This village is kind of like a suburb of Market Harborough in Leicestershire and on Chritsmas Day afternoon I went for a short walk round the area with my parents in the name of photographing some of the more interesting houses, pubs and shops loosely based on the pictures which appear on the 2012 Great Bowden calendar.
Without doubt the highlight of my trip back to Britain was seeing my nephew for the first time and no doubt if my sister is reading this then she will be spitting her porridge out at the computer screen in shock! She gave birth to George at the end of April last year and I finally got to meet the little fella on my arrival back in London on December 22nd.
He really is such a cute boy with his glaring blue eyes and soft fair hair and it was a joy to watch him going about his daily business which needless to say doesn’t involve much more than sleeping which he is very good at! The highlights of his day seems to be the milk bottle which he laps up like anything. Sticking things in his mouth is what he tends to do especially when remote controls and mobile phones are in his vicinity. Usually though it’s just his two fingers which remain lodged in his gob, even in between each and every mouthful of his dinner!
He’s got loads of nice toys which he likes to play with including my Christmas present for him which was a rainbow hoop builder-thing. However, give him an empty plastic milk carton and a wooden spoon and he’s in his element! It was fun watching him in his standing-up cart contraption playing the spot spoon and seeing him throw it on the floor whereby he then peered over the edge wondering where it was.
You’ve got feel a bit sorry for George though as he’s being brought up as a Nottingham Forest fan as his dad and Grandmother are both fans of our East Midlands rivals. Of course he hasn’t said, or been able to say, anything about this decision but its very rare that football fans get to choose their club!
Overall he’s a delightful baby (how long will that last for?!) and it shouldn’t be too long before he’s standing without help and speaking a more decipherable language than what sounds like the occasional ‘dada’. It will be interesting to see how much he’s advanced by the time I next see him.
The reason I chose to go to Scotland was because I didn’t want to travel too far whilst back in Britain and also to hunt down some of the filming locations for ‘Trainspotting‘ (1996) which is one of my favourite movies. Although its ‘set‘ in Edinburgh most of the filming actually took place in the grimier Glasgow area but as that part of my trip never happened due to the strong winds circulating that part of Britain I was left with only the capital city itself which does include a couple of scenes during the films opening moments whilst ‘Lust for life‘ by Iggy Pop provides the soundtrack.
We first see Renton, Sick-boy and Spud running away from John Menzies on Princes Street (below) having just robbed it. That particular newsagents is no longer there but the Boots chemist store still is, albeit under construction when I was there.
Renton (Ewan McGregor) then leaps down these steps (below).
They are located right next to the Black Bull tavern (below) at 43 Leith Street.
He runs on to Leith street where a car pulls out of St. Ninian’s Row and nearly hits him.
His reaction is to just look at the driver and laugh!
He then runs off and joins his mates as they run under the bridge below.
It’s not just Glasgow and Edinburgh which provided the backdrop as London also appears towards the end of the film for a couple of shots (as well as a montage of classical London images) as featured in my London ‘Trainspotting‘ feature at the start of last year.
Even though I ended up flying directly to Edinburgh from London Gatwick I was still on very limited time and only really had the morning of January 4th to look around the city. My University friend ‘Willy’ Steve kindly offered to put me up for the night and after a couple of expensive payphone calls to him and asking numerous strangers I finally got to his at about 9pm which was probably only a couple of hours later than I’d originally planned when I had intended to go to Glasgow beforehand. A quick pint of Tennants in a very local bar followed by a takeaway and that was about it with him until the morning when he returned to his job nearby and I left for four hours of exploration before taking the airport bus just after midday.
Having seen Easter Road marked on a map I thought I might as well go and see the home of Hibs so I headed in that direction and could see some floodlights but when I eventually got up close I was horrified to realize that it was the home of the relatively unknown Edinburgh City FC who play in the East of Scotland League! Easter Road was nearby but I’d lost interest by then and settled for seeing it in the distance from the top of Calton Hill which offered some great views of a really beautiful city. The wind was still kicking up one hell of a gale so I didn’t get too close to the edge.
I followed the Royal Mile (having missed the Scottish parliament and Palace of Holyroodhouse) all the way to the city’s most famous landmark; Edinburgh Castle. By the time I got there it had started to rain and as I was running out of time I didn’t go inside not that I really ever planned to.
I descended from the castle via The Mound and it’s impressive buildings. I finished my fly-by tour of Scotlands capital on Princes Street and that was just about it for me. Even by my standards my Scotish venture was overly short and I would have loved to spend a few more hours there but having considered scrapping Scotland completely the day before I was very glad I did make my debut in the country.
Given all the weather problems in the UK over the last few years at this time of year I have been pretty lucky to have got through my plans each time. This past festive season has seen some of the mildest weather I’ve ever known at this time of year but that all changed three days ago.
When I got back from the Leicester game at Crystal Palace thought immediately turned to the following days trip up to Glasgow by plane in the wee early hours. This was to be my first ever trip to Scotland having never bothered as I always thought (when I lived in England) that I could go there anytime really. My flight was from London Gatwick on January 3rd at 7.15am which caused more heartache than I had realised prior to booking it. My mate Marchy lives in London and I just assumed there would be a tube station near his but due to the differet type of rock beneath the surface in that area of south-east London there aren’t too many underground stations. Thankfully he offered to give me a lift to a station in Greenwich from where I took a couple of lines to the Airport.
All was going well apart from a bit of a wait for the gate number of my flight to be announced. When I got on the plane the captain announced that it was very, very windy up in Scotland and that there was a chance that we may not be able to land but he was gonna give it a go anyway. I don’t think myself or anybody else really thought too much about those words until he repeated them once we were up in the sky………….and then just as we were (probably) on the border of Scotland he announced that it was bad news up north and that we had no choice but to fly back to Gatwick. I was pretty stunned but what can you do eh?! The rest of the passengers seemed to be in reasonable spirits under the circumstances though that was pushed to the limit with the worst ever descend back into the Airport. There was so much turbulence during the latter stages of the flight that I was on the brink of being sick.
Finally back on the ground I was wondering what would happen and as it was I could have got on a flight to get back up to Glasgow for about 3pm but given that I was to be going on to Edinburgh early evening there didn’t see much point. I pointed out to the staff that I had a flight from Edinburgh to Paris the following day but it wasn’t possible to exchange the tickets for one just going to the French capital. I guess I was lucky enough to be able to change my original destination to Edinburgh but the afternoon flight was busy so I ended up having to wait till 5.30pm for that which was nearly seven hours away!
I went to my first away game since the 2002-2003 season yesterday as I made my way down to Selhurst Park with my mate Marchy to see Leicester play Crystal Palace. It turned out to be a successful day as we managed to get our tickets (a whopping £30 each!) at the ground without any problem as we couldn’t get them online due to the postal service being unable to send them out in time. Lack of public transport on Boxing Day and better things to be doing meant I didn’t go the the home game against Ipswich and the New Years Eve game at home to Portsmouth was on Sky TV so I couldn’t collect the tickets at either of those games.
I stayed at Marchy’s house in London on New Years Day and we made our way to the ground in the morning as it was a 1pm kick off. City Manager Nigel Pearson named a couple of players in the wing back positions that I’d never even heard of! Our seats were of the very old-fashioned wooden variety and the sun was shining right into our eyes throughout the whole game which we stood up for for the entire 90 minutes. There was also a big pillar in our way and the beer was £3.80 a pop but its amazing how these things get forgotten about when you win which is exactly what we did!
Ex-Palace man Neil Danns capitalised on a goalkeeping error when Price’s quickly taken kick hit the back of his fellow Eagle and fell to Danns who curled a fine shot in on 18 minutes having cut in from the left. We doubled our lead after 37 minutes when cult-hero Bamba got on to a Danns free-kick at the far post. This lead didn’t last long as Palace scored a few minutes later and went in search of an equaliser but fortunately it never came and apart from a few shots going wide of the post I was confident we would hold on.
As I mentioned the sun was shining in the eyes of us 1,255 Leicester fans so when the play stopped I tended to give my arm a rest from blocking out the sun. For that reason I didn’t see our substitute Howard being sent off for shouting something at the linesman in the last 15 minutes. A good start to 2012 for us Foxes and if we continue to beat teams like Palace who are above us we may just make the end of season play-offs.
2011 has been quite a productive year for hunting down filming locations in the likes of The USA, Jordan, Germany, England, Belgium, Turkey, Czech Republic and Japan. Click on the links below to see more.
1. Back To The Future (Click here)
2. The Bourne Supremacy (Click here)
3. Lolo Rennt (Run Lola Run) (Click here)
4. Star Wars (Click here and here)
5. Memoirs Of A Geisha (Click here)
6. In Bruges (Click here)
7. Terminator (Click here)
8. The Last Samurai (Click here)
9. James Bond (Click here, here, here, here and here)
10. The Karate Kid (Click here)
11. Indiana Jones (Click here)
12. Trainspotting (Click here)
13. The Grudge (Click here)
14. The Bourne Ultimatum (Click here)
15. Mission: Impossible (Click here & here)
16. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (Click here)
17. Harry Potter & The Philosophers Stone (Click here)
18. Wasabi (Click here)
19. Into The Sun (Click here)
20. Austin Powers International Man Of Mystery (Click here)
Other 2011 locations for the films listed below can be found here
The Bourne Identity; Amadeus; XxX; About A Boy; Bridget Jones; Snatch; Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels; Quadrophenia; Eyes Wide Shut; Basic Instinct 2; Mike Bassett: England Manager; The Italian Job; 3 Ninja’s Kick Back; Kagemusha; Sinbad & The Eye of the Tiger; Lawrence of Arabia; Red Planet; Transformers; Midnight Express; Topkapi; Murder on the Orient Express; Oceans 11; Walk Don’t Run; Monster; Into The Sun; Lost In Translation; Babel; Kill Bill and last but not least Godzilla.
When my mum asked me a few months ago for some christmas present ideas I couldn’t really think of too much so I said I’d have a Leicester City shirt which is something I always used to get for my birthdays which coincided with the start of a new season. This list was presented in late October/early November at a time when Sven Goran Eriksson was still in charge. As I’m in Japan I thought I’d get Yuki Abe’s name on my back but since Nigel Pearson returned to the club he has been out of favour. With rumors of him maybe returning to Japan to play, this shirt may only be valid for a short time though his inclusion in yesterday’s boxing day game was positive relief for me.
UPDATE: Yuki Abe left Leicester by mutual consent on January 22 and was announced as an Urawa Reds player with a #22 shirt a couple of days later. I thought that getting this shirt had been lucky for him as he played most of the games from Boxing Day onwards. Sadly, ths shirt didn’t stay up-to-date for more than a month!
The fourth installment in this film franchise is a rarity in that it was actually released in Japan before The UK. It comes out in the The UK on Boxing Day but usually these films are released in Japan months after the rest of the western world. Of course I also wanted to see it as I’m a fan of the movies.
One local reviewer here reckons that the action isn’t quite up to that of the recent Bond and Bourne films and though I’m a huge fan of those movies I disagree with that train of thought as ‘Ghost Protocol‘ was full of action that made my palms very sweaty. It’s no secret that it was filmed in part in Dubai and the worlds tallest building features in an enthralling scene followed by one of the films more comical moments thanks to Simon Pegg’s portrayal of the bumbling English computer nerd who has a far more important role in this movie than one was expecting.
Other locations include Budapest, Mumbai and Russia where someone blows up the Kremlin and frames the IMF thereby activating the ‘Ghost Protocol’ and leaving it up to Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his three buddies to save the day without any support.
One of my main gripes with the previous trilogy of ‘Mission: Impossible‘ movies was the over-use and over-reliance on the use of latex face masks and I’m glad to report that this cop-out way of telling a story is kept to a minimum. Running in at over two hours I was gripped by this flick throughout which is a rarity for a guy like me who has poor concentration.
Tokyo Fox Rating 9/10
This American re-make of ‘Ju-On’ begins at Yanagibashi bridge (1 minute) where the Kanda river runs into the much bigger Sumida-gawa river. Peter is on the 6th floor of his apartment at 1-2-2 Yanagibashi (below) with his wife/partner in bed when he looks at her fairly normally and then just purposely falls over his balcony plummeting to his death below.
When I did my Kanda River bicycle ride back in April little did I know that the starting point was also where ‘The Grudge’ was filmed. It can be seen again on 65 minutes when Karen (Sarah Michelle-Gellar) visits the suicide scene. I was standing on the wall next to the river taking a timed photo with my tripod (whilst holding it aloft to get the highest position possible) when a guy came out and Continue reading
Tokyo Fox (東京狐) 