Soon, you won’t even need to get in a plane to join the mile high club, if plans for this unlikely-looking structure in Dubai go ahead (alright, it’s a kilometre high. That’s ONE KILOMETRE).
Here, courtesy of Device Daily, is a chart comparing it to various other buildings around the world. If you squint, you might just be able to make out Canary Wharf over there on the right:
http://devicedaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/nakheel-tower-09.jpg
I found myself in Croydon town centre a week or two back for the first time in years. It’s de rigueur to deride Croydon, and I expect you think I’m still going to, but whenever I’m there I remember why I think it’s got one of the best-designed centres of any town I know. It’s not wildly pretty, true, but it has its moments (the old hospital on the corner of the high street and George Street is one; the station at East Croydon is another), and most of all, it just works. Whether you come in on foot, in a car or by public transport the system is designed to get you to where you want to be quickly and with the minimum of fuss. The high street is pedestrianised along most of its length, and there are two indoor shopping centres (the Whitgift is older and a little more run down; Centrale, which replaced the old Drummond Centre, has a silly name but almost all the shops anyone could want to visit), so that it’s an uncomplicated and stress-free place to shop whatever the weather or time of day. The main car parks are just behind or under the high street and cars are deposited there via a system of bypasses and tunnels, so that pedestrians and vehicles rarely meet one another, which can only be a good thing. And the public transport is a dream: there are three mainline stations, countless buses and a speedy and reliable tram network (run by those good folk at TfL).
And it still has an Allders. Bromley’s Allders, where you could buy almost everything, became a giant Primark. Croydon’s goes from strength to strength. Sometimes all you need is a shop with a really good haberdashery department.
These are the nominees for “Best act ever” in the MTV European music awards, which take place next month:
If, like me, you find that one name on that list stands out especially for you, you can register your preference by voting. Far be it from me to suggest whom you should be voting for, of course.
The centre may be for the most part the same as it was when Georges-Eugène Haussmann introduced his planning reforms in the 1850s, but in other parts of Paris all kinds of interesting things are happening. La Défense, to the north-west of the centre, is the city’s business district and has the highest concentration of skyscrapers of any urban area in Europe. Since the 1980s the most striking of these has been La Grande Arche, which is brilliantly and thoughtfully designed so that it lines up with the Arc de Triomphe and the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, whose name I never knew before today, meaning that if you stand in the Tuileries gardens you can look straight through all three of them, over a distance of several miles.
But today inhabitat has designs for a new, ecologically-minded skyscraper which is about twice the height of the Grande Arche (though still smaller than the Eiffel Tower – some things are sacred) and which looks great. I’m very happy to live in a time when people have discovered that buildings don’t have to be square or rectangular. We’re building pyramids and pods as well as star-shaped cities and Teletubby houses. It all makes London’s shard of glass seem almost pedestrian.
I don’t know why it is, but those crappy disposable cameras keep coming up trumps with photos of beaches. After the shot of Margate that looked like an Edward Hopper painting, I now have this lovely photo of the beach at Cannes, which looks exactly like the sort of “mood” poster one might have found in Athena in the 1980s. I especially like the palm tree and the mountains in the background, which look like they were added on in Photoshop.
Full set is here.
I went in for a crime-fest on holiday:
Hurting Distance and The Point of Rescue, both by Sophie Hannah, are dense, cleverly plotted thrillers with breathtaking denouements, but that’s not what I liked about them. At least, I did like it, but there are lots of other books you could say that about. What I especially like about Sophie Hannah is how human and likeable her characters are. They’re never there just to serve a clever story: they’re living breathing people whom you could imagine meeting and having a conversation with. This is very rare, I think. My favourite book by her is out of print, but if you can hunt down a copy, I recommend Cordial and Corrosive, which is just one of the funniest, cleverest and most unexpected stories I’ve ever read.
I also read two new (to me) Agatha Christies. Ordeal by Innocence was a fairly standard whodunnit: if you like Agatha Christie, you’ll like it well enough. Endless Night is creepier and more original, and well worth reading, especially if you don’t know the ending, which I did.
To balance out the thrillers, I also read some location-specific fiction: Super-Cannes, which I enjoyed in a sort of plodding way – I couldn’t ever quite reconcile the intensity of the action with the languid tone in which it’s conveyed, though I suspect that’s partly the point – and Tender is the Night, which I took a little while to get into but which I ended up loving. I also noticed some unexpected similarities between the two, which I don’t think are coincidental: a character in Super-Cannes is reading Tender is the Night very early on in the book. But I shan’t go into specifics here because I don’t want to spoil anyone.
I am a sucker for a book on language, and I like swearing very much indeed whilst not being very good at it, so I also enjoyed Your Mother’s Tongue: A Book of European Invective, which more or less does what it says on the tin. When it comes to saying the unsayable the similarities between European languages are interesting, and the differences even more so.
Having successfully read some proper books (by which I mean the kind other people write about), I went back and read another Sophie Hannah book. The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets is a collection of short stories, and it’s a bit more literary than its terrible title makes it sound. I didn’t find every story a hit, but the ones which were good (which crucially included the first one and the last one) were very good.
Then I read two Blandings books, but I couldn’t tell you which they were. It doesn’t really matter: they’re all good. And now I’m on a Jeeves and Wooster, which I’m also enjoying very much.
I haven’t had much to say about Crystal Palace so far this season, partly because I haven’t been since mid-August and partly because we’ve had such a dismal start to the season that there are very few reasons to be cheerful. This weekend, in the spirit of adventure, inclusiveness and the desire to support a winning side, I decided to support Great Britain and Europe in the Davis and Ryder cups respectively. (That’s TENNIS and GOLF). Anyway, it was all quite exciting, but both sides lost. I hope my support isn’t a guarantee of failure. I used to put a bet on the Grand National each year until my horse broke its leg and had to be shot two years running, and I started to feel as though I was condemning an innocent animal to death before it had even started.
Heidi Klum’s two elder children are called Leni and Henry. That is all.
Swearing alert
I’ve just spent a week in the south of France, in a tiny attic apartment with a doddery old TV on which we could, with careful angling of the arial, receive three separate channels. We watched quite a lot of films; some made in French, others dubbed from English (including an exceptionally silly Clint Eastwood film which I now discover is called Absolute Power and which I urge you to seek out at the first opportunity).
Anyway, the main fact I took away from watching French films was that the French use merde like the English use fuck, which is to say in every context and part of speech imaginable. Where we have fucking, fucked, fuckwit, fucker and other variations (I’m sure you can think of some of your own), the French have more incarnations of merde than I’d ever suspected. My favourite is the verb “enmerder” – literally, “to beshitten”, which I think we should adapt into English immediately.
Glad All Over 
