren) where Prime Ministers great and downright despicable have lived for the last 277 years.  Who knows, you may even bump into the “strong and stable” Theresa, or Winston Churchill’s ghost, or chat to Larry the resident cat.  

At 2 p.m. we will be launching one of our many new Autumn and Winter walking tours which will be the Embankment City Walk. You can organise your day by visiting the above mentioned attractions before joining us at Westminster Station for a very beautiful and striking 2 hour and a half walk. After the tour you could also visit the New Scotland Yardand learn a little about policing in London. If you are keen on London‘s history during the Roman era you can also visit the Roman Baths which are next to Somerset House; another fantastic 17th century house to visit. You can also arrange to visit Canada House, Australia House (they filmed Gringotts Bank from Harry Potter here), The National Gallery or the Supreme Court where you can gaze upon the Magna Carta. 

In the evening, at 6 p.m., we will be doing our South Bank Culture and Sin Tour which uncovers some of London‘s less talked about secrets and desires. Why not arrange a visit to any of the places mentioned above (particularly the Roman Baths as they are a talking point on the tour) and close of your evening with a lovely and scintillating walk along the South Bank? Advance Warning: This tour is the only one that is NOT family friendly. 

On Sunday we will be offering 3 more tours (Tower Walk at 11 a.m., Primrose Hill and Regent’s Park at 3 p.m. and South Bank Culture & Sin at 7 p.m. Here you arrange your day to visit any of the houses you missed on Saturday or plan to see new buildings. In the City of London (after the Tower Walk) you can have a relaxing pint or meal in St Katherine’s Docks at the wonderful Dickens Inn. You can also visit the many City Churches like St Lawrence Jewry and St Mary-Le-Bow (both designed by Sir Christopher Wren) which will be open to the public. Of particular note will be the Gherkin which you will be able to explore for free. There are also the Bank of England Museum, Leadenhall and Borough Markets (2 Harry Potter filming locations), The Tate Modern and The Barbican Centre.  

However you decide to spend your weekend, join us on one of our tours and have fun while learning more about this wonderful city. 

In closing it is advisable to have a look at the Open House/City website because some of the houses require advanced booking as they may not be able to accommodate many people. Here you can find a full listing of what is on offer, including many places located in Camden which would couple perfectly with our Primrose Hill & Regent’s Park tour on Sunday.

We look forward to meeting some of you on our tours and should you be unable to make it we hope you enjoy your weekend and keep an eye out for our future tours, we are will to be launching many new tours for the winter season soon. 

You can find our tours here: http://www.wondersoflondon.co.uk/

And follow us here https://www.facebook.com/wondersoflondon/

As Ever, Keep Wondering London! 

A Simpler Time/Make…Great Again – Vincent Edward Manda

Back in the day,

Back in the day,

Back in the day…

Ah, back in the day

I was an abomination,

The offspring of an

Unholy and inhuman union

Between the races.

Back in the day you:

The writer, the poet, the journalist,

And you:

The accountant, the soldier, the dreamer,

Back then; whatever the tone of your skin,

You couldn’t even read or write!

Back in the day

Your knees were worn

And your back bent.

Back in the day

Your eyes knew the bull’s shit

And never dared steal

Glances at rainbows

In the presence of your betters.

Back when times was for

King and queens

And ours was

Hung, drawn and quartered.

Back in those long seasons,

That never ended for some.

Seasons of side sickness and plague,

Small pox and cholera,

Polio and malaria…

Back in that simple time

When thirty was old age

And grandparents were never seen

By the likes of you and me.

Back in the day

They lived in the present,

And someday soon

Our glorious dreams,

Of a bright and peaceful future

Full of food

Will be longings

From back in the day.

Back in the day

Will be a time when

Women and minorities

Worked twice as hard

For half as much,

While the women from minorities

Worked even harder for much less.

Back in the day

Will be an age

When FIFA 16

Was better than PES2016,

A time

When a self proclaimed genius

Butchered Queen

And threatened Bowie…

It’ll be a time to ask why

Fresh food was discarded

Amidst world hunger.

Alas, I can’t predict the future

But I can imagine a scene

From the time of our descendants;

A time with cures for cancer and AIDS

Wherein some writer, poet, journalist,

Accountant, soldier or dreamer

Will gasp for oxygen

And wonder what tree bark

Felt like against the skin,

All the while

Longing for Universal Healthcare.

LEMMY

I loved Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister like a member of my family, even though I never met him because he spoke honestly and didn’t kid anyone. Most of all, he did things his way and enjoyed this horrible life we all share because what he did made him happy. He once said “A lot of bands follow trends and it’s fatal because you can’t please everybody all the time, we don’t play for you, we play for us and if we like it we put it out and if you like it as well that’s a bonus but it’s not necessary.”

I’ve been told to write like the others and take the routes the others have many times, and I have been sorely tempted to do so many times! Lots of people say learn how to write like the greats before writing like yourself, but that is something that never sat well with me. I appreciate the greats and would love to write just like the greats, but I will never be Shakespeare or Anne Rice or Kafka or Maupassant or Dahl or Thompson or Orwell or Eliot or Frost or Rossetti or Bukowski or DIckens or Rimbaud or any other great including Lemmy. I have spent the past years trying to perfect my style and for every thousand failures I’ve had tiny little victories that have made all the difference because they show me the way forward!

Lemmy taught me to appreciate these victories in a way no one else could. He was ugly, he had a horrible voice but he made it work and for the better part of forty fucking years he steered the greatest rock and roll band through the good and the bad to the very end! He was himself and that is what I aspire to be, myself!

Lemmy once said “Most people get to clock out at the end of their day’s work. I’m Lemmy twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.”
I don’t want my writing to be a job because it is me and is always with me and those who truly know me understand what this means.

This is why Lemmy’s death hit me hard, but I am also happy because Lemmy also said “Integrity is everything to me. I will not die ashamed. I will live on my deathbed knowing that I gave it my best shot, and everything else is meaningless to me.”

Even though I have not truly found my style, I know that when I do I will stick to it, give it my best shot and not die ashamed! Lemmy’s most important lesson to me was that being true to one’s self is the most vital thing in life.

R.I.P LEMMY KILMISTER

P.S. There is now technically a three piece Motörhead band in the land of the dead! Lemmy on bass and vocals, Michael “Würzel” Burston on guitar and Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor! R.I.P guys and KEEP ROCKING LOUDER AND FASTER THAN ANYONE ELSE!

A Thought

Art is meant to imitate life, so what we create and what becomes popular should be a reflection of our times. Paintings have long held the power to move us and communicate ideas to us. Some of the great masters sell for many millions alone and in our society such price tags should give us an idea as to the power of a simple drawing.

Throughout history we have had people drawing some, shall we say, interesting pictures highlighting certain parts of our society. From etchings on a cave wall and hieroglyphs to religious paintings then pictures of slaves on the block and those of big lipped, huge nosed, ridiculously fat bottomed people eating watermelons, followed by the insane publications spewed out of that European propaganda machine from the 30’s and 40’s through to the simple brainwashing motivational posters calling for the young to serve and perhaps die for their countries right up to the tragedy we have now.

In short, if the pen is mightier than the sword then shouldn’t we surely carefully consider what we create with it? After all it is the mighty that drive weak.

Something Floating in the Wind

In the absence of dreams we have nightmares and in the absence of dreams and nightmares we have life. They kill our dreams and we kill our nightmares, but life is not eternal and the misery of an age meant to be enlightened is a poisonous sting.

If you lived in the 60′s

An old article I worked on. November 2010

The R L Journal

If you lived in the 60’s would you have been tripping out on acid at some concert fighting for your freedom through free expression? Would you have been hailing Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in celebration of their achievements in the battle against racial inequality?

On 16 October 1793 would you have been throwing rotten tomatoes at Marie Antoinette, not from your local Tesco, but from your back garden or the local market? Would you have taken violently to the street in the hope of improving your current situation?

What about on the 10^th of November when a student demonstration against cuts and increments to university funding and fees occurred in London. Where were you then?

In England we saw the first noteworthy demonstration in years and it has been condemned for violence and dubbed ‘out of control’ by many. Students marched out on the 10^th

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“Oh yes, Monsieur Vampire, take me, I adore you!”

A Hatchet Job

So, Vampires are everywhere on film now. Do you suppose it’s a turn of the century thing?

In the early 1900’s we had the first vampire film “Vampire of the Coast” (1909). This was followed by “The Vampire Trail” (1910) then “The Vampire” (1913). Some twenty plus other vamp films followed (most alluring of which would have to be “A Vampire out of Work: 1916, a very active year) leading up to 1922’s “Nosferatu” which saw a sort of petering out of the genre. A series of notable but sporadic resurgence appeared over the decades, with Bella Lugosi’s “Dracula” (1931) at the helm. This version of Dracula came out more or less alongside the film “Vampyr” (1932) What followed up to around the 80’s was more of a steady output of Dracula most notably of which was Christopher Lee’s portrayal. A number of vampire films were produced but they tended to focus on Dracula and his family.

Some truly notable and hilarious mentions would have to be “Vampire in Brooklyn” (Eddie Murphy, 1995), “Vampire’s Kiss” (Nicholas Cage, 1988). My next to watch of funny vampire films has to be “Sundown: Vampire in Retreat” (1990) I mean any film with hillbilly vampires has to be awesome and the trailer looks good!

At a certain point people started really experimenting. Lestat and Louis (The best vampires) leapt from books and graced our screens.

Around the turn of the century a new breed of Vampires with “Blade” at the helm and “Dracula 2000” second in command appeared. These vampires had new super powers like walking in the sun, going vegan (i.e. exclusively feeding on animal blood), eating actual food like pizza and my personal favourites, the fantastically phantasmagoric ability to sparkle. Again vampires were gaining momentum and it wasn’t all about Dracula any more. He was truly relegated to the ‘The vulgar fictions of a demented Irishman’.

For a period we had that Twilight lot and Dracula.

Then the genre followed the current trend of big stars and made a move to TV. The trailblazer of this trend was “Dark Shadows” from the sixties. However, in spite of “Dark Shadows” illuminating the way in 1966, around the turn of the century vampires had been trying to make it to TV with few success stories. Buffy’s antics (1997) and Angel’s torment (1999) both paved the way for new age telly vamps. The Canadians had their own run with “Forever Knight” earlier in 1989.

Along the way many enjoyable casualties got their move to TV timing wrong. These include “Moonlight” (a private detective vampire story), “The Dresden Files”, “Blade”, “The Gates”, “Ultraviolet” (which reads like a good watch and is on my list), “Kindred”, “Blood Ties” (kind of Holmes as a vampire) and many more.

The floodgates opened in 2008 and the Brits even got in on the action with the brilliant “Being Human” (2008). Things really turned for television and the telly vampire. I would say that the recent success of the television vampire is hugely due to the change in the way television is now being made. The delicious “True Blood” (2008) brought the television invasion about en force with insane sex and violence. “The Vampire Diaries” (2009) followed and in turn spawned “The Originals” (2013). The Interminable Dracula made his appearance on telly with Jonathan Rhys Meyers in, wait for it, “Dracula” (2013). My personal favourite is “Hemlock Grove” (2013) which is simply the most twisted of the lot. The newest entry to this category, albeit an old one, is the TV adaptation of “From Dusk Till Dawn” which I look forward to enjoying. “Hemlock Grove” and “From Dusk Till Dawn” are both from Netflix which in itself is the next evolutionary stage in television. It is apparent that despite being creatures of old, vampires adapt easily.

Most of the above mentioned leached from the nineties into the naughties leading to what we have now. In reference to my opening question, it would seem that vampires like to make intense appearances around the turn of the century. In the early 1900’s we had a slew of vampire flicks featuring a variety of vampires. Later in the century Dracula overshadowed all of them. Around the 90’s and into the 00’s the real TV vampire was born and it was no longer all about Dracula. We were introduced to a whole host of new vamps and then just last year Dracula returned. Is the master of all vampires about to take over our small screens as he did our big ones? In lieu of this I think our love affair with the vampires is going to keep growing until our own jazz age, then peter out with the return of “the ravings of a drunken Irishman”.

Is this turn of the century appearance an exercise in nostalgia for vampires? Do they like coming out at the beginning of something new and then like Anne Rice’s vampires do they grow weary and tired of humanity so opt sleep in the earth for the rest of the century?

It is quite evident that Dracula is truly the most resilient of all Vampires. He is by no means the original vampire, (read up on your eastern folklore) but there is something about him that captured our imaginations. It’s as though he stretched his hands out from the pages and screens, cut our hearts out of our chests with his glass nails and replaced them with himself. He is the one and only truly immortal vampire having haunted our imaginations since 1897. Hell even his hunter, Van Helsing, has endured the test of time having gotten his own films.

Of course any self-respecting vampire fan would not go a moment without mentioning Anne Rice. She is the queen. She reinvigorated the genre and gave us a different outlook. What she did for the vampire genre was so powerful and effective that I sometimes find myself hating her for giving birth to some of these pansy Edwardian vampires we have these days. The feelings she gave her creatures resonated with us almost more than Dracula did and as a result all of today’s vampires are more Lestat, Louis, Armand, Akasha, Enkil, Gabrielle, Mael, Magnus, David, Tarquin, Vittorio, Pandora and the tragic Claudia than they are Dracula. (However is it not reasonable to argue that Lestat et al are, to some degree, in turn based on Dracula?) The drunken Irish man may be the father of the literary Vampire but Anne Rice is the mother of both the literary and the modern vampire. Her work is so prolific that even Dracula has forgotten himself, lost his core values and now resembles Lestat de Lioncourt.

But you can never really hate Anne Rice because she is simply brilliant. Especially since she has just announced that Lestat is on his way back in “Prince Lestat” (October 28). I wonder if he will have an I-Pad.

In closing I look forward to this growth in the world of vampires. I hope we get many more new and interesting fledglings in our imaginary world. It is an interesting thing that they have grown so much in film since back in the day they could not be seen on mirrors or be caught on film…(They must have acquired some kind of magical ‘be captured on film ring’).

Feel free to comment on any aspect of this piece, I have been trying to come up with a new concept for a vampire story of my own and am looking to crowd source research. I am also considering doing a full piece on literary vampires. It’s a bit all over the place, hence the title ‘Hatchet Job’.

I know I left out a lot of films and shows, but I either haven’t watched them, don’t know them, didn’t want to talk about them and perhaps most honestly of all am just lazy. Although I really did not want to talk about “Underworld.” It got kinda…shit…

And just in case it was not clear earlier ANY TRUE VAMPIRE FAN WOULD DENOUNCE TWILIGHT!!! VAMPIRES DO NOT TWINKLE OR SPARKLE!!!

Thoughts on News and Journalism; The Fourth Estate of Today

Yet Another Perfect System

A hundred and fifty years ago a whisper took about fifty avenues to reach your ears. It tried the short cuts only to find itself lost in dark alleys and dodgy nooks. When it asked for directions the local man (through and through Londoner he is) thought it was a tourist and sent it the wrong way. Those fifty avenues were so long that most people did not even bother finding the whisper at all. It was too expensive and not worth it at all. They just lived their lives not caring about news on a bigger scale, because when it did reach them the elephant in the room had metamorphosed into a fly on a wall.

Nowadays, at the tap of a key, a whisper will cross a million avenues and go around the world in seconds before reaching not only your ears, but also your eyes. It reaching our senses so quickly makes it fresh, and fresh is good. A fly on a wall is truly the fly on the wall, it did not have fifty avenues and weeks in which to change its appearance. It had mere seconds therefore it most definitely is the fly on the wall.

And since whispers travel vast distances in short times a whisper that is ten minutes old is already ancient and a new one has to be picked up. By the time the day is over, we will have already forgotten that first whisper, which may have been the most important one.

The first whisper of the day is covered by dead bodies harbouring flies yearning to be the one on the wall whatever the cost.

That is the state of news in our modern day. The elephant in the room has become invisible and all there is is a triviality masking the true state of affairs. Good journalism is reliant on experts and reliably unimpeachable sources, in essence flies on walls, the people who see and know all. But when these experts and reliable sources choose to ignore the elephant in the room what becomes of the news reported to us?

In a world of too much information and “news” we have become desensitised and unable to pick apart that which is important, yet we claim to be aware of the character of our modern and driven world.

We are just like the poor of old who could not afford the news and therefore lived their lives not caring about it on a bigger scale. Whereas we can afford all the news, we cannot afford the consequences of said news. This truth is too expensive. We shut our eyes and plug in our I-Pods when something we dislike or do not understand is brought to our attention. Our poverty is that of the mind because the opportunity is there, but you tell me what we do with it.

I, personally, file it away and hunt for the newest and juiciest…