Dirty Stopout Part Two

I’m worried about my bike. I forgot I had a social engagement on Thursday night and cycled into the station as usual leaving it locked up in Vauxhall underpass. It’s done the odd night away from home before and survived, including one memorable occasion when I left it unlocked outside Ealing Broadway station during the great fuel crisis and only realised in the morning when I came to pack up my bike bag and found my lock was still in it. The fact that my bike was still there where I left it probably tells you all you need to know about the relative desirability of my bike. But then Friday night I inexplicably had another social engagement (and the fact that this is noteworthy probably tells you all you need to know about the relative desirability of me and my other half as dinner guests, but there you go) and didn’t get home till gone midnight leaving the bike out there in the wilds for not one but two nights. In Ealing, all I had to worry about was whether my bike was stolen or not and parking it up next to a much shinier bike was generally enough to give me some sort of sense of security. But at Vauxhall they don’t nick the bikes so much as strip them down. There was one bike recently that lost a wheel during the day but was still otherwise intact. By the next day, though, it was nothing but a frame. And it’s been chained there ever since to act as a Dreadful Warning to other bike owners about what happens if you neglect your poor machine for more than 12 hours. But clearly – for me at least – not Dreadful enough.

Off to fetch it now. Or its sorry carcass…

The Gloves are On

Ok, so when was it people started wearing those surgical gloves to do absolutely everything? I can see why whenever you’re doing any sort of healthcare procedure to someone else, however minor, that you have to snap on a pair of rubber gloves – if not to protect yourself from any nasties they might have then at least to protect them from any nasties of yours. And when picking up litter or anything else on the streets these days you need gloves just because of the yuck factor, although if it were me (and thank God it’s not) I’d want more than a thin skin of latex between me and whatever it was I was picking up. But when fixing a traffic light? There I was on the bus this evening, on the prime front seat at the top, having consumed enough red wine to sink a ship or launch a book (whichever is the greater) when I saw a guy on top of a ladder doing what amounted to open heart surgery on a pelican light (it was still on) – in a pair of rubber gloves*. Why? What exactly was he protecting himself from by wearing them? Surely something that thin won’t act as insulation against the electricity? Or was he worried the traffic light might have been contaminated by extremely tall ill people?

Nope, it’s a mystery. Answers to the usual address, please.

*And other clothes as well, obviously. This is a family blog.

Jean Genius

Disgruntled consumer is getting an outing today because I’ve been shopping. Or rather, back on my never-ending quest for a pair of trousers that fit. This is a quest that has been in progress since about 1998 when the international conspiracy of fashion designers met in a secret bunker outside Milan and, bored with setting hemlines and choosing the new black, declared that women had changed shape. From now on, all women, whatever their size, were to be freakishly tall, have thighs no bigger in diameter than their knees, no calves to speak of, and hips and a waist that were approximately the same dimensions. I’ve seen people shaped that way, it’s true, but they’re mostly sixty-year-old men. Any designer caught creating trousers not following these guidelines was expelled from the inner circle and forced to design polyester uniforms for catering staff. Oh, and belt loops were banned. Along with pockets.

Or at least that’s what I think happened. The alternative is that clothes designers secretly despise us and want those of us with slim waists to hate our thighs and those with skinny thighs to be forced to wear trousers that either gaped at the back like a convention of builders or were slung so low the crotch was round their knees. I don’t think I’m a particularly odd shape. I’ve been wearing the same size levis since I was 19 and they still seem to fit fine. But other trousers? I’ve had a pair of Helmut Lang cords that date from before the secret edict and they’re so old they are no longer actually corduroy in places. All other pairs of trousers I own are merely allowed in the house on suffrance and the minute I find a source of non-jean trousers that don’t look as though they were designed with Mr. Potato Head in mind, they’re history.

Tell me it’s not just me… Or tell me where the secret bunker of properly fitting trousers can be found…

PC Plod Revisited

Well, it looks as though the local police have abandoned their plan of patrolling the footpaths of the park by driving round them in their panda car. Instead they’ve parked a whole whacking great panda lorry there. It looks as though it’s supposed to be some sort of mobile police station – complete with entrance door and canopy and motivational slogan (‘Working towards a safer London’, I think – I tried peering across the park this evening to get the exact wording and nearly fell off my bike so in the interests of a safer Vauxhall I decided not to bother). But no police. At least no visible police – none in the park, and none apparent in the lorry either. It’s been there for at least a week, morning and evening and no sign of life at all whenever I have passed it. If they’re outreaching then they’re not reaching out to the part of their population that commutes elsewhere to work. The alternative of course is that the lorry has simply been nicked and abandoned there.

If so, and if there are any Lambeth police reading this, wondering where their lorry has gone, it’s here

Lighten Up

Bah, I hate this time of the year. Both this morning and this evening as I cycled to and from the station, London was under a heavy cloud (Stratocumulus stratiformus according to today’s handy Guardian cloud identification chart) and the weather was murky enough to remind me to check the batteries in my bike lights and get used to the idea of going back to cycling in the dark. It’s not quite there yet, but it won’t be long and the cars are already beginning to switch their headlights on. We have nothing to look forward to but gloom and doom and leaves on the line. Roll on the Winter solstice. For after that, at least things can only get better … at least until they start to get worse again.

 Wake me up when it’s spring …

Blankety-Blank

Now we all know the rule about ignoring people in London. Most of the time as you’re making your way around the city, you treat the other people around you as though they were mobile pieces of street-furniture, to be manoeuvred around, but not acknowledged in any way unless you happen to step on their foot. This is mainly because there are around 7 million of us, not counting the tourists, and saying hello to everyone would get tiring. But I’ve always considered that under some circumstances – when you are a member of a recognisable sub-tribe, seeing another member for instance – that a brief acknowledgement is not just acceptable but welcome. Otherwise we start to feel like mobile pieces of street furniture ourselves, and that’s not pleasant.

Take running. If you run, your fellow runners become somehow acquaintances, to be noticed in a kind of ‘us against the world’ way. Or at least that’s what I thought when I lived in Hackney. Making my way round London Fields, any time I crossed paths with another runner, we’d exchange the barest of nods – nothing so extravagant as a greeting (that would require breath to spare) but a flicker of eye-contact and an ‘I share your pain’ expression. Different places have different conventions – on the tow path round Richmond, I’m told, a raised hand is the greeting of choice. But now that I run on the South Bank, I’m finding I cannot crack the code, if there is one. You can’t nod to someone who isn’t looking at you, who is determinedly locked into their own world, eyes straight ahead, staring at nothing. I’ve tried. I once ran the whole length of my run seeing if I could get anything – any recognition at all – out of my fellow runners. The tramps and the drinkers and the out-all-night tourists will acknowledge me in their drunken incomprehensible way. Sometimes the strollers and the passers-by will give me a smile of encouragement or even a glance of bemused contempt. But only one runner has returned my brief nod of greeting and he was American and didn’t count.

So this morning, when I saw a chap running towards me with his headphones on singing, and not just singing in that drone-y sort of way that people do unconsciously but belting it out like a torch singer – ‘I can’t liiiiiiive … if living is without yoooooou’ and waving his hands in the air at the emotional bits – I thought that, at least, deserved some recognition. I gave him my friendliest grin.

He blanked me.

Hmmmm

So apparently I was in London Lite yesterday. Which is all very exciting and everything, appearing in the mainstream press – albeit that bit of the mainstream press that they have to give away – but I know this only because Jan mentioned it in the comments and on her blog (thanks, Jan). As far as any official notification goes … nada. When the London Informer featured this blog, they emailed me first and asked if I’d be interested, negotiated getting a picture and sent me a copy afterwards. In fairness, I had noticed in my stats that someone from Associated Newspapers had been wandering around in the site looking a bit lost and had got as far as the contacts page where they may well have tried to send me an email, but if so it didn’t arrive.

So here’s the question. Am I right to feel a little peeved at them going ahead with it without my permission? I haven’t actually seen the article itself but I’m guessing they’ve quoted entries from it (If they’re reviewing or recommending blogs and writing their own copy about the blog then it’s fair comment and not a problem). I do after all put all this stuff up on the internet for free, so can I complain when someone copies it and uses it as cheap filler in their paper? Well obviously I can, because I’m doing it now, but do I have a leg to stand on? Or should I just be happy about the exposure?

And here’s an announcement for any other media outlets wandering my way. I’m a complete stats-whore and will probably agree to any exposure of this blog that you wish to suggest. But I would like to be asked first. And if the contacts page doesn’t work or I don’t respond, see if you can crack the fiendish code protecting my email address on my about page.

On Me ‘Ead

You’ve got to hand it to those TheLondonPaper distributors – they’re keen. Now that they’ve got their pitch sorted out outside Vauxhall, stripy umbrellas and all, they seem to have seen off the London Lite people altogether. And they’re not letting anyone past without trying their best to hand them a copy of their rag – even me, on my bike. I supposed I could have taken it in my teeth …

More Signs, and no Wonder

Sometimes I really do wonder what goes through someone’s head when they put up half the official notices we see. There was one, pasted into every cubicle of the Holyhead Ferry terminal toilets (at least in the girls’ ones, I didn’t check the blokes’) ‘Please flush the toilet’. Who, exactly, was that aimed at, do you suppose? Who is there who had mastered the basics of reading but who wasn’t really sure what the little handle thing on the bog is for? And which of those is going to read that sign and think, you know I wasn’t going to bother to flush, but now I think I will? The only function those notices really serve is to make the person who put them up feel better.

And then in the Virgin train toilets (sorry about all the toilet humour, just the way it panned out…), some instructions on the use of the emergency call button: step one, it said. Press for emergency assistance. Well, that’s fair enough, you wouldn’t want someone stranded on the floor of the disabled lavatory desperately twisting and pulling the button to call for help. But then, whoever was writing the sign obviously felt something was wrong. You can’t just have one step in a set of instructions. There needs to be a step two. So they added one: Step two. Wait for assistance. Ah, but of course. So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong all these years.

But the prize for absolute content-free informational message of the week has to go to SouthWest Trains, masters of the pointless tannoy announcement. In a rare lull between passing trains this morning at Vauxhall we heard the following message: ‘This is a special announcement from the SouthWest Trains Customer information centre,’ and we all pricked up our ears. Special announcements generally mean bad news – strikes, engineering works, signal failure at Clapham Junction, that sort of thing. ‘We would like to thank you all for choosing to travel by train today.’ And that was it.

I suppose it was a nice thought …

Here Be Tractors

I’m back – did you miss me?

I shall draw a veil over most of the trip there and back – suffice it to say that while London to Northern Ireland via Holyhead doesn’t exactly rival Cape to Cairo in the great overland trips of the world stakes, it certainly gets into the top ten list of train journeys to die before you make. And I would like to add, while I’m on the subject, that three hours to explore the delights of the Holyhead ferry terminal is about two hours and fifty-eight minutes too many. Oh, and that putting up a dot-matrix information board with the message ‘Please see posters on platforms for details of trains’ is somewhat missing the point of a real-time travel information system. But that is all I will say on the subject.

No, what I did want to blog about today happened right at the end of our journey out there, the supposedly easy part, once we’d picked up the hire car. This is by way of a public information service for those urban dwellers out there who don’t get out into the country much. We were nearing our destination after a trip which had, for reasons I will not go into*, had taken 12 hours longer than it was supposed to do. The other half was distracted by the need to multiply every speed limit by 1.6 to get it into kilometers because that was all the car would display, and so when we saw a sign pointing us confidently towards Newcastle, we took it, even though it was pointing confidently off to the left and Newcastle was, as far as I could tell on the standard issue car hire map that was showing the whole of Ireland on a sheet of paper approximately the size of a tea-towel with most of the space taken up by showing you where all the other car hire branches were located (just in case, you know, you wanted to hire another car on top of the one you already had) and leaving lesser landmarks – little places, like Belfast – to be guessed at, was somewhere to our right. (sorry was that a parenthesis too far? It’s been a long day). Sometimes, particularly in that corner of Ireland, little things like logic and geometry need to be left behind when navigating, so off we went, trusting the sign, and it was only when Kilcoo inexplicably turned out to have been replaced by Rathfriland, did we realise we had fallen prey to the one-legged signpost. Anyone who lives in urban areas where the local youths can amuse themselves by mugging people and selling crack may not realise this, but out in the countryside where people have to make their own entertainment, one-legged signposts cannot be trusted. Two-legged ones are fine. The local yoof may decorate them, or shoot airguns at them, but that’s about it. But one-legged ones can be rotated to point pretty much anywhere the locals choose and should therefore never be trusted. If you ever find yourself at the end of a muddy track looking at a field and thinking that Ludlow, or Chipping Camden, or Little Giddings has changed since you last visited it, that’s probably what happened.

Anyhow, we made it. And now we’re back. Work tomorrow …

* I promised