Pen & Notebook

Fer de Laptop

It's hard to believe that I've never done this before - I am for the first time ever, sitting in a café using my laptop and surfing the internets.

I am at the lovely Riverside Studios, having just had a super-productive meeting, and I am connected to their ethernet, through an extremely useful cable.

I wonder if they're on this Freelancer's Map of London?

This, right here, is the freelance dream.

(incidentally, I was under the impression that freelance had evolved from the chivalric phrase fer de lance, but I can't find any evidence for this, and I'm now thinking that this idea may all have come from a Nero Wolfe novel of my grandmother's, still Fer de Laptop has a good ring to it).

Plus Ça Change

Working as a TV researcher, a couple of years ago, I realised that neither of my grandfathers would really have understood what I did for a living.  One died in 1950, before the coronation in 1953 really brought TV to the masses, and the other lived in India until his death in 1957.

It's so strange to think that fifty years can make such an astonishing difference.  But, by way of a contrast, these beautiful photos from around 1949 by Chalmers Butterfield, posted on How to be a Retronaut, demonstrate that not all that much has changed.

Here's one of Piccadilly Circus circa 1949:

And here's one from Google Maps circa 2008:

I wonder if that is, in fact, the same lamp post - moved a few metres.