News headlines

When you walk around London you see the Evening Standard advertising boards with their "tease" headlines that try to persuade you to buy the paper, which I never do. Normally, these headlines are of gloom, disaster, crime, recession and such like and they add to a sense of dread as you make your way home, frozen and in the dark. But now and then, they have a headline of such cheer that it puts a spring in your step again and makes the trek home just a little more bearable.

At last! Some good news. I absolutely cannot stand Brand, who I never found funny in the slightest and whose mere appearance on the TV causes me to feel nauseous and Ross is, and has always been, a talentless "bloke". His "free adverts for celebrity dreck" show on the BBC is a disgrace and should have been relegated to commercial television years ago.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Bus stop!

I don't really understand how transport policy works. I used to drive to Woking station and pay a fortune to park in the car park there. For a few months, however, I've been cycling instead. This is obviously a net revenue loss to the council, so I imagine council tax will go up accordingly next year. Anyway, for a variety of boring reasons, I wasn't able to cycle today so I caught the bus. I haven't used the bus for a while, so I was absolutely shocked that these pirates of the A320 proposed to charge me £3.70 to get to the station and back. When I said to the guy something along the lines of "that's daylight robbery and I won't pay it", turning round to get off, he told me that a one-day pass anywhere in Woking was only £3.60. So I bought that instead, but still spent the entire journey fuming.

Needless to say, I won't be using the bus again either except in the most dire circumstances. But I couldn't figure out the "plan" behind all of this. Are the council colluding with the bus company and trying to get us out of the bus and back into our cars because of the revenue from the car park, or are the bus company just fed up with running buses but too embarassed to tell the council that they don't want to do it any more? This must be what is meant by an integrated transport policy: make everything expensive and rubbish except cars.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Disturbing perspective

Well, that was a bit of a shock. The trains were held up because someone went under a train at Woking, so we travellers were advised to go down to Guildford and pick up a service back into London from there, which I did and was only half an hour late at Waterloo in the end so it wasn't too bad. Anyway, while I was waiting for the Guildford train, I was staring down the platform while I was thinking about a document that I'm writing at the moment so I wasn't really paying any attention to what I was looking at, which was a bunch of emergency services people in high-vis jackets. Then I suddenly realised what they were doing: getting a body up from the tracks. They had it in a black sheet and four of them carried it back up the platform to the exit. What an unpleasant job.

But I was more shocked by it than I would have expected. When the announcer says that there's someone under a train and so services are delayed, you don't really think about the person, just about how inconvenient it is and how you'll be late. Once you see the body, even though it's wrapped in a sheet, you are forced to think about them.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

It's a guy thing

When you're a Dad, you rarely get a better phone call than this.

No.2 son: "Just wanted to tell you about the game".

Me: "Great, how did it go? Where did you play?".

No.2 son: "[The Manager] asked me to play as the holding midfielder and make smart passes to set things going."

Me: "How did that go?"

No.2 son: "I think I played really well and we won 10-3."

Why does this feel infinitely better than playing in a game and winning 10-3 yourself?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Put your shirt on it

The market never lies. I was out shopping with no.2 son today and we noticed there was an England football shirt sale on at a local sports shop. Since it was a good deal we wandered in and it turned out that the shirts all had numbers and names. Most had already gone, but the ones that were left comprised a few John Terry (explicable, since he hasn't played in the last couple of games because of injury), a few Wayne Rooney (I don't know why, maybe they over-ordered them) and lots and lots of Frank Lampards (but no Stephen Gerrards). Hhhmmmm.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Walls have ears

Overheard a great conversation on the train today. In one of the seats behind me, a guy from a large and well-known systems integrator was talking on his mobile, evidently to a colleague. They were discussing a contract that they were working on for a major bank: apparently, the bank had cut down the contract by a million pounds, so these guys were working out how what parts of the contract to complete and what could be dropped (and what could be cut without the customer realising that they'd have to buy it later anyway). This sounded to me like commercially quite sensitive information. I bet the company in question has a really strict policy about copying sensitive documents to memory sticks and leaving them on the train though.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Sofia so good

Had an interesting journey into Sofia -- it was like being in a lazy sitcom about Eastern Europe. The taxi driver was chain-smoking Marlboro, listening to loud heavy metal (Zep, in fact) and really did overtake a horse and cart on the motorway.

It's nice here though, despite a guy in the hotel telling us that he'd been robbed in a taxi and that police snipers are executing mobsters in the street

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Guardians of our money

It turns out that the buffoons at Surrey County Council had £20m in Icelandic banks -- wow! sorry we're flying over the Alps right now and they look stunningly beautiful -- and will undoubtedly claim that they could not possibly have foreseen the problems on the way. Yet...

By March this year the situation was so worrying and so widely known, it was even featuring in the Daily Mail. On 16 March 2008, reporting on risky banks, they wrote:

[From Burning our money: How Were They To Know?]

What the article says is that "Credit insurance for debts at Iceland's biggest bank, Landsbanki, is priced at 610 points while that for Kaupthing is priced at a hair-raising 856. Given that these two have taken billions in UK retail deposits, it may be a sobering thought for savers to consider where they are putting their cash. These banks are now seen as the most unsafe in the developed world."

So it looks to me that they had a few months to get their money out of there and put it under the bed or in the Nationwide or something. For goodness sake Kingston -- get your noses out of The Guardian's public sector jobs supplement and pick up the odd copy of the FT or something.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Facing up

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Old and new

I was on my way into Lloyds in the City of London when I saw

I couldn't resist trying to take an artistic picture to try and capture how beautiful the City looked in the fading light.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

What's in a name?

If you're hanging around bored at the train station, waiting for the next train to come along because you just missed your train because of a huge queue at the ticket office, you may notice that some of the trains that go past have names. In the quaint English tradition, they're always called things like "Duke of York" or "Pride of the West" or similar. Why don't South West Trains give theirs more up-to-date names in keeping with modern Britain? At Woking, the trains should be called things like "Black Hole of Calcutta" or "Survival of the Fittest".

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

XXX travel tips

Well, that's handy. I'm often surprised by the kind of shops I see at airports, but rarely as surprised as I was today when ambling around the duty free at Vienna airport. I was thinking about getting an outdoorsy watch for cycling, since my trusty old Timex has been annexed by no. 2 son (it has a very comfortable webbing strap) and generally pottering about, when I came across the Beate Uhse tax-free sex shop. Naturally determined to fulfill my mission to find things to blog about, and for no other reason, I went in. If I do decide to by myself an enormous sex toy in the future, I'll know where the bargains are. But I must be so old-fashioned, because while perusing the impressive array of devices, magazines and DVDs, I just kept on thinking "who buys these at the airport?" over and over again.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]