London in the blue night

... is the title of the illustration that my new header image is cropped from. The artist sells his wares to (unwary) tourists in Covent Garden. But this is no scam. His various visions of London are an urban studies student's dream. Bird's eye views mostly, he picks a layer of the city to highlight in each caricature-like interpretation. This one picks up the suffusion of blueness in London's sky in summer and sometimes autumn [bridges are downplayed, notice, and all the same]. In another he makes the theatres garishly oversized and multicoloured, rising up out of the brown morass of the rest of the buildings; in another he pays tribute to the bridges, sketching each in loving and true detail. The 5th, and my second favourite after blue nights, is a strange perspective on the City of London, seen as if from a ship coming into central through Tower Bridge. With good use of artistic license, Chris Rogers (the artist.. I think that's his name) stacks up the different facades of 80s and 90s Square Mile buildings (the Gherkin is strangely absent) and crowds them up against the riverfront, framing the whole urban mass with the half open Tower drawbridge. Finding this guy has given me some good Christmas present ideas.
I'm glad I came home today, even though it's Friday night. Glad there's a home to come to where I can curl up and lean against the column in the kink of my assymetric external wall, and wonder about tucking my feet into the 13 tog duvet neatly folded and resting on one side of the bed.