London ain't no place for teddy bears

Remember Paddington? The migrant bear-worker who arrived to London from "darkest Peru" hidden in a cargo shipment ; no one could pronounce his foreign name (all too familiar) so he was re-named Paddington bear by the Brown family, who took him to their posh house in west London.

Well not all migrant teddy bears are as lucky. Here are some pictures documenting their miserable condition, down and out in south London.

The Market Diaries: skipping breakfast

Last night you were up late, reading Dr. Frenkel’s 1856 account of his travels to Jerusalem, written in antiquated Hebrew, strange and sweet. Now it’s nearly ten and you had planned this to be a market day. No time for porridge, then; you get ready to leave, put on your grubby market trousers, and fill you panniers with empty plastic bags. A look through the peep hole before you step out, roll your bike, go.

You cut into the secret gardens, by the abandoned warehouse, through the parking lot: when you reach the gates you put your florescent orange jacket away. In the market, visibility has its disadvantages; attracting attention is unwise. You never know how the Market Authority feels about scavenging this morning.

You start the tour and find your breakfast: Organic bananas from the Dominican Republic. One will be good for now, the rest for later. As you eat you notice the boxes of Tunisian dates in the silver metal bins. Why are they there? You turn the boxes but can’t find a Best by date. Taste one, and two, and three: they’re fine. ‘Is there anything wrong with the dates?’ but the worker from the warehouse just shrugs his shoulders. And so you become the lucky owner of three kilograms of organic dates.

Now come kale, leeks and fennels; Italian pears, more bananas, radicchios, a small bag of wild mushrooms, and the best find, five Brazilian papayas. You forgot to bring elastic bungee ropes, and your panniers are full, so this will have to be it for today. You bid farewell to the squashed Israeli avocadoes, to the boxes of mandarins. No herbs, you think; there was a time you used to find coriander every week. Is there a global coriander crisis? Or perhaps coriander is an early morning commodity, disappearing before 11am? The mysteries of the market keep you pondering as you cycle out.

An hour later, you are sitting in your little courtyard, eating rice, fried smoked tofu and wild mushrooms, cooked with garlic, olive oil and white wine (as Marcel advised, you let it almost completely evaporate). You savour on the sky, the air: the cold does not bite. Global warming, the best antidepressant.

Obscure Visual Sign of the Week (44): Mission Imposible

For your next assignment, you will need the following tools:

London Mink will deny any responsibility if you get caught. Good Luck. This computer will destroy itself in 15 seconds.

Life without hot water

Even though it’s a warm winter, I decided to stop having cold showers; I have been warned that excessive cold showering may lead to repressive personality complexes. The last cold shower was in November.

These days I go for the bucket system. Two kettle-full of boiling water, together with cold water, is all that I need to have a nice shower, and even wash my not so long hair . It takes less time than an average shower, and much less water: around 8-10 litres per bucket, compared with 30-50 litres of a 'real' shower, and 80 litres for a bath.

Modern domestic water facilities, which we have come to expect as a natural element of our living conditions - the flushing toilet, the sink, the shower - make us use much more water than our ancestors did. The global consumption of water rose sixfold between 1900 and 1995, double the rate of population growth. Most of this goes to agriculture; but water is a fluid form of power, privilege and money. When I read that the average de-lux hotel guest uses per night 700-1000 litres, I feel like closing a few taps.

Soy Cuba at the Ritzy

It’s better in the matinee, sing Franz Ferdinand in the CD I found a few months ago on my street. It’s definitely cheaper, in the Ritzy’s World Cinema Matinee, £2.50 only. A good day to cycle south to Brixton: the sun was shining in my face. I sat outside in the little square in front of the library with the drunks and the rastas, enjoying the yellow thing in the sky and eating the vegetarian sushi I skipped last night from Pret. Then I went inside the cinema to watch Soy Cuba.

Made by Mikhael Kalatozishvilli in 1964, this film is the story of Cuba at the time of revolution. Pathetic, poignant, and strangely beautiful, it’s Soviet avant-garde in a Caribbean settings; like Dziga Vertov on pina collada, Eisenstein after a hot day in a sugar plantation. The dialectical approach is still there, and so are the strange angles, but not the 1920s hectic montage, built on shock and surprise; Soy Cuba is dreamlike realism, and the camera movement is much slower and more lyrical, leading the way to Tarkovsky.

In the first act, we see degenerate Cuba through its sleazy bars full of rich Yankees and poor pretty prostitutes. As you may have guessed, women feature predominantly as a vehicle to explore notions of seduction, violation and redemption; gender/race is always a good way to examine socialist/radical films, to look beyond the surface propaganda. Soy Cuba is not the only film where the director’s fascination with the female body and with blackness runs counter the supposed progressive message of the film. Strangely, the camera assumes the point of view of the American businessman, stranded in a shanty town, desperately trying to find his way out; as if the audience is most likely to identify with him.

Next Act, a poor farmer is told that his sugar cane field and his little shack were sold to United Fruit ltd, and that he has to leave. He burns his house and crops, he goes mad, he dies; the camera moves backwards, upwards, and the narrator, a woman’s voice:

I am Cuba

Sometimes I think that my Royal Palms were watered with blood

Sometimes I think that the sea around me was created by people’s tears

Who is to answer for all the blood,

Who is to answer for all the tears?

United Fruits are now rebranded as Chiquita. Their stickers, like Del Monte's and other agro-empires, are on the bananas I find in the market every week: I know the end of the story. With Fidel’s condition deteriorating, soon they may all be able to return to Cuba, the agro-corporations and the rich men in suits. On the way out I looked at the audience, that random collection of matinee viewers, bag-ladies, pensioners and students. Revolution anyone? Better go home to my leek and potato soup.

Obscure Visual Sign of the Week (43)

Release your inner hound

It's running out

When I ask people what will happen when oil runs out, I always get the same answer.
A taxi driver in Amman, last May, pointed to his mobile phone, and said 'we didn't have them ten years ago'. He smiled. 'People will invent something'.
A university lecturer in Jerusalem said to me last November 'they'll find some other drek (shit in yiddish) to replace it'.
People seem sure that technology will come up with something.

Imagine you inherit lots of money from a dead aunt. Then you spend it like tomorrow never comes. When someboy asks you about this behaviour you say: 'well maybe I have another rich aunt and she will die and leave me more money'. But you have no other rich aunt - not one that you know of, and the chances it will appear out of nowhere is almost zero. No one would call this behaviour rational. I would use the word nutcase.

But this is how we live today. We consume energy as if an easy and cheap solution is just around the corner. But there is no reason to believe this is the case. For sure, there are lots of technological solutions, lots of renewable sources, but they will not allow us to live the way we do.

Peak Oil is the term for the time when the production of crude oil peaks - that is, production cannot expand to meet the growing demand. Some people think we already passed it; others put it at 2015. Others put it at 2030, and prefer to forget about it. But when the Peak comes - and it will - prices will go up considerably. Since the demand for energy continues to grow (with rapid growth of the economy in China, India and elsewhere), cheap energy will be a thing of the past.

However I look at it, I can't figure it out. How can people keep living the way they do? Is there anything I'm missing? There is a very good chance that in ten, fifteen or twenty years, the way we live today - the way we travel, eat, keep warm, etc etc - will become impossible ... Humans are ingenious creatures and solutions will be found to survive. But at what price.