My last few successive Tuesday night have been spent at the pop-up ice rink at Canary Wharf hosting an event we’ve dubbed “Bankers on Ice”. We’re inviting our customers to partake in a little bit of pre-Christmas cheer with us and cavort on the ice, if they so desire. I've opted to entirely eschew the ice myself, I had a brief brush with ice many, many years ago when due to a mean girl I was purposely flung from the end of a chain onto the cold, hard ice and got temporarily concussed. Nothing so dramatic has happened at these evenings but I've chosen to not tempt fate and do all the entertaining on the inside of the marquee instead.
When it was over I thought I'd explore the Canada Square garden. All the trees are covered in blue twinkly lights and if you weren't feeling festive on entry you'd be imbued with a touch of Christmassy magic.
When these were first lit up it reminded me of a weekend of Christmas shopping in New York even longer ago. When I was at school, because my father worked for Air France, we got to go on crazy last minute exotic trips that I'm not sure my school friends ever believed I went on.
I think I was in my early teens but can't quite remember. I do remember all the trees lit up in these tiny twinkly white lights, watching the ice skating at the Rockefeller Plaza, buying red and white striped candy cane ornaments for the Christmas tree, visiting the Woody Allen recommended salt beef sandwich place and procuring an excessive number of heavy film books. I remember feeling a bit trepidatious on the subway, I had read somewhere about a spate unfortunate passengers being pushed under the oncoming train whilst having their bags snatched. Their apartments were being heartlessly ransacked whilst they were being rescued, resuscitated or scraped up of the rails. I would cling to the back wall until the subway train pulled in and also wore my bag across my body under my coat. I looked like the hunchback of Notre Damme! I was really impressed how late the shops were open, we were terribly jet lagged and being able to explore shops that were so different from home at night whilst we were wide-awake was great fun. But it did make the bags very heavy for the return flight. Now trees wrapped in all the fairy lights is common place but seeing New York covered in a blanket of white pinpricks is where it all started tonight.
I used my smallest aperture to get the star effect. I have a built in star filter in my camera but that looked rather insane when I applied it on this scene. It's definitely feeling a lot like Christmas.
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