The rather marvellous artnouveauho  and myself arranged to meet up for a spot of tea and tubewhoring in the posher middle bit of the District and Circle lines around Kensington on Friday. This meant a simple enough journey via a change at Earl's Court up one of the District lines multiple spurs - the District Line has many odd branches and wiggles all of which involve dickering about at Earl's Court but at least the Platform indicator boards are still willfully ancient and arcane, like some fairground divination game:




we then completely failed to get tea as the place we were aiming for was closed, but wandered via Notting Hill and all the chazzas in between to a strange little Italian place with delicious rice balls where we were seranaded by a very peculiar singer in a pinstriped suit, slightly off key and with the oddest, plastered-down hair - like it had been fabricated all of a piece from rubber.



He was fantastic entertainment but for all the wrong reasons, and very distracting when we wanted to gossip - and, being a singer herself, eventually his off-keyness was becoming physically painful to L - so we left for tea and gingerbreadmen at her house via Sloane Square - which was a twinkly fairyland with Christmas lights - so three done!

I have midnightxpress  as willing cameraman for the day on Monday, so following the success of previous guerilla attack on the H&C, top up the Oystercard and arrange to met at Victoria to knock off the bottom of the pale blue line into the South before lunch.


In order: Victoria (for mainline rail services and the coachstation), Pimlico, above (for Tate Britain), Vauxhall (for Skin Two's relocation from the Grand Canal), Stockwell (bought my leathers in nice bike shop here once), and Brixton (for drugs and ticket touts, and the Academy; best venue in London)...

We start this leg of the tour from North Greenwich. I am amazed to see the Millenium Dome is right outside the station, flanked by soaring aerofoils and concrete flags, for no explainable reason other than they look cool against the blue winter sky. They fascinate me; they should be generating electricity. It is as surprising to see the Dome really is right there as it is to see how close Stonehenge is to the road. However, there's a fight going on aesthetically between the vaguely fascist 'tomorrow belongs to us' exhuberant brutalist architecture and the mundane world of bus stations and carparks, vast tarmaced vista stretching to the horizon, the British way of not being quite finished yet, all chipboard hoardings and hazard tape. All very 1984 as staged by the Beeb with Peter Cushing in the lead. As much as I love the Edwardian sections of the tube, I can't help but love the clean lines and open spaces on the Jubilee; the proud grandeur they were striving for in being overtly modernist in design - to be as 'of the time' as much as the early tube stations were of theirs, the acres of reflective, toughened glass, brushed steel and superstructure on view. Nothing softened by anything organic or green. However, it's gleaming and shiny now, and pleasantly deserted at two in the afternoon. Will it retain the sharpness and futurist beauty after twenty years of foot-traffic and budgeted maintenance? The noise of the now pentrates the open station...(oh yes, I have a degree from Goldsmith's and I'm not afraid to use it)


blue glass mosiac tiling on the support beams...

Still, the expanses of glass and chrome, are shiny shiny surfaces to play with. Having someone with you to take pics, rather than accosting a random stranger who might nick yer camera, and in front of whom you'd feel stupid clambering about on street furniture pulling silly poses, means we can muck about. No staff are about to tell us off either.


Needless to say, pvc has little friction and is very grabby; I get stuck on the post...bet that doesn't happen to Catwoman. We are giggling like fools as G extricates me. Blimey - my arse is so shiny I can actually see people reflected in it. Sadly angle wrong to reflect the station name...


Up in the ticket hall, we spot the perfect location for General Bamford to survey her domain...