The Wheels on the Suitcase go Round and Round

It seems as though these days that no sooner have I come back from one trip, unpacked and got through about half the laundry backlog, than it’s time for me to pack up my little wheely suitcase and set off once more. A work trip, this time, and nowhere near as exciting a destination as the last one unfortunately. The problem is that my flight leaves at 8:20am from Heathrow which means technically I should be aiming to get there for 6:20am. Now I’ve checked the Heathrow Express web page and the first train leaves some time after five am, which is jolly nice for it, but it will be leaving without me because the first tube doesn’t run until sometime just before six. The Transport for London journey planner has made all sorts of helpful suggestions regarding buses but buses and suitcases don’t really mix, and to be honest, neither does me and five in the morning. So my plan is to check in online, print out my own boarding card, take only a carry-on, and hope for the best. It still means experiencing the delights of the very first tube of the day. Here’s betting it will still manage to have discarded copies of the Metro all over the floor.

I have the promise of wireless internet access so if all goes well I’ll be able to blog about it – watch this space. Meanwhile, an early night for me. I feel tired already…

Like Riding a Bike

It was such a lovely sunny Sunday today the other half & I decided it was time to disinterr his bike from under a pile of leaves and mouse corpses and go for a cycle. I was hoping that as I cycle every day, and he cycles roughly every year these days, we might be able to break the usual pattern of our bike rides (him rapidly diminishing dot in the distance, me puffing and blowing behind). Wrong. Going out wasn’t too bad as we avoided any thing tricky (like a right turn) but on the way back things started to slip as he rediscovered his cycling legs and I discovered that mine were turning into jelly. (Not fair – I run, he smokes – where’s the logic in that?).

The real problem was the roundabouts. When you’re on a bike there are two kinds of roundabouts, the single lane kind which are quite nice as suddenly everything is a left turn, and the multi lane kind where you either have to take your place* in the traffic or end up suffering an undignified end at the hands of a duck bus. We ended up in Battersea where the only cycle lane we saw was on the pavement around the edge of a single-lane roundabout – which actually made the whole thing harder to cycle around than if they’d just made the road slightly wider and let us get on with it. Once back in Lambeth things were a little better but Lambeth’s idea of a cycle lane hops from road to pavement and back again and is prone to leading you out to the front of a junction or multi lane roundabout, putting you in one of those bike reservoirs at the front of the lights (aka ’skittle alleys’ to the driving community) and then announcing that you’re on your own. At this point the other half and I parted company, literally and figuratively. He declared the experience ‘rather fun’ whereas I (once I had caught up and my heart rate had returned to something below that of a hummingbird’s) announced my intention never to cycle in his company again.

The truth is my five minute pootle to the station and back is nothing like enough preparation for real road cycling in London. I might have the yellow jacket, the lock and the lights but I’m a long way from being able to consider myself a cyclist yet. I am, however, still alive.

* Cyclists definition: Right in the middle of the road. Other road users definition: either on the pavement or under their wheels.

It Makes you go Blind

She seemed like such a devoted mother, making sure her daughter’s hat and scarf were firmly on, and that she didn’t lose her oyster card, and that she was settled nicely in her seat. But then she picked up her copy of the Sun and laid it across her knees and absorbed herself for the next five minutes with an article on page three – giving us all, little girl included, the full benefit of Zoe, 24, from London’s perky nipples.

I don’t know why it bothered me. It didn’t seem to bother anyone else, and the child (who looked about seven) didn’t turn a hair – no doubt she sees worse every day on the way to school. Maybe I’m becoming a prude in my old age. But I think it was the way the mother didn’t even seem to see what she was looking at – the fact that we have all become so used to ignoring the stuff that should be jumping out at us (look! topless women!) that we no longer even see it. She probably didn’t even register that it was there.

Maybe the old wives were right after all

Spot the Difference

One for the kids – or rather one for da kidz who have taken to infesting my train home of an evening.

 
The one on the left is a phone. You use it to make calls, send text messages and take grainy photographs of your friends throwing up when they’re drunk. The one on the right is a music player. It will play music without making it sound like it’s coming out of a tin box filled with bees. If you really must share your music with us on the train, please try and do it on the latter.

Thanks

Note: Ths blg avlble in a txt trnsln

White Van Man vs. Little Green Man

It’s not often someone tries to kill you on your way to work. Ok, so technically it wasn’t me he was trying to kill (any pedestrian would have done) and if you want to be really picky he wasn’t actually trying to kill me – he was just driving as though he was. But still. Had I been a few seconds slower I’d have been just as dead as if he was trying. And anyway, it makes for a dramatic opening.

There I was blamelessly crossing at the Kew Bridge junction, the green man on my side, my newspaper in my hand having just finished reading this article* when a white van driver decided to turn left from the right turn lane. This meant that not only was he running a red light on a pedestrian crossing with actual pedestrians crossing on it but he was also coming from a completely unexpected angle and doing a completely illegal manouever. I didn’t have the presence of mind to take his number or thump the side of the van or indeed do anything but leap onto the safety of the traffic island but I did give him an extremely hard stare, which would have definitely told him had he noticed it. But on fact he was completely oblivious  – of my presence, of the fact he’d even done anything wrong, indeed of everything as far as I could tell which was the worst part of all. If you’re going to mow me down in my prime you could at least be paying attention while you do it. Back to school for you, matey.

* Not while walking, of course. Now that would be dangerous

Compare and Contrast

Walk to the station – with coffee:
Emerge from the house showered, dressed & reasonably presentable in good time for a brisk yet fundamentally unhurried walk to the station, in possession of all my belongings and ready for the day ahead

Walk to the station – without coffee:
Wake to the dreadful realisation that the last thing we did before going on holiday was break the cafetiere. Contemplate, but discard, the option of drinking tea made from the out-of-date tea bags kept for the entertainment of builders and stray members of my family. Forget that I was not cycling (and hence had less time to spare), where I had put my oyster card (down the back of the sofa, obviously), my wallet (had to go back and get it) and my staff pass (had to humiliatingly stand in the lobby until the work experience student arrived and let me in). Head, fortunately, screwed on.

Travelling to work – with Silverlink*:
Arrive late, breathless and mildly frostbitten after spending half an hour on the open platform at Willesden junction which had been previously deserted by all Silverlink employees because one of Silverlink’s sorry excuses for a piece of rolling stock had broken down at Gunnersbury successfully bringing to a halt not just Silverlink but the District Line as well

Travelling to work – without Silverlink:
Become mildly annoyed when the on-time departure of my intended train means I miss it due to caffeine-withdrawal-related incompetence (see above). Reflect that this will give me a chance to buy a coffee at the stall. Tut briefly at the two minute delay to my next train as I sit in a heated waiting room sipping my coffee. Get wafted efficiently to work. Be seated at my desk an hour and a half before my silverlink colleagues arrive defrosting their noses and spitting tacks. Surreptitiously touch wood before all of this fate-tempting comes home to roost.

It’s, er, not great to be back

* I am indebted to my colleagues for this little snippet. And not smug at all. Oh no, not in the slightest. Well, maybe a little bit…

Screen Burn

Maybe it’s because I’ve just come back from some wide open spaces and uncluttered scenery, but I find myself noticing more and more the intrusion of tv screens into every corner of our public spaces. It used to be just pubs, then it was airports, and then the Post Office decided our queuing experience would be enhanced by adverts for Saga Holidays and incontinence pads. In Berlin, even the U-bahns had them – nothing you might actually want to watch – just adverts – but enough to draw the eye and distract you from your private musings.

Now it’s taxis. I may be slow picking this one up because I don’t travel by black cab in London all that often as I prefer my daylight robbery done at knifepoint rather than taximeter. But we were shattered, we had a suitcase too heavy too wheel and more backpacks than we had actual backs to carry them on, so we got a cab from Paddington. Once we’d dragged all of our luggage on board and sat down and persuaded the driver that there was sentient life south of the river, we set off and a screen flicked into life showing us a safety video (why on earth does anyone think our travelling experience will be enhanced by making it more rather than less like a plane journey?) and offering us a cornucopia of choices of things to watch but no actual option to turn the bloody thing off. This was after sitting through 15 minutes of jabbering inanity on the Heathrow Express (and of course 15 hours of poor sound and badly cut films on the plane).

It’s the buses and trains next, I’m warning you now. Back when the no 38 was a routemaster they experimented briefly with putting TV screens in them. The CCTV shots were quite amusing (a great cheer went up on the top deck every time they came into view on the screen) but the rest of it was just a dreadful harbinger of things to come. The advertisers see us as one great captive audience who will be delighted and diverted by their drivellings instead of driven into a fury of irritation by one more flickering object in the corner of our vision. They see our vacantly staring out of windows as so much wasted selling space. Pretty soon, the windows will go to improve our viewing pleasure. You read it here first.

Those of you who might like to look at uncluttered scenery, projectile vomiting penguins and the like should go here*. The rest should await the resumption of normal service, which will begin (with some delays) tomorrow.

* It may take me a while to get all the pictures on, so be patient.

Dances with Penguins

I am off here.

I may be some time …

One down, six to go. I may be able to post, so watch this space, otherwise normal service resumes in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, whose stupid idea was it to have a tube strike on the day I have to get to Heathrow with an absolute mountain of kit?

Answers on a postcard please.

Oh All Right Then

Listen very carefully because I will do this only once (respond to a tag, I mean)

seven things to do before I die

1. Go to Antarctica (watch this space)
2. Get published
3. Own a forest
4. Dive with whale sharks
5. See a Pel’s Fishing Owl
6. Make a will
7. Help stop global warming (before we all do…)

seven things I cannot do

1. Stop using ellipses at the end of every other sentence …
2. Stand on my head
3. Take decent photographs
4. Shut up for one minute
5. Take both hands off the handlebars
6. Pick up a live toad, even to save its life
7. Admit I’m wrong

seven things that attract me to blogging

1. The discipline
2. The audience, all three of them
3. Even the worst train journey suddenly has its upside
4. Seeing my family do it
5. Laughing at my own jokes
6. ‘Meeting’ other people
7. Having my own platform to say whatever I like

seven things I say most often

1. Nightmare
2. You are a star
3. Fantastic
4. Coffee?
5. Of course I’m right
6. Have you seen my …?
7. F#*&%!

seven books that I love
What only seven?

1. Miss Smilla’s feeling for Snow
2. Catch 22
3. Persuasion
4. War & Peace
5. Atonement
6. The Secret History
7. The Plot Against America

seven movies that I watch over & over again
…er I barely watch films once, let alone over and over. Can I have seven more books please?

8. High Fidelity (or any Nick Hornby)
9. Paddy Clark, Ha Ha Ha (or any Roddy Doyle)
10. The Amateur Marriage (or any Anne Tyler)
11. The Republic of Love (or any Carol Shields)
12. The Nine Taylors (or any Dorothy Sayers)
13. Case Histories (or any Kate Atkinson)
14. Wild Sheep Chase (or any Murukami)

seven people I want to join in

Anyone who wants to – feel free.

Costa Pretty Penny

I foolishly arranged this evening to meet someone at Waterloo at the height of the Friday rush hour. You’d think as a hardened city dweller and commuter I’d be immune to crowds of people but rush-hour Waterloo is something else. Kew Bridge station gets pretty full of an evening but everybody mostly just stands there hunched in misery and doesn’t move about much. In Vauxhall they are a little livelier but in Vauxhall in the evening there’s nothing to do but get off your train and get the hell out so the traffic mostly flows in one direction. In waterloo there are a plethora of shops, strange food outlets found nowhere but in train stations, cafes, bars, cashpoints and actual trains and everyone seems to be rushing from one to the other in different directions simultaneously. Having got off my train, it took me a few minutes just to sidle my way into the main slipstream of commuters (think Wildebeests migrating across the plains of the Serengeti, but with each one carrying an Evening Standard and a hot beverage) and then ease myself out again, washed up on the relatively calm shores of a coffee shop where I could wait for my friend and in the process  be parted with an unreasonable amount of money for a hot chocolate and, get this, a chocolate stirrer. This was about as useful as its counterpart the teapot and the whole experience was made even more painful by the staff attempting to give me change for a fiver when I’d handed them a tenner. I think they were confused by the fact that nobody had ever managed to order something in their cafe before that actually resulted in change for a fiver.

Never mind chocolate oranges, David Cameron, ask yourself why it costs more to buy a relatively healthful and non-alchoholic drink at a coffee shop than it does to buy a pint of beer at a London pub. Something wrong there, no? We rectified the situation by repairing to a local pub where we saved ourselves a bundle by getting hammered instead.