all images courtesy the artist | used with permission Erica Ward is a California-born ink and watercolor artist who has called Tokyo her home for over 10 years. Inspired by Japanese designs and imagery, as well as the ever-changing landscape of Tokyo, Ward reinterprets everyday sights and objects in surreal ways within her artworks, asking […] Related posts: The Tokyoiter Presents Diverse Visions of Tokyo Louis Vuitton Tokyo City Guide &TOKYO: City of Tokyo Announces New Logo

The London Lens In today's edition we investigate art, science, conspiracy and just what did the councillors know? It looks important, heavily signposted in gleaming red letters from both Greenhill Way and Station Road. A chain of blue and green lights beckons through an alleyway between a cake shop and a chicken shop, while a sign on a lamppost lures you in with promises of STREET FOOD ART AND MORE. But beyond the skips all we found was a silent cluster of lockable units, adapted containers and pseudo-greenhouses, all connected via a chain of timber ramps because this tumbleweed corner is nothing if not accessible. Who precisely is accountable for whatever hasn't happened here? special activities hitching onto the coattails of the London Festival of Architecture. Our bet is that the live music and local food was better appreciated than the panel on incremental urbanism, especially on a Thursday evening. And yet a month later nobody is here, not unless they're walking through from the adjacent street market, and the empty units echo with the sound of misplaced investment. Subscribe! But first — a quick look at the big London stories this week: Welcome to The London Lens. We're the capital's essential news magazine, delivered exclusively by Substack and online. Sign up to our mailing list and get free editions of The London Lens full of tantalising titbits you need to know about the city, although for the in-depth proper journalistic stuff we want your money because we have mortgages to pay. Please consider becoming a backer of The London Lens at just £7.95 a month, which is quite small if you think of it in terms of 'three coffees' and definitely not nearly £100 a year if you do the actual maths. The Cultural Lens Thirst! It's all about water and the lack of it, because we love to bring you the exclusives. Please subscribe!! Thirst! continues until February 2026 which is basically forever, so it'll be worth a visit on a glum winter Saturday when you've run out of interesting things to do. This article was published by The London Lens, a new quality Substack channel prioritising all things London. Several times a week we'll share with you a carefully curated story, plus our best recommendations, at least until we start to lose interest due to lack of subscriptions. We prioritise quality over quantity and delight in hiding all the best bits behind our paywall, tempting you in with dangling cliffhangers and hoping you'll cough up dosh to discover how things end. Please subscribe! Art Park continues unabated. map of the Art Park framed on the wall whose key is entirely empty, all the way from Units 1-14 to Galleries E-G. And yet it all started with such high hopes. Meanwhile Space on behalf of the London Borough of Harrow, the aim to "establish itself as a creative and social catalyst for Harrow's future". Beancounters should have run a mile when they read that the Art Park was to be "a hub of curiosity" but instead they paid up and this deadzone is the end result. Subscribe right now!! told the London Lens that the project highlighted Harrow Council's inability to plan and co-ordinate effectively, also that "hundreds of pounds in taxpayers' money is likely being wasted on keeping the lights on all day every day” which we're pretty sure is a ridiculous exaggeration. In response the Conservative council leader admitted it would take a few months to reach full occupancy as you'd expect with any new venue, then blamed Labour councillors for being too downbeat. "The Council is learning and adapting as we go along," he added, which to be fair did sound like a confession it was a bit rubbish at the moment. The remainder of this post is for paid subscribers only. Subscribe to The London Lens to read the second half of this and every newsletter going forward, because trust us we are really good at making the second half sound like it must be really interesting. £7.95 a month is nothing in the grand scheme of things, especially if you're the kind of Londoner who'll spaff twice that on a five-minute Uber journey, so why not share some of your disposable income with us? Please subscribe to the London Lens and keep the flames of proper newsgathering alive. It's better than doing a real job, especially now that so few real jobs for journalists remain. We implore you to subscribe!! Already a subscriber? Please sign in.

I have eaten at El Moli a number of times over the 40 or so years I and my family have been visiting this part of the world. The first couple of visits were pre-blog and pre-camera phone and I don't remember much about it other than being sat in those same ancient vaulted rooms (some parts of the building are 12th century) and being bitten by mosquitos. I went back with a couple of friends in 2007 and had a dreadful meal - it's possible that the food had been terrible on previous visits and I just had lower standards, or maybe we were just unlucky this time, but you can read about how awful it was here. Decades passed - understandably - before I was willing to give it another shot, but in October last year I had a genuinely lovely meal of interesting seafood and seasonal home-grown veg (El Moli have their own kitchen garden nearby) but thanks to a suspiciously cheap SD card reader picked up on the streets of Girona, managed to lose all my photos and so couldn't write it up. Before that though, the snacks. L'Escala is famous for its anchovies, and so you'd expect one of the town's leading restaurants to showcase these lovely salty little fellows in various different ways. So here is gorgeous crusty homemade anchovy sourdough served with anchovy butter... ...anchovy-stuffed olives which had a brilliant balance of soft savouriness and saline punch... ...and anchovy and truffle seaweed crackers, possibly the most distressingly addictive snack I've come across in the last few years. Even a couple of under 10s on our table who usually eat little else other than white bread and chocolate managed to gobble a number of these down, a testament to their universal appeal. From the starters proper, first to arrive were smoked sardines, something that had become a bit of a theme of the trip thanks to the discovery of a place in town that made their own using north Atlantic fish. I'm not sure where El Moli source theirs, but they were still very nice, accompanied by green beans and a gentle herby vinaigrette. White asparagus, carefully grilled to get a few dainty char marks but not so much to make them tough or dry, were served in another light vinaigrette which made the most of the veg. El Moli do have a slight tendency to add one or two more ingredients than strictly necessary to a plate - the usual Spanish style is to have the main item and nothing more - but this dish was a model of restraint, and all the better for it. White prawns next, from Llançà, a little fishing town just around the coast near the French border. Dressed simply with olive oil and salt - which is all they needed really - I'll forgive them the slightly redundant sprig of frisée lettuce on top partly because it was nice and crunchy and fresh and also because it soaked up the leftover dressing very well. I've never had grouper before in any form and though this arrangement of sashimi was perfectly pleasant, I'm not entirely sure there was enough flavour in the raw product to justify serving it raw. That said, I don't know where else you can get grouper sashimi so life experience ticked off there. Now it was time for the larger plates, but not before one of the more excruciating moments I've ever been through in a restaurant. We had, during ordering earlier, enquired about the smallest available Cap de Creus spiny lobster, a rare and expensive beastie with a short season, hand caught in the waters around Roses bay. We were told initially that they had a 300g specimen, which at €18/100g mean that we could have a taste of this delicacy for €54 - punchy, but not ridiculous. However, they later realised that the smallest lobster they had was in fact 700g (and brought it out still kicking to show us), meaning a significantly more damaging outlay of €126, so we reluctantly turned it down. Now, two things to say about this. Firstly, the staff couldn't have been nicer about the whole thing and swiftly and graciously took the lobster back kitchen-side, presumably to make for some rather more extravagant than normal staff dinner. So they could not have handled the situation any better from that point of view. And secondly, although you'd be tempted to blame such lack of communication on the language barrier, I can promise you that our waiter spoke better English than most front of house in London, so that wasn't the issue either. It was just one of those things, an unfortunate combination of us (probably) not quite rejecting the thing as forcefully as we could and them misreading our English politeness incorrectly, which if it had been an extra portion of chips or a plate of croquetas would have been unfortunate, but regarding a €126 serving of some of the Costa Brava's finest seafood became something else entirely. Anyway, I'm happy to say that the mains we did order were definitely worth our while. Scorpionfish came whole-roasted, boasting a lovely crisp salty skin and bright white, meaty flesh inside, alongside some more grilled vegetables from the kitchen garden. This was partly ordered out of curiosity as I don't think I'd ever tried scorpionfish before, but it was a lovely thing indeed, rather reminiscent of hake in texture. And it wasn't all about the seafood - this is a 500g "Txogitxu" Txuleton on the bone for an astonishingly reasonable €37.50 - bargains are to be found in all corners of a Spanish restaurant menu. The Txogitxu website proudly states they specialise in "Fat old cows", which can be both an amusing turn of phrase and completely true at the same time. We had all the desserts, too - well, apart from the Recuit goats cheese and honey which had run out. Torrija is a kind of Spanish French toast, buttery and crunchy on the outside and complimented by a rich homemade ice cream... ...Mille-fuille of seasonal citrus fruit was gorgeous to look out and incredibly easy to eat, with layers of lemon curd binding together delicate flakes of pastry. We probably should have ordered two of these, it disappeared so quickly... ...Basque-style cheesecake, of which we did order two, which had a fantastic creamy flavour and texture topped with sugared hazelnuts... ...chocolate mousse with toasted "garam bread" (fortunately not nearly as weird as it sounds) with olive oil and salt... ...and a strawberry pavlova hiding under a blanket of mousse-like meringue which was full of the joys of summer. There was also a cheese course, all excellent needless to say, but don't ask me to tell you what they were because I forgot to make a note and they were all super-local varieties that you probably wouldn't see outside of this corner of Spain even if you looked for them. By this point, aided by a couple of bottles of nice cava (a ludicrously reasonable €20 each) and a glass of treacly Pedro Ximines, we had largely put the Unfortunate Lobster Incident behind us and were further cheered by a bill of €522.30 - pretty good indeed for 11 people. Admittedly the under 10s mainly ate chicken fingers and bread (as well as those puffed seaweed snacks) but a couple of the older kids had oysters and roast hake and chips, and there was definitely plenty of food and drink for everyone. So when I say the spend per head was only just over €47, well, I'm only stretching the truth slightly. The point is, I can recommend El Moli de l'Escala with endless enthusiasm. Their style of food and service is unpretentious but considered, rarely overcomplicated and always bursting with flavour and charm. They offer a range of exciting and unusual seafood throughout the year (if you ever see Palamos prawns, get them - this applies to any other restaurant too) at prices that feel moderate bordering on bargainous. And when Incidents arise, they handle them with grace and charm. I do hope they found a willing customer (internal or otherwise) for that Cap de Creus lobster. And either way, I hope this post serves as enough of a thank-you. 8/10

I remember film for cameras. You couldn't just wander around with a smartphone snapping willynilly, you needed special film like Colourprint II designed for instant loading cameras. You bought a box of film from the shop, in this case Boots, and had to manoeuvre the cartridge into your camera without accidentally overexposing it on the way in. This particular film only had space for 12 pictures so you had to take photos really sparingly or you'd run out before the end of the holiday. There was always a best before date, in this case May 1980, and note the depressing news that PRICE DOES NOT INCLUDE PROCESSING. Every film had to be sent away after use, in this case dropped into Boots, and then you'd go back a few days later and excitedly flick through the blurry messes you'd taken. No 'dodgy' photos in those days, Mr Chemist was watching. If you're a certain age you probably remember film for cameras too, also I'm aware you can still get it for certain retro devices, but my word instant photography has moved on in the last fifty years. 24 cards featuring Dr Who And His Enemies just as Tom Baker hit his peak. You got 4 characters at a time, each of which had to be pushed out of its card before you could play with them in front of the colourful alien scene on the back of the packet. I never got the full set, instead I ended up with two Yetis, also I was only 10 so didn't remember any Dr Who stories containing a Quark or White Robot. Gordon Archer did the artwork and they're now eminently collectable, not that I realised this at the time. I also remember Magic Roundabout pencil toppers in Ricicles and Klondike Pete comics in Golden Nuggets, as will you if you're a certain age, and wow breakfasts got a lot duller when they stopped putting random freebies in cereal packets. plastic viewer with two eyepieces and then you could buy all sorts of discs on all sorts of topics to slot into them. Each 'reel' had 14 transparencies, and by viewing them in pairs you got to see seven 3D images as the disc rotated. This set's Wombles-themed from 1973, with three discs each bringing to life one of the stories from the stop-motion TV series. Ideally someone else read the text from the booklet out loud while you were clicking through, or else you knew the story off by heart because you'd watched them over and over. In the absence of video recorders, this is how we filled our afternoons. If you're of a certain age you'll remember Viewmasters too, maybe any age because they're been around since 1939 and are still in production. Originally the main content was tourist-related, so for example I have another set of reels from Niagara Falls, but eventually storytelling for children took over and in 2008 they stopped making scenic panoramas altogether. Letraset made some stunners - and pick a decorative style for a bedroom cupboard or something more sober for the front of a presentation. Of course you had to try to keep the line straight or the end result looked wonky, plus the letters had a tendency to eventually rub off, but if you're of a certain age you will very much remember dry-transfer lettering. comments if(postComments['91851351325181'] != null){document.write(' (' + postComments['91851351325181'] + ')')}else{document.write(' (0)')}; I remember Pocketeers. They were a series of hand-held non-electronic games released by Palitoy in the late 1970s and my brother and I were totally target audience. Each came in a green sleeve and generally what you got was a plastic box with some kind of clever mechanical game inside. Time Up was a maze through which you had to try to roll a small silver ball, scoring up to 100 points according to how far you got before a mechanical timer halted your progress. I also owned Steeplechase which was a mini-obstacle course, The Derby which was a wheel-turning four horse race and Pinball which was self-explanatory and ideal for 10 year-olds who couldn't go into pubs yet. My brother had Cup Final and Golf, the latter with a teensy player you took out of the box and set up to hit teensy balls into a teensy hole. We never got the full set of Pocketeers because they cost 99p at the Co-op and that was beyond our pocket money but they were a much-loved possession that filled many an afternoon and I remember them very fondly. boiled sweet produced by Trebor, named because they had a hard flavour outside and a soft sherbet inside. My absolute favourites were strawberries and cream Double Agents, numbered 004, closely followed by lime and chocolate (as pictured, 003). All the sweet wrappers had coded messages on them which could be unravelled if you found the packet with the right Spy Information printed on the inside (a simple substitution code but with all the words written backwards). Trebor often ran special offers - they sent me a Fingerprint Kit in 1978 in return for four wrappers and a 10p coin. Double Agents would have been the perfect sweet to eat while reading the KnowHow Book of Spycraft, an Usborne publication which I read and reread and which may still be one of the best books of all time. You may remember none of this, or you may have taken everything to heart and learned to reveal absolutely nothing. Space 1999. I must have got through a lot of lollies in the summer of 1976 because I've got a dozen of them, also they stopped hiding picture cards inside the wrappers the following year. The artwork wasn't great because the real Dr Helena Russell looked considerably more realistic than that. As for tea cards we weren't a great consumer at the time so my grandmothers funnelled all their Brooke Bond freebies my way, and between us we managed to fill the entire album of The Race Into Space (1971), History of Aviation (1972) and The Sea - Our Other World (1974). Cuppas have never been so exciting since. comments if(postComments['91851351325182'] != null){document.write(' (' + postComments['91851351325182'] + ')')}else{document.write(' (0)')}; I remember ink cartridges. This is a pack of 10 Parker ink cartridges for my Parker fountain pen, cursive script being an essential part of a 1970s education. You needed a stash of cartridges because at any minute your nib might go a bit scratchy as the ink ran out and that could be the end of the world if you were in the middle of a crucial essay. I always plumped for black ink rather than the usual Royal Blue, either because I thought black looked cooler or because in the early days we only had a bottle of black Quink ink in the house. Also I note that this particular pack of ink cartridges is unopened, this because there was once a threshold in my life when the need to use a fountain pen became redundant and my lovely Parkers now sit in a drawer. In a way it's a damned shame, but also a good thing because I'm not forever hunting a sheet of blotting paper and my fingers no longer look like they're decaying from frostbite, indeed hardly anything needs writing any more and when it does biros and fibre tips have totally won out. green plastic rectangle you could slot into a payphone and make a call without the need for coins. It meant you had to make a purchase in a shop before you could make a call, but BT smiled because their payphones were no longer full of cash and a target for theft. Instead a strip on the front of the card was heated and 'erased' so they knew how many units you'd used, and if you could read the bumps you knew how many you had left. I think mine's fully used up which is just as well because cardphone technology was phased out in 1996 and otherwise I'd have wasted some of my sunk cost. You may remember BT Phonecards if you're old enough, but mainly when people get nostalgic about payphones it's all about dropping coins in slots and what the minimum coin was and giving three rings and how you had to press Button A and Button B, and one day people who use smartphones will be just as retrospectively tedious. pocket pets which you had to nurture so they grew up properly and didn't die. Feed them right and clear up their poop and they might grow from baby to child to adult, but neglect them for too long and they'd get into bad habits or waste away and go up to heaven like an angel. Eventually you learnt it was OK to go to sleep at night because they'd still be alive when you woke up, but like today's phones they were always burning a hole in your pocket begging for attention. I know they still make Tamagotchis but this is one of the first generation circa 1997, not that I was still a child but there's no age limit on novelty zeitgeist gadgets, and I'm hoping that a lot of you who didn't remember any of the earlier things will definitely remember this. I remember being 30. I got given a birthday card with this badge on... '30 and red hot' ...and I wore it at work all day. I didn't think I was red hot at the time but I look back now and sigh, recognising I was far more red hot than I thought I was and considerably red hotter than I am now, relatively speaking, indeed they don't make '60 and red hot' badges and they wouldn't sell anyway. But it's all too easy to spend your time looking back and sighing about the past, and droning on about the past, and fixating about the past, indeed focusing all your thoughts on the past, whereas the present is all we've got and the future is all we can change. Remember that.