It doesn't matter anyway

Now, possibly I'm missing something here but I'm fairly sure that double-decker buses aren't made out of cardboard as a rule. Admittedly, living in this out of the way backwater I usually only get single deck buses these days, but when I used to get double-deckers I'm sure they were always made of something more substantial than cardboard. And I'm not sure if the cardboard bus is necessarily the way forward, either; possibly they'd be more environmentally friendly than the metal versions, but on a wet day everyone would cower downstairs, and what use is that?

Still, while I recognise this as a rather hare-brained project, I will recycle my cereal box to help them bring the plan to fruition.


Oh noes! Not only are Redbridge Council destroying the cardboard double-decker bus dreams of a nation, but they don't appear to know that "thank you" consists of two separate words! The horror just keeps on coming.

Gas Factory Junction

While I've maintained my usual standards of personal hygiene during my week off - well, I skipped the odd shower here and there, but only on days when I knew that I probably wouldn't be mixing with polite society - I haven't been shaving much. This partly due to laziness, and partly because my left cheek has been looking rather sore of late and I've been trying to avoid dragging a blade across it as much as possible. As such, I now have a rather slovenly layer of fuzz across my neck and cheeks. (I'll spare you the picture I just took of my hairy chin.)

And this has got me thinking about beards. I've always been against beards, which I suspect dates from early childhood and being made to kiss a bearded uncle (which I'm sure must be a euphemism for something, but I'm not going to speculate what). However, I am wondering if this is the right time to have a go at growing one myself - I no longer have a bearded workmate (again, really sounds like it should mean something else) so I couldn't be accused of copying someone else, and bearded former workmate was definitely a hit with the company's female workforce, although that may have been because he was witty and sociable and other things I tend to struggle with. Plus there was that girl on the internet dating site who I sent a really good message in which I pointed out the many ways in which we might enjoy each others' company and that the only one of her criteria I didn't meet was my beardlessness (*) and who never wrote back.

On the other hand, I suspect beard maintenance is probably far more time-consuming than shaving, and there's always the danger of getting crumbs in it. And it's not as if my chin is my worst feature. Plus I'm sure beards on slightly tubby men tend not to be flattering. No. I was right all along. Beards are dangerous and wrong. I shall reach for my razor at the first possible opportunity.

(*) Which is a word, according to my spellchecker. Blimey (**).
(**) Blimey isn't, though, so I wouldn't believe a word it says.

Man, I haven't written about supermarkets in ages

One of my many endearing habits is that of getting up early on Saturday mornings to go and do my shopping. There's not really any good reason for this - on the occasions when I've had to visit later in the day the supermarket I go to is never that crowded, and apart from a reduced likelihood of getting any nice bananas there's no real downside to going later, but I like to get the shopping out of the way so that I have the rest of Saturday to do with as I please. (Admittedly this does tend to manifest itself in sitting in an armchair reading the paper and listening to Adam and Joe (except when they're being substituted for by the son of Dagenham & Redbridge's worst ever manager), but it's my weekend and I do with it as I please.)

You begin to notice familiar faces after a while. Not just the staff, but fellow shoppers; the old couple who are always arguing, the woman with the glasses who always seems to be consulting her list rather than look where she's going, the other old couple who aren't always arguing but the man looks like Jack Lemmon... all right, there aren't that many familiar fellow shoppers, in all honesty. I'm just trying to pre-emptively defend myself.

There's this woman.

Now, the thing about the woman is, she's almost always with this dreadful permanently-baseball capped goon. Actually, that's not fair either; I don't know that he's a goon. I'm just assuming he is from a conversation I overheard them having about breakfast cereal (I happened to be in the breakfast cereal aisle when they turned up and decided that I had to make a really careful decision about which breakfast cereal I was going to buy that week, I wasn't eavesdropping or anything) where he just made grunting noises while she asked him whether there was anything he wanted. But, let's face it, he wears a baseball cap all the time, he's totally unworthy of her, and the point is that I was stood at the checkout and thinking that I hadn't seen her this morning when I was surprised by a question about the number of bags I'd brought with me.

"Sorry, beg your pardon?" (Actually, I said this really quickly, so it sounded more like "Sur, beyerpardon?", but this is my page and the idea is that I look good.)

"How many bags have you got with you?"

Now, I have four bags for life from when they were giving them away for free that I take along each week; it transpired that for my environmental awareness I would be getting extra Nectar points for each bag used. At this point I was forced to point out, unusually early in the transaction, that actually I don't have a Nectar card.

"But you'll miss out on your extra points!" she pointed out, giving me the offended look I always get from the women of a certain age among the checkout staff when I tell them that I don't have a Nectar card, and thus stopping me from pointing out the curious logic of this statement. I considered, as I always do, relating the tale of the time I got a loyalty card from another supermarket, diligently handed it over each week, and was rewarded with approximately £1.50 of vouchers for products I never bought, and as such have never bothered with loyalty cards ever since. But this would have distracted me from my packing, so I didn't.

As I handed over my debit card she asked if I had a Nectar card, before remembering that I didn't just before I could point this out. I counted this as a small victory, even though I knew that overall I'd lost. And if they're going to keep asking me how many bags I have I'm going to end up getting a Nectar card out of sheer embarrassment. This is all Al Gore's fault.

What I did on my holidays, by M. S., aged 32 and 3/365ths

I've spent much of the last couple of days doing my best impersonation of a tourist. The problem is that I'm not very good at being a tourist. For a start, I don't take enough pictures. Maybe it's because I'm not used to having a camera with me, or maybe I just don't quite see the purpose of having lots of pictures of stuff.

Consider my trip to Kew on Tuesday, partly to see the Treetop Walkway, but also because I had happy memories of having gone there (cripes) about 20 years earlier. I took my camera with me, but until I'd been about halfway around the gardens I didn't think to take any pictures, and it was only because a bloke with a huge camera was taking pictures of the Walkway from below that I thought of it at all. I think he was more interested in the structure of the walkway itself rather than the trees. I was quite interested in how it was put together as well, but it doesn't make for that interesting a picture.



The Treetop Walkway itself is good, and wobbles slightly but pleasingly when several people are in the same section of it at once, but the implication that you can see views of London in that news article is a bit misleading as really all you can see is the tops of trees with the odd bit of the gardens poking through in between. Which, to be fair, is what you would be looking for from a treetop walkway. I took some pictures, but there were mostly of, well, trees:

Trees!

Tree!

Tr... er, Plane!


Tr... er, some bit of machinery!

I did think of taking a picture of the group from the girls primary school who were up there at the same time as I was - several pink backpacks disappearing into the distance, one after the other - but I do worry slightly about that type of thing. (This also stopped me from taking a picture of the tree with a lot of headphones hanging down from it, as the only other person listening at the time was a tiny human child.)

I enjoyed my trip to Kew. I probably chose a good day for it - sunny but not excessively warm - and it's probably not anywhere I could visit regularly, but it felt like a worthwhile use of a days hols. My favourite bit was the conservation area, which seemed even more tranquil than the rest of the park, although that will probably be shattered when they finish building the runaway mine cart ride.



Then, yesterday, I found myself en route to the Tower. I went via the DLR, so that I could spy on people while they were doing aerobics.


Naturally they stopped doing aerobics the moment I got my camera out.

About ten years ago I would often walk past the Tower on my way to work, but I hadn't been near it since then. It seems quite odd, now I come to wrote about it; an iconic image of the City that I have no real inclination to go and see. Not that much has changed on the Tower side, anyway, but someone's built some great lop-sided building in place of where I used to walk down to London Bridge. Anyway, this is where I was heading, to see the Telectroscope:


Which, as bits of whimsy promoted by broadband companies go, is quite good. And it looks great, like something out of The Chaos Engine or something. I particularly liked the dials and knobs on top of it. But, again, I'm not sure what my pics of it offer over anybody else's. Apart from some bemused small children, obviously.

While I was there there was a bloke who looked and sounded a bit like Matt Lucas in attendance, doing little to dissuade the woman who was asking him how it worked who clearly thought that he was Matt Lucas. I don't think it was Matt Lucas though; I'm sure if it had been he would have said one of his amusing catchphrases: "I'm the only lady in the village!" or something. I wouldn't have taken a picture of him even if he had been Matt Lucas. I may be a tourist but I have some standards.

Today I have read about various babies. Possibly not unrelatedly, I later made a Shepherd's Pie.

Official Obligatory Birthday Post

Man, I'm getting old.

French Disko

Now that it's over, and it hasn't taken a huge chunk of East London and several army bomb disposal experts with it, I think it's finally safe to say how much I've enjoyed the business of the unexploded bomb. I'm not quite sure why; maybe it's the satisfaction of imagining grumbling commuters willing to take their chances against a pile of unstable explosives, or maybe it's some kind of genetic interest in bombsites that I missed on because they'd all gone by the time I was born. Or maybe I just like the inevitable cheerfully morbid local news reports about bomb disposal experts.

I think my favourite bit, apart from Monday's announcement of trains being suspended due to 'army investigation', was the evocative description of how "it started to tick and ooze some pretty horrible substances". Apart from the splendid idea of World War 2 bombs being designed to fit with traditional Hollywood convention - I hope that there was a reactivated alarm clock in there as well - it does beg the question of what these oozing substances could these possibly have been. Presumably, having been in a river in East London, all kinds of unpleasant effluent will have seeped into it - urine from drunks and tramps, rat shit, Cockney spunk from discarded contraceptive devices. And, bearing in mind where the bomb came from, the bomb would presumably have been laced with a certain level of residual evil. Just think; someone probably bottled that ooze and even as we speak scientists in Government laboratories are probably fusing it with pig kidneys as the first step in creating an army of evil supermen. It's a frightening thought.

(The Evening Standard deserves some sort of special uselessness award for the "TUBE BOMB TRAVEL CHAOS" advertising board that I forgot to take a picture of yesterday evening. How can a bomb in a river near a railway line be a "TUBE BOMB"? If you kicked an Evening Standard writer in the genitals near the entrance of a tube station, would the correct headline be "STANDARD MAN'S TUBE ASSAULT NIGHTMARE"? Clearly not.)

Edit until less sweary

B Johnston
City Hall
London

Dear B,

I'll be honest, B; I've come to regard most of the people who inhabit the city and surrounding suburbs as idiots. There's the fact that you wield power, for a start, and then there's people who decide to form Facebook groups and the like complaining about how unfair it is that people can't drink on the tube any more. I'm no sociologist or criminologist or any other sort sort of ologist, but even I could see how putting a lot of idiots and a lot of booze on the tubes on a Saturday night was going to end in a mix of drunken twattery and hysterical reporting. It seems to me, B, that the idiots involved were the same sort of idiots who set up "LOL @ Boris"-type Facebook groups or appeared in TV vox-pops in the run-up to your ghastly coronation claiming that "It's time for a change" without giving the slightest indication of what sort of change they might have been after, because apparently nobody in this city is capable of thinking things through. Let's face it, B; you were voted in by a bunch of cretins.

And so it is that your spokestoads are allowed to say things like "Londoners are fed up of feeling threatened and intimidated on public transport. That's why the mayor has introduced an alcohol ban which came into effect today" without being forced to make any connection between the two sentences. The sort of people who threaten and intimidate because of alcohol (rather than because they're deeply unpleasant) are already pissed-up before they get on the train; no Tube journey lasts so long than you could go from sober to drunk to the point of aggression, unless something goes deeply wrong. I know that, because I use public transport; you possibly know that, because apparently you just put the 'stupid' act on; the nice people in their Chelsea tractors don't but approve of putting down the proles. Still, plenty of easy arrests on the first Saturday of the football season when beery but amiable Northern men suddenly find themselves getting dragged off trains, eh? That'll look good in the crime statistics.

See, if you want to something that's going to "make everyone's journey more pleasant" (and, fuck me B, did you deliberately ask for the mimsiest phrase imaginable to make this seem like a good idea?) I have a plan for you. See, I'm not bothered about people drinking on the tube. What does bother me is people who stick some part of their anatomy in the doors as they close so that they'll re-open and they can board the train, thus delaying my journey. Some tosser did this at King's Cross when I was on my way home the other day; not only was it an annoying thing to do, but he looked incredibly satisfied with himself for doing it, plus he looked a bit like a smug younger version of Nigel Havers. Did Nigel Havers look smug when he was younger? You must have watched Don't Wait Up, B, I seem to recall that it was full of annoying posh people.

Anyway, it's an unimaginably selfish thing to do, and as what tends to happen is that as the doors close again someone else comes along and does the same thing, it generally ends up delaying the train so long that it would have been quicker for the first person to just wait for the next train. So, instead of fannying about with new Routemasters or whatever other nonsense your transport masterplan involves, I suggest research into putting guillotines into tube train doors.

It'd be great. Any obstruction and the driver is entirely within his right to deploy the guillotine and slice through the offending article. There could even be a little post-chopping announcement that they could play where someone says "And that's why you don't obstruct the doors!", just like that bit in Arrested Development. The only exception would be if someone jams a pram or buggy in the door; in that case a team of social workers could be on stand by. Honestly, B; what could make any journey more pleasant than seeing some smug Haversalike getting his right arm severed? You're a fool if you don't... oh, sorry, forgot who I was talking to.

Yours etc

MS, BSoI, TAoF, UoNG (Hons)