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]