On Wednesday at 3.00am, Kathy was woken up by a humming made by a strange-looking ship. I have to say that this photo reminds me of the opening sequence from The Usual Suspects.I’m glad to say that there was no giant explosion but Kathy’s curiosity got the better of her and she got up again at 6.00am to find out what the ship was.

It’s Alcatel’s cable ship Ile de Batz, somewhat further up the river from where Alcatel’s submarine works live on the peninusla. I don’t know what it’s doing on Greenwich Reach pier; Kathy’s not seen a cable ship there before. I guess it could be – well – laying cable.

Wanna know how they do it? Check this out. I particularly enjoyed the dramatic music.

Sorry – this post should have appeared yesterday; I had some technical problems.

Ruth asks:

“Where is the best place to go and watch the Drag Race from this evening?”

The Phantom replies

Yup folks – it’s that time again – the fourth (I believe) annual Drag Race. Fun and games, thrills and spills, all kicking off from the Rose & Crown. I can’t find the exact time and to be honest I never bother looking for it as I turn up around 7.00pm and hang around for the fun and games (which never set off on time anyway.) I can’t find a website for it this year, so I suggest you do the same.

I usually stand on the corner opposite the old Glocuester Arms (now the Greenwich Park Bar and Grill) because there’s a satisfying bulge (fnaaar fnaar) in the road and you can get a good view of the start.

Update – here are some absoutely fabulous photos from Warren – wonder if he’ll be including one of them in his wonderful annual calendar..?

Jon asks:

“I hear that BBC Question Time with David Dimbleby is coming to Greenwich for it’s post-debate show on 22 April. Have you heard which building it will be held in?”

The Phantom replies:

After calling several BBC ‘help’ lines I realised that you know more than anyone at the BBC, Jon (or at least more than anyone who’s supposed to be dealing with tickets, or indeed, Question Time was prepared to say.) And the website ain’t telling either.

So I can only guess. If it’s at Greenwich Theatre the cast of The Little Hut might be a tad peeved. It could be the lecture hall at the Old Royal Naval College, but it’s not particularly huge. Ditto the Octagon Room at the Observatory, though it is very pretty to look at. I did notice stuff going on at the old Trident Hall next door to the Trafalgar this morning but I can’t for a second think it would be held there.

So, in a nutshell I don’t know. But if you want tickets for the mystery event, call 0871 626 9988

I know we already mentioned the unveiling of a plaque to those cheery chaps Squeeze last Tuesday, but local photographer Warren King’s sent me some pics and I can’t resist ‘em…

It’s a busy weekend for me, so I’ll just leave you to enjoy ‘em…

This, claims VisitLondon, is the world’s smallest pop-up hotel (as opposed to the world’s smallest hotel, which, astonishingly, is not in London, but the Bavarian town of Amberg).

Here you can see it in all its airstreamy glory at Covent Garden, on its tour around the capital; its frankly superfluous excuse being to remind tourists that you’re never more than a five minute walk from 20 top London attractions.

I am assuming that they don’t mean this literally (in my case the 20 top attractions include Morley’s Chicken, several dead stores, King William IV pub, KFC, two charity shops, Tescos and the Yummy Yummy Chinese takeaway) – or that they don’t count Greenwich as London (right ‘n all) but nevertheless, it IS coming to our neck of the woods and YOU have the opportunity to win a night’s stay in all its shiny luxury.

Just imagine getting out of your swanky double bed, gliding straight into the en-suite shower whilst watching your flat screen TV and listening to groovy sounds on the stereo, before stepping into the morning glory of the Old Royal Naval College…

And why not, I guess? Who ever actually stays as a hotel guest in their own town?

Not for me this one – caravans give me the willies – but if you fancy being a tourist in your own town on the 19th March, register here, before March 7th…

Apologies for the lack of updates on Parish News. When I look at the superb job that IanVisits does, I blush, but hey – things are ridiculously busy chez Phantom just now. I’ll try to do better in future. I’ll update the section with other things I’m not previewing here but still like the sound of later today.

In the meanwhile, three things that have caught my eye, coming up in the next week or so…

First is a slightly bizarre but rather intriguing celebration of East Greenwich Library’s 105 birthday on 22nd February. Trying to find out any concrete detail about the event has proved impossible; it would seem they will be ‘going with the flow’ on the evening, but we’re promised music, singers, poetry and readings. I rather like the idea of something that’s not organised to the hilt; we’re so used to everything being prescribed down to the last second, though it’s hard to know exactly what will happen – or, indeed, when it all begins. I’m guessing evening, and since no prices have been mentioned, I’d say it’s probably free.

Staying with odd, but a little more structured, a one-night-only performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – at Up The Creek, of all places. There’s a cast of 17 professionals, and the reason it’s on at a comedy club is that the mechanicals are all stand up comics who play the venue on a regular basis. If you fancy a ticket, get your skates on – they may only be a tenner, but there’s only a ton of them available. Call 0208 858 4581 for tickets. If you miss out this time, the show will be going on national tour – the closest it will play to Greenwich will be the Orchard Theatre in Dartford on the 22nd March.

Finally, Scared of Chives has been telling me about a regular night upstairs at the Mitre. I’ve been a little edgy about open mic nights ever since my best pal became a stand up comic. I never had an issue watching my mate perform, even in the early days, but some of the other acts were just painful, apologising for their very existence with their whole bodies – and sometimes their acts, too – as they stood lost onstage. Whatever they were feeling it was far worse for the audience.

But this isn’t a comedy open mic night, it’s music (largely). The One World Club is a ” free music club and ‘open mic’ night” where anyone can get up and perform (you have to turn up before the 7.30 start to book a slot first – check the website for more details) but the very fact that you need to be able to play an instrument or sing reasonably well will probably weed out the really embarrassing stuff. Besides, SoC seems to think the standard’s pretty high.

Not that it isn’t a lottery as to what might be on any particular night. They’ve had (among other things) folk singing, poetry, reggae, Indian dancing, jazz guitar, indie, classical, opera and world music, so as long as your tastes are catholic, you should have a good evening. It’s free to get in, SoC tells me it’s getting busy these days, so arrive early to ensure a seat.

I shall get along as soon as I can to review it (with my luck it will turn out to be a stand-up comics first-timers’ special) but in the meanwhile, if the first sniffings of spring this morning after yesteday’s vile weather is sending you stir-crazy, check out one of these.

More Stuff To Do on the Parish News later today. Promise.

Today is Plough Monday. No – I didn’t know, either. It’s traditionally a way of blowing off steam for bored ploughboys, stuck in the depths of ennui (I doubt they actually called it that) in the dull period between the jollities of Christmas and the time when they could start ploughing.

It was effectively an unholy blend of Morris Dancing and Trick-or-Treat, where burly lads would go around the town offering to dance for money. Anyone who refused had nasty tricks played on them – including having interesting furrows ploughed across their lawns. Of course, the young rascals were demanding money with menaces from the very people they were reliant on giving them employment as soon as the ground defrosted, so they didn’t want to be recognised. They disguised themselves with soot and wore coloured scarves and jolly hats.

Like Morris Dance, they were originally all men, though instead of an Obby Oss or that bloke with the ribbons and hat, they had a Molly – a guy dressed up as a woman (and thus taking us straight back to panto – as usual everything’s connected). Although clearly they have nothing directly to do with the Molly Houses (gay brothels) of 18th century London, I’m sure the cross-dressing element in the name can’t be a coincidence.

The last ‘classic-period’ Molly Dance, was, according to Wikipedia, which knows everything, in Little Downham, Cambridgeshire, in 1933, and, in all truth, it’s mainly an East Anglian/Essex tradition.

So what’s it doing in Greenwich tonight? Well, Fowlers Molly Dancers can’t think 0f a good reason for Greenwich NOT to have a nice dose of Mollying on a miserable, snowy, Monday in January. I mean – let’s face it – no one’s going to be able to plough anything round here at the moment…

The Fowler Mollys are both male and female, but there’s still a healthy amount of cross-dressing involved, according to Sarah, who’s part of the team. Apparently they have a beautiful bearded lady called Margaret. She admits “we’re fairly guerilla-style” so they don’t have a website (though I did find this fascinating site about the Jack in the Green, which mentions them) “we just pop up in December and January and then go to ground again.”

The video at the top of the post is the Fowlers Mollys (named after an early 20th Century troop) dancing outside the John Evelyn in Deptford a couple of years ago, but if you fancy seeing a little piece of English tradition reinterpreted, they will be doing the classic Plough Monday tour of local hostelries tonight between several West Greenwich pubs.

They start from the Ashburnham Arms, where they’ll dance at 8pm and finish at the Richard I (the Tolly), in Royal Hill at 9.30pm. There will be a pub in the middle in the 8.45pm slot. Traditionally, this is usually the Prince Albert just up the road from the Tolly, but the pub is in the process of changing hands and Sarah wasn’t sure of the exact arrangments when we were talking last week.

I wasn’t planning to write this week, but since I’ve been forced to sort out a horrible mess (thanks to spammers who hijacked the blog and put long lists of their sordid wares at the end of a good forty posts, pleasing me not one jot) I thought I’d ask you how you think Greenwich did in the last year.
I guess we’ve had some good and bad things. For me, much of Greenwich has seemed in limbo in 2009 while everything’s cranked up for The Year Everything Will Be Wonderful, which, apparently, is 2012.

This has seen building sites agogo, dead shops, broken ships, swathes of the ORNC closed, the pier a total mess, poor old King Billy rudely disturbed in his quiet not-quite-ex churchyard and the death of the Village Market.

We lost Beehive Cafe too – one of the best reasons to hang around in Greenwich – and though you can still get London Coffee Roasters coffee in Nevada Street Deli if you can find somewhere to sit, I miss the jolly Antipodeans who served me in the place that had nowhere to sit. Less mourned was The Old Friends, though several of us will be sad to see the building itself go. I never loved the pub, but had always hoped that someone would do the late-Victorian building up and make a go of it.

And in some of the saddest news of all, we lost two cyclists and gained two ghost bikes this year, one of them just a couple of weeks ago.

But we’ve had good stuff too. I mean – c’mon – tell me that snow in February wasn’t brilliant (and so much more fun than the slippy icy stuff we got just before Christmas.) The horrid plans for Greenwich Market were scuppered by a council who finally found some gumption. The Dwarf Orchard showed signs of being kissed by a handsome prince and turning into a beautiful secret garden (doncha just love mixed fairytale metaphors…)and David Herbert in Creek Road got his house back at last.

The Climate Camp came – and went – just a few hours after they left you’d never have known they were ever there at all. Sadly, I suspect we’ll have the same net result from Copenhagen.

Even shorter-lived was the East Greenwich Pleasaunce Farmers Market. Best we can hope for there, I suspect, is a compromise Halstow Road school playground. Which wouldn’t be so bad, at that…

Comings and goings continue around the peninsula. The last really big industrial plant, Syrol, closed, with the loss of local jobs and the gain of some fresh air, but a little further up the way, Meantime Brewery was preparing to move its works rather closer to the Meridian – with the gain of local jobs and the loss of fresh air (unless, like me, you rather like the smell of hops, in which case you’re in luck…)

So – a mixed year at best for Greenwich. What were your best and worst bits of living here in 2009?

Blimey. I’ve just got back from a slip-slidin’ trip across the park, where the snow is melting but there’s still just about enough for a few brave souls with tea trays to try tobogganing down the slopes.

The paths down the bottom aren’t too bad but up at the top it’s all compacted ice and really slippery. I didn’t go a pearler but it was only because I walked flat-footed and very slowly, whilst being cackled-at by a whole tree-full of ring-necked parrots. They’ll be laughing the other side of their beaks next month when anyone will be allowed to shoot them (though the question will be, of course, with what? Spud guns? Pea-shooters? As far as I know real guns are still illegal, even in South East London…)

A load of the pavements, too, are really icy – some on main roads.

I notice it’s all turned to rain now – particularly yucky – but tonight they’re promising sub-zero temperatures again tonight – so I’m guessing we’ll have a lovely black-ice alert tomorrow.

Take care, guys…

This one’s all a bit last-minute; if it’s been planned for much longer than a week I certainly haven’t known about it. But hey – it’s all over the place now, and, despite the council having chosen what is probably the least convenient time to have a consultation, it might be a wise idea to hove your way down to Devonport House at some point this weekend (between 19th and 21st December) to see all five possible options (six if there;s a ‘do nothing’ button) for the pedestrianisation of Greenwich town centre.

Now – I have to say that in principle I have no objection to this. In fact I rather like it. I’m guessing that few Greenwichians would object to the idea – and it would do the place no harm at all for encouraging tourists. It’s the guys from outside the area who use us as a rat-run between further into town and the Blackwall Tunnel that will be getting hot under the collar – but there are levels of pedestrianisation and it would do us all good to decide exactly how far we’d want to go with it.

The options range from just cutting off College Approach and making Nelson Road two-way (easiest but a potential log-jam) all the way through to a giant one-way system just outside the centre (elegant but making you go a long way round – which might not be so bad at that), with various permutations along the way.

Those of you in the Greenwich Society will have received a letter about this – it’s been forwarded to me several times (thanks, guys) but it’s all a bit complex to explain here.

There’s only a small window of discussion here as the council want the new system in for (surprise, surprise) the Olympics, hence the awkward date of the consultation. Do try to get along if you can…