Internet Commentator

Just got back from two weeks holiday in Lagos, Portugal (not to be confused with Lagos, Nigeria!). I didn’t announce my departure this time partly because I hadn’t posted much/at all in the preceding week and partly because there’s now sufficient personal information here on my weblog for the enterprising burglar to find and empty my house during the promised period of absence.

Over at Foreign Dispatches a couple of weeks ago, to a post on camera recommendations, I commented that someone who was interested in a single piece of light equipment for snapshots might, rather than purchase a camera, do well to trade their current phone for the Sony Ericsson k750i which features a 2mp camera - sufficient resolution for display on a 1600 x 1200 high res computer monitor, which is where, I’d guess, the vast majority of quotidian digital photographs are ever shown. I made the mistake of choosing a Motorola V3 over the k750i back in January and after much frustration finally reversed that decision a few weeks ago and have become quite evangelical about this phone, far superior to the V3 even setting aside its camera function.

So, I thought I’d put my money where my mouth is and use it (my wife’s Ixus had finally given up the ghost, so she took my Fuji Finepix Z2) for the holiday snaps:

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I had forgotten that one of my favourite pieces of “architecture” in London was that stretch of Regent’s Canal between London Zoo and Camden Lock:

Dick O’Brien shares some nice pictures of Lisbon. It’s been a few years since I last visited the city but I have been several times and, like Dick, I am also quite fond of the place.

Dick O’Brien reports from Segovia and shares his great Flickr photoset of this Castilian town:

Off to New York, en famille, for a couple of days from Thursday and then onto Florida for a week to visit Mother-in-law. If anyone has any must-see suggestions for NY, I’d be delighted to receive them…

Great question from Ciarán, inspired by Dan Cruickshank’s Around the World in 80 Treasures (incidentally, this week’s programme featuring Samarkand, Bukhara, Isphahan and Damascus was excellent), who asks:

I was speculating about what a programme specifically on crap treasures would include. So I thought I might ask you to suggest some and see if we can get a curmudgeonly world tour going.

The only rules are that the treasures must have had some original intention other than modern tourism (so that’s Disneyland out, unfortunately) and that they must have some claim to being a tourist draw

“Around the world in 80 trinkets” would surely have to include Niagara Falls. I have never been there myself but am reliably informed that it is exceedingly rubbish. I’m sure there are plenty more candidates…

Update: Better add Tower Bridge and Buckingham Palace to the list - There are plenty of genuine treasures in London but some of the most-visited sights are a bit crap, including “BuckPal”.

Update II: How about George’s Docks in Liverpool? In the immortal words of Brookside character Barry Grant, back in the late 80s, squireing his Canadian squeeze around Scouse-ville - “See them tiny windows there? Thehh sound aahn’t theee?”

I’m going to Budapest this weekend, so if anyone familar with the Hungarian capital has any suggestions, things to do, places to visit, I’d be very grateful.

Off to Edinburgh for the weekend…

Abiola points to Michael Totten’s great photo-diary of his trip to Libya. I have a few observations:

1) Mussolini’s occupation managed to gift Tripoli one well designed twentieth century extension to the old city which contrasts notably with the socialist-realist, agoraphobic/megalomaniac urban planning which followed. Architecture’s dirty little secret is that (unlike Hitler’s Germany), Fascist Italy produced many fine examples of architecture.

2) Ghadames, the “jewel of the Sahara”, is beautiful and indeed beautifully preserved. This was achieved at the point of Ghaddafi’s goon’s guns. Totten (rightly) bemoans the absence of people and the bustle of city life and the assault on Berber culture. But: it is a (widespread) fiction that such pristine preservation is consistent with “messy” urban life. Ghadames represents the ne plus ultra of conservation. Those who seek to preserve and conserve traditional buildings and cities ought to realise that such conservation must compromise with the inhabitants and, if it is to be consistent with quotidian life, can never be pristrine but must have some rough edges.

A few impressions of Rome as snapped by my T610: