Wed 1: While I was touring City churches I came across this, the Lost London Churches Project. They've printed a little colour card for every church in the City of London - current and former - and the idea is to collect them all and stick them in a special pack. It's a bit like collecting Brooke Bond tea cards (I still have the full set of The Race Into Space) but with churches. Each card has an illustration on the front and a list of dates on the back (a bit like Top Trumps except you couldn't play this as a game). There's also a collectors pack to slot your cards into, a book of background information and a very colourful map showing all the former parishes. Well this is lovely, I thought, as I searched through the stack of cards for a St Magnus The Martyr.
Except I couldn't get my head round how it all worked, even though I'd read Ian Visits' post about it last month. I think you're supposed to go round various City churches to complete your collection, although I'm not sure how many you're supposed to swipe in one go because the stack contained dozens of cards. It also said 'suggested donation £2', but was that for one card or several because there are 110 altogether so that could be ruinously expensive. Rest assured you don't have to go to the right church to get the right card, it's more random than that, but most City churches are closed most of the time so the cards are going to be hard to source,. Also they don't do swaps on the website only a random set of 10 for £2, or bafflingly you can buy the full set of 110 in two lots of £5. The more I look at the bundling and the pricing the less it makes sense, and I still think they're lovely but I just don't know why you would.
Thu 2: I went to my local polling station without photo ID. I knew very well I needed it, I've known for five years ever since this bastard government put it in their manifesto. But I went without photo ID anyway just to make a point. Someone somewhere will be collecting statistics about this, I thought, and every incremental tiny percentage helps. I decided not to be outright belligerent, instead I played dumb and claimed not to have realised photo ID was necessary. They said I could use a driving licence and I told them I didn't have a car, which was true but deceptive. They said I could use a passport and I said I wasn't in the habit of carrying my passport round with me. Thankfully they didn't say I could use an old person's travel pass because I'm not there yet. I left the polling station without voting.
I came back later with my passport, and the policeman on the door gave me a wry nod of recognition on the way in. I felt the expected rush of embarrassed disappointment as the scrutineer checked my photo, then looked up to check my face and then looked down again. They duly gave me my papers and I went away to vote, awarding none of my crosses to the party which had installed this unnecessarily high hurdle in the first place. I realise I'll only be in the statistics under 'turned away first time but came back and voted', which is less damning than 'turned away and never came back', so more an inconvenience than a barrier. But the real statistic that matters is 'never bothered trying to vote because they already knew they couldn't' and sadly nobody's counting that. Ultimately it didn't matter in London this time, but every vote counts and somewhere sometime photo ID's going to change the outcome.
Fri 3: The retail units under the Capital Towers skyscraper at the Bow Roundabout are slowly filling up. A mini supermarket came first, then a hair salon and a nigh invisible barbers, now finally the unit closest to the canal has its first tenant. It's only taken seven years. The new shop is called Gold Dry Cleaner, a name announced in red letters stuck somewhat wonkily above the door, and appears to consist of a bloke and a few machines in a mostly empty room. Nothing especially golden is evident. And if you look closer at the signage it doesn't exactly scream quality.
They do 'Cortains and Carpets', apparently. They also do 'Repair and Altrations'. Also their Shirt Offer is '5 Shirt only 7£' which suggests the owner isn't familiar with how UK currency works. Maybe spellings and convention don't matter, maybe it's all about balancing low prices with a high quality service, but I do wonder how many people will ever be tempted inside in the first place. Good luck to Gold Dry Cleaner, I think they're going to need it.
Sat 4: Today is Star Wars Day, at least in the English-speaking calendar, and has been for almost 50 years. So I was very excited when I saw that Flickr, the actual company Flickr, had added my photo of Stormtroopers on the DLR to their May The 4th Be With You gallery. That's quite an honour, I thought, and waited for the adulation to come piling in. But no, apparently the official Flickr gallery had fewer than 200 visitors in total and my photo only scraped an extra 100 views. That's a bit odd, I thought, because it really was a very striking photo I stumbled upon entirely by accident.
Only later did I discover that Flickr had also appropriated my stormtrooper photo to their own photostream, appropriately credited, where it's received over 50,000 views and 450 faves. That makes it my most-viewed and most-faved Flickr photo of all time, which is nice, although without a tipoff I'd have seen none of it. Such are the benefits of a Creative Commons Licence.
Sun 5: I saw this advert at Camden Town station and did a doubletake. "55% of the UK only use SPF when it's sunny" didn't worry me because I can believe that. "You even need to wear sunscreen in cloudy London" made sense because I'm well aware that clouds still let some UV through. But the startling claim underneath that we all need to wear SPF every day of the year looked jarringly unlikely. On a dull day in mid-January, why bother? At the winter solstice with the sun low in the sky, why bother? On a day you're not going to be outdoors more than a few minutes, why bother? But it seemed to have the backing of a skin cancer charity underneath, so was this a lesson I urgently needed to learn or pseudoscientific bolx?
I went to the website which turned out to be that of a suncream manufacturer, and was encouraged to 'make a daily pledge' to SPF. Apparently only 22% of us do this (and only 8% re-apply SPF later in the day), according to a survey YouGov did in February. And I thought hang on, this is just a devious marketing campaign to sell more tubes of gloop, because the more people they can persuade to daub sunscreen daily the more money they'll make. Also nowhere does it say that daily application is medically necessary, the entire text is slyly worded to make insinuations and leave gullible consumers to jump to their own conclusions. Those of us who scrutinise the weather forecast will know that the UV risk never rises above 'Low' between October and March, not here in the UK, indeed we've only recently entered the 'sunscreen would be a seriously good idea' season. So this campaign can sod off because, face facts, 366 days of SPF just isn't necessary.
Mon 6: While I was at Canalway Cavalcade, the annual narrowboat extravaganza at Little Venice, I became overly intrigued by the prices being charged for ice cream. Two vans from 'The Royal Whip' had turned up and were attempting to sell swirly chilled treats to an increasingly bedraggled audience. I always like to check the price of a 99 - here described as a Single With Flake - and this van was somehow charging a whopping £4.50. If a family of four turned up they were effectively looking at forking out almost £20, and that's assuming nobody wanted to upgrade to a Marshmallow Waffle Flake.
They were also selling a Double With Flake for a breathtaking £6.50, i.e. an extra £2 for merely another squirt of ice cream, not an extra flake. I then looked to see what a single cornet without flake cost, to help determine the full scale of the mark-up, and was amazed to see this wasn't displayed on the side of the van at all. I'm sure they'd have served you a plain cornet if you'd asked but I bet they were hoping nobody would, in a classic piece of misdirection and upselling. I learned two things. One is that ice cream vans offer increasingly appalling value for money. And the other is that selling ice cream during a cost of living crisis means screwing the folk who can afford it for as much as you can get.
Tue 7: I turned up to use the Woolwich Ferry because I needed to cross the river and it's free, which are two good reasons. I smiled when I saw it was operating a two-boat service again, but I didn't realise this was a new thing because I hadn't seen today's press release yet. London'smediaoutlets were all over the story today, plainly delighted because TfL don't fire off press releases during a Mayoral campaign so they've really missed the opportunity to regurgitate a news story with minimal editorial effort. I boarded the ferry, as did umpteen vehicles, and we waited and we waited and we waited. I'd already spotted the cruise ship way upstream at the Thames Barrier, negotiating gingerly through, but I assumed we'd have plenty of time to chug across before it arrived. Seemingly not, and when it arrived alongside it was bloody enormous.
We waved, they waved. It was the Viking Sky, a nine deck monster setting off on a fortnight's cruise around the British Isles and back to Norway. Its sister ship Viking Neptune is off on a similar journey this Friday, should you want a megaboat fix of your own, and nine more cruise ships are due in London before the end of June. That'll give the local tugboats a bit more work. Incidentally it turns out the Thames Barrier was opened exactly 40 years ago on 8th May 1984, and as part of the celebrations they'll be closing the gates from 8am to 10.30am (preceded by a flotilla of narrowboats passing through for good measure). You never know what you might see from the Woolwich Ferry, now twice as frequently as before.
(and dont't worry, I've saved seven other Unblogged things for the end of the month)
