Rush hour in Paris. Taxi cruising through the streets. One always thinks of the glamorous sides - but it’s reassuring to see that that most of Paris is conceptually no different to London. Ordinary people. Ordinary looking shops on ordinary-looking streets. Just ordinary stuff.

The streets have nicer sounding names in Paris though. And many of the upper-floor windows of buildings have cute little balconies.

And then - all of a sudden … (Click on the MORE below to find out.)

… the Eiffel Tower appears out of nowhere.

Hanging out at the Jazz Cafe in Camden Town. North London. It’s been ages since I was last round these parts. Tonight it was Jamie Scott. One cool dude - with a cool voice - singing soulful blues to acoustic guitar. He could be a cross between Stevie Wonder and Jamiroquai. One to watch. (Is he related in any way to Ronnie Scott I wonder?)

Managed to capture a particularly moving moment in tonight’s performance. Click play in the media player below to tune into the atmosphere at this most legendary of live London Jazz venues. There’s very few places left where you can get up this close and intimate - and immerse yourself deep down inside a live performance like this.

An excellent evening out. Look out for Jamie Scott - he could be big.

Took my usual place on the upper deck of Route79 bus home tonight. Right at the back. It’s where the teenagers like to hang out. Not sure exactly why they do - but they do.

Turn up the volume - and click on the “play” button in the media player below to hear the sounds of the journey home.

Most people would keep a straight face.

But I just couldn’t.

Go to work in the dark. Come back in the dark. Those days are approaching rapidly. The world outside the window is depressing in the winter months. And “Mother Nature” teases us with tantalisingly fleeting moments of summer-like weather this late in September.

The flourescent yellow of the ambulances glow in the strong morning sun. The scratch-graffiti on the windows do their best to obscure the view.

But the sky is blue - and I have to entire upper deck to myself, for now.

Click on the media player below for a relatively appropriate musical accompaniment to this posting. It’s encoded at a fairly low bit rate (64kbps stereo) - so should stream OK for most people. Turn up the volume.

It’s a sample of an absolutely stunning and magical arrangement of the opening allegro of La Primavera (Spring) Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons”, Op.8 No.1-4 - played by the Belgian Flanders Recorder Quartet. Yes - it’s played on the humble recorder! Those of you who thought that the recorder is a crappy instrument used only for learning music when you were at school will think again when you hear this! (The full CD can be purchased online at Amazon - at a bargain price of only £4.99.)

Spent the best part of the day in London’s Docklands today. The first time that I’ve ever travelled on the Docklands Light Railway too!

One thing I’ve noticed about this place is that it’s awfully bleak. And extremely windy!

On the way home tonight I managed to get a seat at the very front of the driver-less light railway train. This afforded me a spectacular view of the Canary Wharf skyline. The picture doesn’t capture the serenity of it all.

… is what I do every morning. Lost in music. There’s little else to focus on waiting for the train.

Being a teenage kid in the Midlands during the Thatcher era - childhood memories include being totally consumed by the music of a local band called UB40.

Gert’s occasional dive into her tape/record/CD collection inspired me to blow the dust off some of my own CDs. And so - it’s been a morning of rediscovery of music by UB40.

My first experiment in associating image with sound. It’s normally the other way around: select an image - and then pick some words and some sounds. It’s a bit harder to associate image with a selected sound - and almost impossible to associate words with the sound if the sound is a song. In any case - the results can be a little abstract.

Click the play button in the media player below to listen to “The Way You Do The Things You Do” composed by Smokey Robinson and originally performed by The Temptations - but recorded in 1989 by UB40 as part of the Labour of Love II collection. It’s encoded at 56kbps so even if you are on dialup it should stream fine. If you wish to hear it again - it will play from your computer’s hard disk every subsequent time.

About graffiti in Slough: there’s not a lot of it really. And unlike in London - this form of subversive “urban art” is not taken very seriously in Slough. In London you will find plenty of elaborate, colourful pieces adorning structures like bare walls in railway stations and otherwise dull municipal outbuildings. And in London you will find more grotesque and prolific forms of “tagging” on walls, fences and etchings on bus windows.

London “writers” seem to take their work very seriously.

Slough, however, is a different story. In Slough - any tagging and graffiti that does exist appears to be more opportunistic than premeditated; more crass than style; more randomly applied than with sense-of-purpose. And a couple of orders of magnitude less glamorous - exhibiting little by the way of romanticism or emotion.

Just outside the Queensmere shopping centre, right here in the heart of Slough, is a tall chimney-like structure. A concrete legacy of 1960s architecture. If such a structure existed in the suburbs of London - it would be a prime canvas for practitioners in the most exotic of hip-hop-inspired, spray-scan art forms - as thousands of people walk past it every day. Being in Slough however, it remains largely devoid of graffiti. The only tags that exist are of “Bert” and “Bob”. The fading seems to indicate that these were written many years ago. Even the “Bob” tag is obscured by the a pile of wooden loading pallettes stacked up against the wall.

A “stray” shopping trolley has parked itself alongside.

Perhaps “Bert” and “Bob” were the last and best of Slough’s finest urban artists.

Went down to the Wembley Stadium Sunday Market this morning. But there was no market. This market is meant to be one of the largest and busiest markets in the whole of London. It’s set in a huge section of car park in front of Wembley Stadium - and has over 500 stalls - with practically every type of goods being traded. So it surprising that the market would have a weekend off - but it did. Despite the stadium construction work - this market has continued in the shadow of the construction every Sunday - with thousands of people making there way from all over to visit it.

But there was no market today - and all there was to tell the hundreds of people like me who turned up that there was no market was a little sign on a fence which said “no market on 12th September - this week only”. Oh well - I’m glad I didn’t have travel from far - as the stadium is only 5 mins from where I live - and we only come here once every few months. I feel sorry for those who came over from further - only to find the market area deserted.

Interestingly - the fact that the place was deserted made the opportunity for pictures of the evolving stadium much easier - as I could get right up close the perimeter fence - with nothing obscuring the view. So I thought I’d provide a photo update on Wembley Stadium progress instead.

Three different modes of transport. That’s my journey to work. One or two buses, one or two tubes - and one train. The “one or two” really depend on my mood - and the weather. It’s one if I want to go for a longer walk - it’s two if I want to avoid it. And it’s the same for the journey home.

Alperton is the place I usually switch from bus to tube. Picadilly Line. The tube trains at Alperton are usually quite crowded in both mornings and evenings. But on some occasions if I’m travelling into work later than usual - they can get very quiet and spacious indeed. As was the case the other day. Taking advantage of the space - I gazed all around myself - and admired the “art” that makes up the environment of a tube-train carriage.

The upholstery, the armrests, the windows, the doors, the poles and hand grips, the discarded newspapers, the signs, the logos and the way people sit. We take it all for granted really, and it’s everydayness that makes it disinteresting - but there is a lot to admire when you stop to actually notice it all.

Otherwise known as “vindaloo” style. This is probably NOT like the stuff that’s labelled “vindaloo” in the ready-cook meals section of the supermarket - and probably NOT like the “vindaloo” that English pub-goers order at the Indian restuarant after pub closing time.

The vindaloo style of cooking probably originated in the Indian state of Goa - and is probably best described as Indian/Portuguese fusion. It is more of a fiery hot “sweet and sour” - but with less sweet - and the use of an medley of spices that includes cloves, cinammon, mustard seed, cardamom, bay leaves as well as the usual ground spices that you find in these recipes. The sourness comes from the use of tamarind - which is used by Indians the world over as a dip for samosas, pakoras and other savoury tea-time snacks.

Click here to learn how to cook this chicken vindaloo!

Having been mostly working in the City for the last two months or so - I’ve been missing my daily bus rides on Route 79. But now I’m back to the former routine and it’s great to be taking my seat on the upper deck once again. The great thing about riding a London bus through the suburbs is the fact that images of life outside the window are so ordinary - and yet the stories they tell can be extra-ordinary - especially if you dwell upon them long enough. The bus ride home provides for an infinity of such images. An infinity of stories.

It’s now been over six months since my work office in Hammersmith closed - and we relocated to Slough. Hammersmith is in West London - and Slough is even further West - just past Heathrow Airport. The journey to work obviously takes longer for many of us - and despite the fact that we were disappointed about Slough (I mean - it has a reputation for being one of UK’s crappest towns) many of us approached the prospect with an open mind and a positive manner - and have tried to make the best of it.

Personally, I think that Slough and its people get a really rough time with all the criticism - especially from die-hard Londoners - I think it’s got a lot to do with the name “Slough” than the place itself - which in reality isn’t unlike many places we Londoners know and love so much - e.g. Stratford, Lewisham, Deptford, Woolwich etc. Slough is no more depressing than all the London towns in the East of the City - except it’s in the West. It has a shopping area that’s made of concrete that’s out of date - a bus station that should have been demolished years ago - undesirable council estates and a youth culture that is derided by the Guardian-reading classes - just like, say, Charlton, Stoke Newington and Bow.

Of course Slough isn’t helped by the fact that the famous British poet John Betjeman published the infamous poem about Slough in 1937 - where he proclaims “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!” - and it also isn’t helped by the fact that the BBC’s most popular award-winning (and I mean Golden Globe Award Winning!) sitcom of recent years - The Office was set in Slough. I watched just one episode of that programme to kill time on a long-haul flight not long ago - and judging by the characters and manners portrayed - which admittedly are funny - it seems to make mockery of the types of people who live and work in Slough.

Now - having been working in Slough for only around six months - so it’s not really long enough to have explored it very thoroughly - but I have promised myself that I will in this journal right here - over the course of time - try to expose some interesting images of Slough. Try to correct some false perceptions - right some wrongs etc.

So I’m going to start with the street right outside the front door of my office - the street where I work - which is called Wellington Street. Presumably this street was named after the famous Arthur Wellesly - the Duke of Wellington - who after proving himself a great soldier during his mission to sort out Tippoo Sahib of Mysore in India in 1797 - returned home to later be put in command of the armed forces that defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. He became prime minister of UK in 1828 - and it must be a great honour to him that Slough Borough Council have chosen to immortalise his name on this one of the busiest thoroughfares in the centre of Slough. Wellington Street is actually a dual carriageway that forms an urban section of the A4 - which used to be known as the Great West Road between London and Bath/Bristol. Slough was the second stop for the horse-drawn carriages that ran that route Westward. (Uxbridge being the first.)

Modern day Wellington Street is bounded on one side by office blocks and the concrete-grey of the Queensmere Shopping Centre - and on the other side by the Brunel Bus station (the subject for a later posting) and a huge Tesco supermarket. Concentrating on the Tesco for a moment - it’s all happening here in Slough; this is the largest store in Tesco’s worldwide estate - it’s open 24 hours - and is about to be rebuilt to make it even bigger! The people of Slough obviously love their Tesco.

One thing I noticed about this supermarket is that the trolleys don’t have a coin-deposit feature on them. So without an incentive to return the trolley to the designated trolley-parks - you will find that there are shopping trolleys abandoned all over the massive car park.

This could be just like any other supermarket car park in any other East London town. Going some way to proving my point that Slough is no different.

Cooking this dish is as much fun as saying it!

I haven’t posted something on food for while - but I couldn’t resist sharing this recipe. It uses prawns and sausage - so the vegetarians amongst you may not be too interested in this - but if you do wish to try something like it - and you have the inclination to read through the recipe - you could always substitute the fish and meat for something else - e.g. tofu, paneer - or veggie sausage etc.

Click here to learn how to cook spicy jambalaya.