Thu 1: My National Trust magazine arrived in a compostable potato starch wrapper printed with the request "Please don't put this in your plastic recycling bin or with your general domestic waste." Instead it informs me of three methods of disposal. "Add to a compost heap" but I don't have a compost heap. "Place in your garden waste" but I don't have a garden. "Use to line your food waste caddy" but this is Tower Hamlets and we don't have food waste caddies. I now feel somewhat insufficiently middle class. The magazine ended up in the recycling and the wrapper ended up in the bin. Fri 2: I thought I'd buy six Magnum ice creams at Tesco because the label on the shelf said the Clubcard price was £1.60. but at the till I was charged £5.75 because I'd picked up the wrong box, indeed I suspect there weren't any of the right box left. Sat 3: Last week British Gas sent me a letter saying that even though I'd just had a bill they needed to send me a new one because they'd transferred me to a new billing system. Today it arrived and it's for the period 1st May to 2nd May, and I fear they spent more on postage than I did on energy.
Sun 4: When I wrote about Coronation clocktowers last month I unintentionally overlooked the tower in Crayford erected to commemorate the coronation of Edward VII, sorry, so I hope this photo I slogged across Bexley to take makes good of that omission. Mon 5: Five weeks ago I blogged about Tower Hamlets' intention to introduce 'No Loading' restrictions on the last double yellow lines near my house. Today I see they've painted them already - fresh paired stripes on the kerb outside Bow Baptist Church - which seems like very fast work. Deliveries and red routes really don't mix. Tue 6: Today, as temperatures soared, I was privileged to be in attendance at London's annual Please Carry Water With You In Hot Weather ceremony. Two members of TfL staff appeared at the far end of the Central line platform at Holborn station, the junior acolyte clutching freshly-printed rolled-up posters. The elder used his radio device to alert staff further up the line that the religious objects were ready, then handed them to a train driver for safe transfer to the next two stations. I missed the unloading ritual at Chancery Lane but at St Paul's a member of staff graciously accepted the offering, checked that it had the sacred text "St Paul's" scrawled on the back in pen, then processed serenely up two sets of escalators and delivered it to the control room. I imagine a prayer was said and the poster splashed with holy water, and when I came back a few hours later it was on proud display in the ticket hall.
Wed 7: The new big thing at Canary Wharf appears to be large communal entertainment spaces with streetfood and alcohol concessions designed to keep groups of friends busy while parting them from their cash. The Market Halls space feels a bit like Boxpark but with glass walls and better cocktails, while Fairgame is a faux-funfair for adults where you get to play nine games for £15 and might walk away with a teddy. Thu 8: Radio 6 Music's new evening schedule has been going for a week now, and sorry but two hours of New Music Fix is overdoing the unfamiliar, but I am enjoying Riley and Coe later on. The pair banter well and it does feel like appointment radio, but with all the talking the proportion of music being played is much lower so I still prefer the solo shows on Mondays and Thursdays. Fri 9: The 20000thArchers episode was a bit of a letdown, given the expectation for secret mystery guests or shocking drama-busting plotlines, but perhaps it was for the best that the dialogue focused on the minutiae of pig husbandry because that's truer to the show's roots (and maybe the hotheaded Tom/Lee decision will later turn out to be absolutely pivotal). Sat 10: It is astonishing that Shaun Bailey has been ennobled in Boris's resignation honours list, partly because his campaign team is at the heart of the latest Partygate accusations but mainly because he's not the sharpest tool in the box as his Mayoral campaign proved, and it turns out it's not what you know it's who you know.
Sun 11: Today I headed across town to enjoy the Route 65 and 71 Heritage Event organised by the London Bus Museum. A heck of a lot of old vehicles plied the streets between Ealing and Chessington, all for free, bringing smiles to the faces of passengers and unintentional spectators alike. I rode a 70-year-old RT from Ealing to Kingston, crammed up top with the enthusiastic gentlemen, the serial-number-tickers, the nostalgic grandparents, the bubbling families, the silent documenters, the portly throwbacks and the excitable tip of the autistic spectrum. We made slow progress due to roadworks, congestion and limited acceleration, but still stuck to timetable. The best bit, retrospectively, was stopping outside South Ealing station just as the London Transport Museum's red 1938 tube train passed directly underneath. Mon 12: Route 108 is about to get new electric vehicles transferred from redundant routes 507 and 521, indeed the first arrived on the route today. I hope they add some seats in the huge gap where City commuters used to straphang, because these cavernous cattletrucks may be swish but they're not yet fit for purpose. Tue 13: Sometimes it's fun to just walk round Harrods and treat it like a sightseeing trip. On the second floor I discovered the home fragrance department, a lot of sales assistants with nothing to do, a £50,000 piano that plays itself and a tiny exhibition of Bob Dylan artworks. I very briefly got my hopes up but no, not 'my' painting. Wed 14: An exhibition you might enjoy: At the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow they warn you that the 'Ashish' exhibition might not be suitable for children. Ashish Gupta is a flamboyant clothes designer and I thought the roomful of mannequins was pretty innocuous until I actually read the slogans on some of his glittery sequinned tops. They are subversively gorgeous though. You can also enjoy a separate film explaining Ashish's creative journey (Esme from the Sewing Bee is in it). Until 10th September.
Thu 15: Netflix haven't castrated BestMate's piggybacked access yet, so we sat down and enjoyed the first episode of the new season of Black Mirror, Joan is Awful, and the other four have a lot to live up to. Fri 16: News from Ealing: I went back to the junction of The Ridings and Audley Road, which was called Wordsworth Drive when Reggie Perrin used to walk past it daily, and the owners of the house on the corner have built a new extension and a new wall and suddenly it doesn't look very 1970s any more. Sat 17: Shortly after arriving in Wivenhoe I was walking up the high street when I spotted someone I thought I recognised coming out of a coffee shop. "That looks very much like the lady who made me redundant from my last job," I thought, "right down to her haircut, her height and her choice of clothing, but what are the chances of her living here?" I kept out of the way in the churchyard because I didn't want to have words and it probably wasn't her anyway. But then a member of the local community recognised her too and addressed her cheerily by name, and I thought "My God it is!" plus some rude words I won't write here. I kept well out of the way until she'd driven off, seemingly heading safely out of town, and it took the best part of an hour for me to fully recover. <and breathe> Sun 18: I finally worked out where the flies were coming from, and sometimes that's worse than not finding out where the flies are coming from. Mon 19: Today I found a bus map on a tube platform dated November 2007. I won't mention where it is lest it be removed, because even an out-of-date bus map is better than the current default which is no map at all. Tue 20: The first wasp of the season blundered in through my french windows today and then utterly failed to locate any of the multiple exit routes I kindly provided, and how can they get so close to an open window on so many occasions but always miss it? Wed 21: Today I wrote about Tower Hamlets Road E17, and in a week's time a former resident will leave this comment hardly anyone will read: "That 'really smart detached gabled villa' is actually a pair of charming but pokey semi-detached cottages, similar to the ones in Eden Road in Walthamstow Village. I know because we used to live in one of them, but moved to a less entrancing but rather more practical house about 25 years ago. I think the estate agent said 'bijou' when we sold it. We used to get quite a bit of post for the same street number in Tower Hamlets Road E7, and on one occasion a taxi-full of merry partygoers."
Thu 22: An exhibition you might enjoy: I dropped into the Whitechapel Gallery for some art because the main galleries are free at the moment. The big exhibition is called Life Is More Important Than Art That's Why Art Is Important. I could have happily enjoyed a roomful of Janette Paris's graphic histories, not just eight. I sat through 5 minutes of John Smith's Citadel before I realised it was about lockdown. Susan Hiller's J Street Project is an ingenious geographic slant on attitudes to the Holocaust featuring 300 German street names. Until 17th September. Fri 23: In 2009 the Kings Arms pub on Bow Road was turned into a tacky B&B and in 2012 they painted it a ghastly shade of grey. It's currently off-white... except the owners have just had scaffolding erected and are busy hacking off the cladding in great lumps in what appears to be a very unprofessional manner. A tiny scrap of old 'Ind Coope' sign was revealed but they've since painted over that, and I hate to think what look they're eventually aiming for. Sat 24: Rick Astley basically ruled Glastonbury and his elevation to National Treasure may now be complete. Sun 25: I resisted bringing you a 40th anniversary blogpost but some days are important - who knew my last ever A Level exam would be the trigger? - and rest assured celebrations were undertaken. Mon 26: The fact the new TV version of Popmaster is on More 4, not Channel 4, suggests they know it doesn't really work. Tue 27: A large East End funeral descended on my local Roman Catholic Church this lunchtime, attended by an extended blond family who looked like they'd spawned home from Essex. The deceased lay in a white carriage drawn by four pink-feathered horses, topped off by floral tributes in the shape of a can of cola and a packet of Mayfair cigarettes. I hurried home before the bagpiper started.
Wed 28: TfL's Pride poster campaign includes a fabulous map of London's lost rivers, so I tweeted that and it went totally viral, but I also got 43 people telling me their local river wasn't actually lost and that took the shine off somewhat. Thu 29: I'm increasingly convinced that I might now be wasting my time. Fri 30: Let's see how this year's annual counts are going...
• Number of London boroughs visited: all of them (at least 18 times each)
• Number of London postcode areas visited: 250 (which is 100% of the total)
• Number of London bus routes ridden: all 546 (100%)
• Number of Z1-3 stations used: all 380-odd (100%)
• Number of Z4-6 stations used: still only 3 (1%)
