Remember this photo of Stratford's mis-timed Olympic countdown clock? Alerted by my post, tonight's Evening Standard and London Lite have taken the story one step further. Read the full article here. One of their reporters has contacted Newham Council, who have now apologised...
"It's very disappointing for this to go wrong when we are trying to get it right. It is something we are aware of. This is something people rely on and the countdown message is important for Newham residents. It's a symbol that needs to be got right. It's very frustrating. We wanted to do something that was simple but it has turned out to be tricky. It's a bit like the Games itself."
...and blamed the software company who installed the countdown timer two years ago...
"A spokesman for the council said the mix-up occurred after officials wanted to update the written message thanking the people of east and southeast London for their backing of the successful bid. They discovered the company had gone out of business and so engineers were brought in to try to change the message but succeeded only in altering the time."
So, there you have it. The whole thing's been a semi-amateur well-meaning typically-British balls-up. I wonder how long it will take the council to fix it, now that they know we know it's wrong. That's the power of blogging.
"The Circle, District, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan lines will get new air-conditioned trains from late 2009."[pressrelease] good: And about time too. There's nothing tube travellers complain about more in the summer than sweaty overheated tube carriages. And now it'll be lovely and cool, like a New York apartment. bad: But for the other 10 months of the year, air conditioning really isn't very important at all, and tube passengers have completely different grumbles. bad: But air conditioning is only being introduced on four of London's twelve tube lines - the ones in the shallowest tunnels - and not the deep level lines where all the sweatiest sweat is. bad: But aircon won't be arriving until late 2009, so that's another three record-breakingly sweltering summers to survive unaided. bad: But it's only the Metropolitan line which gets new air-conditioned carriages in 2009. The rest of this rolling stock upgrade doesn't start until 2012. bad: But the full fleet of 190 ice-cool trains won't be in place on these four lines until 2015, by which time we may all have died from overheating.
"Trains on the Circle and Hammersmith & City lines will increase in size from six to seven carriages, an overall capacity increase of 17 per cent." good: And about time too. Current 6-carriage trains always stop short of the end of the platform, leaving hordes of passengers rushing forward to cram into the last doors of the rear carriage. There'll be less pushing and shoving in future. bad: But 16 of the platforms on the Circle and Hammersmith and City lines are going to be too short for these new longer trains. Either somebody's got to find the money to extend them (and we've got to put up with long-term engineering works) or some of the doors on the new trains will have to stay shut when they pull into the shorter stations. bad: But the new 7-carriage trains won't fit into some of the existing railway sidings. The sidings at Farringdon, for example, only just fit 6-carriage trains, and will be useless come 2015.
"Train interiors will be larger thanks to a new seating layout and door design. This will help ease congestion."[pictureshere] good: And about time too. The new carriages will be able to carry 9% more passengers, which means fewer people left standing on the platform. bad: But if there's more space, then something's got to be removed to make room for it. And what's being removed are several of the seats. "More capacity" really means fewer people sitting and more people standing. bad: But at the moment every train on the Metropolitan line has a nominal 448 seats. The new trains will have only 307 individual seat places. If you're commuting for over an hour all the way from Amersham into town, that lack of seats is really going to hurt. Perhaps not surprisingly, Metropolitan commuters are seething. bad: But the new seats will be hard plastic things with thin cushions, and not the comfy upholstered seats passengers are currently used to. bad: But there are overhead luggage racks and coat hooks in today's Metropolitan carriages, and none of these will be replaced. Where is Chorleywood Man supposed to store his briefcase and brolly now? bad: But the needs of the long distance Metropolitan commuter are completely different to the needs of the one-stop Circle line user. Why should all these new trains have to use the same carriage layout?
"Trains will have wide aisles and an end-to-end walk-through design" good: And about time too. There'll be space for wheelchairs and luggage and pushchairs, which can only be a good thing. And better security too, because you'll be able to see all the way from one end of the train to the other and need never feel isolated. bad: But that'll just make it easier for rag week students, buskers with accordions and gangs of muggers to work their way down the entire train seeking money and valuables. bad: But you know what the articulated interior design of these new trains really reminds me of? Bendy buses. Cavernous seat-lite bendy buses. Giant walk-through people carriers for the mass movement of human cattle. A lowest common denominator travelling experience, coming soon to a railway line near you.
"Better signalling means the upgrade will deliver 21% more trains per hour on the busiest sections of the upgraded lines." good: And about time too. More frequent trains can only be a good thing. There'll be 5 extra trains an hour to Uxbridge, for example, and as many as 34 trains per hour on the south side of the Circle/District line. Hurrah!
"The work will be undertaken by Metronet." bad: It'll be a bloody disaster, then.
Why do people insist on buying things twice? Maybe not quite in the same format every time, but the same thing nonetheless. You've probably even done it yourself...
"Look, I've upgraded my entire vinyl collection to cassette. Hear how much better it sounds." "Look, I've upgraded my entire cassette collection to CD. Hear how much better it sounds." "Look, I've bought all of my favourite band's singles again, on this compilation album." "Look, I've bought exactly the same compilation album again because it has a different cover and two bonus tracks." "Look, my favourite band has remastered all my favourite albums - I must buy them all again." "Look, I've downloaded all my favourite songs from my teenage years off iTunes." "Damn, my hard drive failed, I'll have to download all my favourite teenage songs off iTunes again."
More recently we've started doing it all again, but with sound and vision. We'll pay to see a good film at the cinema and then pay for it again on DVD so we can watch it in our own homes. It may be a different experience, with added bonus extras, but underneath it's exactly the same story for twice the price. And then there are TV series. We pay our licence fee to watch them "for free" but, because we're a bit useless at setting the video recorder, we often end up buying an entire series on DVD so that we can watch it at our own convenience (or, more likely, leave it on the shelf for a rainy Sunday afternoon and then never quite get round to it). It all adds up.
And now the entertainment industry wants us to buy our TV programmes yet again, but via different media. Television replay services are destined to be big, so the major players hope, be it by satellite, by broadband or by mobile phone. They'll record all your television for you, to save you the effort, and you can pay them extra to watch just the bits you want to see. Like the newly-announced service from BT Vision, for example. An engineer will come round and install a broadband box, at a price, which will let you enjoy all the Freeview channels you can already watch. If there are no cute animal documentaries playing live then you can watch streamed meerkats for just £1.99. If the videos playing on the existing music channels are boring, buy a PIN code to unlock the video of your choice for 29p. Did you miss last night's Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares on Channel 4? Don't worry, BT recorded it and you'll only be charged 99p for the privilege of viewing it. And just how many times can you watch Pulp Fiction in 24 hours? It's only £2.99 to find out.
"Did you see that great TV programmeaboutbloggers on BBC1 last night?" "No, I'm watching it on my computer next Tuesday."
It might all come to nothing. I mean, nobody yet whips out their mobile to watch the X-Factor on the bus down to the pub on a Saturday night, do they? And people won't really fork out £5 to watch an hour of the latest music videos, will they? As we become spoilt for choice, we're in danger of swapping quality for convenience. Paying for video content doesn't necessarily make it better than the stuff we can already watch for free. But we'll probably all fall for it, and the entertainment industry will rub their hands together at screwing us over once again. Pay twice, watch once - that's the future if we're not careful.
My top 10 favourite places I've been to the top of (in no particular order)
1)Helvellyn (Lake District): Much easier to reach from the roadside than land-locked Scafell Pike, and the views are better too. From the top of England's third highest mountain there's an especially fine panorama out across Ullswater, Thirlmere and the green peaks of Lakeland. I particularly enjoyed the exhilarating ascent via the razor-sharp ridge of Striding Edge, with a sheer scree drop to either side. But tread carefully. [Visited: 1982] [map][photos] 2)Gherkin (London): The rarity of this "Open House" ascent made the 3½ hour queue worthwhile, and the view across London from the pointy-topped 40th floor was quite spectacular. Apart, that is, from the reflection in the west windows of the white tablecloths in the restaurant on the floor below - serious design error, folks. [Visited: 2004] [report][my top floor photos] 3)Corona Heights (San Francisco): It's not the most well-known seismic upthrust in the Bay area, but this rocky outcrop affords a splendid close-up overview across downtown. Just behind you, the sanatorium featured in Hitchcock's Vertigo. And do try to ignore the dogs relieving themselves on the scrappy patch of grass below. [Visited: 2002] [map][photo][view] 4)CN Tower (Toronto): The world's tallest freestanding structure was only a month old when my family took the lift to the summit, 1815 feet above Lake Ontario. I wish I'd had the guts to stand on the thickened glass in the floor of the observation deck, but I was much littler and scaredier then. [Visited: 1976] [map][photos] 5)St Paul's Cathedral (London): What, you mean there's another staircase above the Whispering Gallery? And then another less solid-looking set of steps inside the Dome right up to the very top beneath the golden ball? I never realised. All hail Sir Christopher! [Visited: 2003] [visit][view] 6)Eiffel Tower (Paris): The more you pay, the higher you get. I paid my francs and then monté dans l'ascenseur au troisième étage. But I really wasn't expecting to have to change lifts on a tiny platform halfway up the long thin neck of the tower, which made for an interesting mid-air experience. I've improved my French since. [Visited: 1980] [website][webcams][photos] 7)Glyder Fach (Snowdonia): Forget Snowdon (I climbed that in thick fog, so I'm biased). The view you really want is from the top of the Devil's Kitchen, above Llyn Idwal, at the dogleg bend in the deep glacier-cut valley of Nant Ffrancon, in broad backlit sunshine, looking out towards Anglesey. Mere words can't do it justice. [Visited: 1985] [map][views] 8)Beckton Alp (East London): The Thames Estuary is almost uniformly flat, so this old slagheap beside the A13 provided the only decent opportunity to survey East London from above. The artificial ski-slope here closed down several years ago, but they didn't quite fence off the summit properly and so I managed to scramble to the top one overcast afternoon. Ah, to stand all alone amongst the twisted metal remains of a downhill slalom, King of all I surveyed. Unexpectedly life-affirming. [Visited: 2004] [map][history][report][photos] 9)Empire State Building (New York): Manhattan's most glamorous observation deck, thrusting proudly above an astonishing forest of steel and glass. I just wish I'd visited a year earlier when the view downtown was still complete. [Visited: 2002] [website][old photos][new photos] 10)My last workplace (London): Somehow going to the office every day was less of a hardship when my top floor view crossed the treetops of Green Park. When I wasn't staring at my computer screen I could stare instead at Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the Eye, Battersea Power Station, passing helicopters and even Crystal Palace transmitter in the distance atop the rolling southern foothills. Since relocation, alas, my view is of a brown brick wall.
In the latest January edition of DG magazine... • The New Year Detox Diet • Resolve yourself fitter! • Faces to watch in '07 Available now in your local newsagent
What is it about monthly magazines? Why do so many of them insist on running a month ahead of reality? Do they really think we're so stupid that we won't buy a magazine dated 'December' in December in case we think it's an old copy? Alas, yes.
Pop down to your local newsagent and you'll find the January editions of several of Britain's favourite magazines on sale already. The January 2007 edition of Q magazine was published last Friday, the January copy of Empire has a cover article previewing "2007's darkest sequel" and January's FHM boasts "20 new sex tips for 2007". Even Practical Caravan, Cross Stitch Crazy and Classic Tractor have their January editions on sale already. Why? It's not January for four weeks yet. We don't want to read about 2007, we want to read about 2006.
In the ludicrous time-shifted world of the monthly magazine editor, New Year comes early. Magazine editors spend their November putting together articles on slimming and gym-going, and trying desperately to predict the trends of the upcoming year. Even worse, they'll have spent October assembling their special Christmas issues. This means sending out the junior researcher to find artificial snow and fake holly to decorate photographs of festive place settings. And it means trying to cobble together "Review of the year" articles and "Best of 2006" lists when there's still ten weeks of the year remaining, rendering the subjects meaningless. All this so that we, the readers, get our Christmas and nostalgia fix delivered in the first week of November, only to deem these magazines wholly irrelevant and chuck them away unread. And when we do finally want those gift-buying hints and Nigella's turkey-basting tips, at the start of December, it's too late because we're already being forcefed articles on New Year Resolutions instead. Pah!
Not that every magazine is quite as bad. Marie Claire is waiting until this Thursday before going all 2007, British Plastics & Rubber won't be pretending it's January for another fortnight, and most of the BBC magazines hold off until much nearer the end of the month before releasing themselves. Would it really be so awful for circulation if all magazines were more patient and published at the correct time, so that both the date on the front and the content inside were appropriate? It might mean publishing another January 2007 magazine at the end of this month, just to kick things back into proper synchronisation. Or just holding back every remaining 2007 issue by an extra couple of days each month so that the publishing date eventually aligns with reality by the end of the year. We, the British public, are quite intelligent enough to work out that the magazine in the shop must be the latest edition, no matter what month it says on the front cover. Alas, I fear this may never happen. In which case a very Happy New Year to all my readers (and I'd better start planning what I'm going to write for Valentine's Day).
Look, there are only 2012 days remaining until the 2012 Olympics. Or so it says here, in this (blurry) photo I took this morning outside Stratford station. This is the countdown timer looming high over Meridian Square, just a hop, skip and a jump from the site of the new Olympic Stadium. Back in the summer of 2005, when London's Olympic bid had yet to be won, a giant fibreglass statue of a strangely indiscernible athlete stood here beneath this high metal bar [photo]. The timer was then counting down to the 2012 decision (and the ripping of a golden envelope) at lunchtime on 6th July. And then, after London won the Olympics, the model athlete was removed and the timer restarted. It's now counting down to the Games themselves, displaying the remaining days, hours, minutes and seconds to any Stratfordian who cares to look upwards.
Except it isn't correct. This timer isn't counting down to the opening ceremony on 27th July 2012 at all, because that's still 2063 days away. Instead it appears to be counting down to mid-morning on 7th June 2012, some 50 days earlier. I'm not quite sure how this miscalculation could have happened (and neither is the last Olympic official I spoke to), but it is a trifle embarrassing. Seb Coe and friends are going to find it hard enough to build all their stadia in time for the real July 2012 deadline, without setting themselves this even tougher imaginary target. I wonder how long it will take whoever owns this giant mis-timer, be it the London Olympic team or Newham Council, to get their act together and shift the time seven weeks into the future. The clock is ticking...
volume: A forest of flashing speakers has been erected this week in the John Madejski Garden at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This usually serene courtyard is now home to an impressive piece of interactive audio-visual sculpture, entitled volume. Each thin black post, of which there are many, is covered by rows of tiny lights and topped off with a loudspeaker. As visitors wander around amongst the installation, motion detectors control an ever-changing sound-and-light show. Groups of lights glow, and ripple, and change colour, while a random electronic symphony echoes against the surrounding walls. The musical brains behind the volume project are Robert del Naja and Neil Davidge of Massive Attack, and the end result of their efforts sounds both soothing and upbeat (like one of those New Age trippy CDs, but one you might actually buy). The composition evolves, pulsates and modulates, but only until the last visitor retreats from the platform. In the absence of any human stimulation the colours fade away and the electric forest falls silent, pulsing occasionally with white light to beckon back any distant spectators. Go on, step back in, and pump up the volume.
Very Important Pedestrians: Oxford Street and Regent Street have been closed to traffic today in attempt to attract crowds of shoppers to the capital's two main shopping streets. It's not like the pavements are usually quiet, you understand, but today it's possible to step off into the road without being mown down by a passing double decker. Crowds of shoppers have duly turned up, and are swarming around the big (and little) stores snapping up Christmas goodies like there's no tomorrow. The roads aren't completely clear, though. At the intersection of the two streets a group of mysterious white inflatable globes is causing almost as much congestion as the usual traffic lights. Mobile musical entertainment is being provided by bagpipers and a couple of Sally Army brass bands, as well as the odd steel band and ethnic drumming ensemble. Elsewhere there's free mulled wine (if you know where to look), plus the usual balloon-sculpting elves and stilt-walking angels who gravitate towards events such as this. Beside Tottenham Court Road station people are queueing to enter Banksy's annual "Santa's Ghetto" exhibition (photos here). And outside John Lewis I stumbled upon a photocall by Ken Livingstone flanked by a row of grinning Santas (alas, they all buggered off into the nearest department store before I could grab a photo myself). Today's event seems to have been a great success (so long as you weren't trying to ride a bus anywhere nearby), and can only hasten the day when Oxford Street is pedestrianised for good. As for the Christmas shopping, though, it struck me that more pedestrians just means busier shops and longer queues, so I resisted. Maybe I'll return when the cars do - it should be quieter then.
In the dg postbag (because, even in this online age, some mail still arrives via my letterbox)
• The tube network was particularly unreliable last week, with severe delays and track suspensions occurring almost hourly. On Monday my journey into work ended up taking more than 15 minutes longer than normal, so I decided to apply for a ticket refund under TfL's Customer Charter. It's very easy to do online if you have an Oyster card. Hey presto, my refund arrived by post yesterday. And now, hurrah, I have a £3 voucher (the cost of a single journey) which I can exchange for a train ticket at any time during the next 13 months. Which sounds very equitable. Except, erm, why would I want this? All of my daily journeys are already paid for on my Oyster season ticket. Even if I choose to journey outside my allocated zones, the maximum extension fare is only £1.50. What good is £3 towards a paper ticket I shall never use? Why haven't I been given £3 of pre-pay instead which I could actually use? Maybe I'll go out later and donate my free ticket to a passing bag-lady.
• My local council have sent me a leaflet about recycling. They didn't just send somebody round to stick it through my letterbox, oh no, they stuck it in an envelope and posted it to me. The leaflet is to tell me that my new recycling collection day is Tuesday, which is news to me because my address has no recycling arrangements whatsoever. Tower Hamlets council have one of the worst records in the country for recycling, which probably explains why I don't have either a green recycling box or one of their pink recycling bags. All I now have is a leaflet and an envelope, both of which need recycling, and nowhere to put them.
• After I complained about my endowment mortgage last month, I've since complained again about the financial settlement I was offered in redress. Not content with screwing me over once with an incorrectly-sold life assurance policy, the devious corporate leeches then subtracted future life assurance payments when calculating my compensation. They've now apologised for this 'oversight' and upped their original offer. It's only an increase of £42, which is insignificant compared to the size of my mortgage, but I guess every little counts.
Back in September, when I first gave my blog a festive revamp, you all thought I was being wildly premature. Gearing up for Christmas in late summer was consumer madness, surely? But, ten weeks later, who's laughing now? You're not ready for Christmas at all, are you? You've squandered the last couple of months on mindless trivialities when there were gifts to buy, parties to plan, food to prepare and sparkly decorations to purchase.
And now it's December, and Christmas is coming. It's already time to start gobbling down the first chocolate in your Advent calendar. You'll be having your work's drunken 'do' soon, if you haven't already. The last posting date for your Christmas cards is approaching fast, and I bet you haven't even bought them yet. And there are only a handful of weekends left to decide what special present to buy Auntie Jean. Hurry now, before it's too late. Baby Jesus is on his way, and he waits for no man. Fa la la la la la la la la.
I love Christmas. But there's one part of the annual festivities that I hate, and that's buying Christmas presents. It's not that I resent buying gifts for others, you understand, it's just that I find it bloody difficult. And this is because, every year, I make two fundamental mistakes: i) I never ask other people what they want. I know I should, but I don't. And so I traipse round the shops looking at this and that, over and over again, day after day, wondering which of this year's must-have gifts the important people in my life might just possibly like. But I never quite know, and I never stoop to actually asking them, so I always end up buying something they probably don't want instead. Even if everyone's always too polite to say so when they finally unwrap it. ii) I never buy the first thing I see. Why oh why don't I buy the first thing I see? It would save me hours and hours of time. Instead I waste vast portions of my December in overcrowded retail hell. All this time I'm trying desperately to buy something appropriate, something that will make the recipient think "ooh, that's clever, he's so perfectly summed me up in this single gift". But it never works. I usually end up buying something which says more about me than it does about them. I might as well have bought the first thing I saw because they'd have appreciated it just as much. Or just as little.
But I needn't inflict on others the horror of Christmas shopping on my behalf. So here's a special message to members of my family... Can we please have the same arrangement as last year? I'll buy you presents as normal, but you don't have to buy me anything. Honest, there's still nothing I want. No newly published books, no repackaged compilation albums, no overpriced gadgets, no amusingly ethnic novelty items, not even an Ethiopian goat. Really, I won't mind sitting there on Christmas morning not opening anything, just like I didn't mind last year. You deserve to spend less time in the shops this Christmas. And if you have any idea what you might want, maybe I'll save a bit of time too.
My mp3 player's battery ran out during my journey to work yesterday, so I was forced to listen to my fellow commuters instead... • [Bow Road → Mile End] The train grinds to an unexpected halt inbetween stations. The all-enveloping silence in the carriage is suddenly punctuated by a loud snore. Sprawled across two seats is a well-fed bloke in oversized overalls, his head tipped back and his eyes firmly closed. His boots are splattered with dirty white paint, and his lunch dangles from one arm in a blue plastic bag. A second disturbingly loud snort fills the air, causing several nearby passengers to peer up from their newspapers. Intermittent snoring continue, reverberating in all directions as the train goes nowhere. The assembled audience begin to smile and glance at one another in guilty pleasure, relieved not to be the snoozing sideshow themselves. This unintended entertainment continues for three increasingly uncomfortable minutes. And then the train starts forward with a jolt, and one pair of heavy eyelids flick open. The semi-conscious traveller gathers his belongings and prepares to disembark at the next station, blissfully unaware of all the embarrassment he never felt. • [Liverpool Street → Bank] The carriage is rammed. Desperate commuters barge aboard from the platform. An off-duty London Underground employee in bulging blue uniform pushes past me to stake his claim to two square feet of spare floorspace. His over-thick head of grey speckled hair is somewhat unconvincing. A bulky laptop bag packed with official paperwork grazes my leg. As the doors clang shut, the newly-arrived tube worker taps the dreadlocked gentleman beside me on the shoulder. "Can you turn that down?" A hand emerges and pulls half a Sony headphone from one ear. No sound whatsoever can be heard. "Can you turn that down please?" Humiliated, the tapped man fiddles with an unseen volume knob and plugs himself back in. Tubebloke smiles, and looks to the rest of the carriage for implicit approval. Only one lady returns his gaze and smiles back. I feel a sudden urge to bash this sycophantic self-satisfied jobsworth over the head with a rolled up copy of the Daily Express for his totally unnecessary public intrusion, but I resist. The train screeches on through the noisiest tunnel on the entire tube network, far louder than any headphone bassbeat. Nobody utters another word.
threelinks • The London 2012 team have started up their own 2012 Olympic project blog. It's a bit serious, because official blogs have to be, and relentlessly upbeat, because official blogs have to be. But it's also surprisingly comprehensive, refreshingly broad-ranging, revealingly in-depth and unexpectedly interesting. Go read it now, before some of the more depressingly-negative political bloggers discover it and start leaving smug comments. • Do you have The Knowledge to become a London taxi driver? Test yourself out in a series of online tests at the WizAnn website. In what street is Birkbeck College? What route would you take from Hackney Downs to Finsbury Circus? Where on a roadmap is the Trellick Tower? I failed miserably. (Be warned that the final 'map' section of the test works in IE but not Firefox) • The Met Office has just relaunched its website, with increased access to detailed weather data. You can now type in your postcode to see a local five day forecast. You can view local weather observations over the last 24 hours in graphicalformat. You can watch the British Isles rainfall radar. Plus lots of other meteorological nuggets.
I've never liked the way I look in photographs. My smile's twisted, my eyes are vacant and my face looks all wrong. I often look startled, usually look uncomfortable, and always look plain unnatural. I hate my work mugshot and I despise my holiday snaps. In short, photographs of me don't look like me at all. Or so I think. Everybody else, however, always comments on how lifelike my photographs look ("Cor, that's such a good likeness.") ("Oooh, that's very you!") as if they think I really do look like the inane boggle-eyed gimp in the picture. Because (and this is the hard part to come to terms with), I really do look like that.
Every day since I was small I've looked in the mirror whilst cleaning my teeth or brushing my hair and assumed I was looking at an image of myself. I've grown used to every blemish on my skin, every curve of my face and every slightly wayward eyelash. My entire self-image has been generated from this daily reflection, because it makes sense to think that I look like what I see. But, of course, I've been deluding myself. The face I see in the mirror is a reflected fake, reversed from reality. What I see as my left eye is really my right, and that mole on my right cheek is really on my left. My face is truly asymmetrical, and I'm viewing it the wrong way round. However hard I try, I am not who I think I am.
I'm sure I'm not alone in this. You don't look like your photographs either, neither do you appear to others as you appear to yourself in a mirror. And you all know this, deep down, but it's a hard thought to shift.
Here, as an example, are two images of Prince Charles. One of these is the real Prince Charles, as printed in photographs and as seen by Camilla when she wakes up each morning. And the other is the reflected Prince Charles, as seen by His Royal Highness as he peers into the mirror above the royal sink. One's real, one's an illusion. Is it the left Charlie, or the right Charlie? I bet you've already spotted which is which, because one image somehow looks 'right' and the other doesn't. Unless of course you're Prince Charles himself, in which case Sir will instinctively have plumped for the incorrect image because it's the image with which Sir is most familiar.
Annoyingly, I prefer my reflection to the view everyone else sees. I may be wrong, but I think my mirror image looks slightly more handsome than reality. Not by much, you understand - I'm not being smug here - but to my mind I look better through the looking-glass. Maybe I've become conditioned over the years to tolerate the view I see every day, or maybe I genuinely have been asymmetrically unfortunate. Whatever the case, it's probably no bad thing that I'm comfortable with my looks, even if they are merely a visual deception.
And don't get me started on what I sound like to other people. Recordings of my voice always sound completely wrong, and nothing at all like the voice that I hear in my head. Again I know I'm wrong, deceived by vibrations travelling along my jawbone, but that doesn't make listening to my true voice any easier to bear. I mean, did you hear me talking on the video podcast yesterday. Sounded nothing like me, honest. (damn)
Words are dead. The future lies instead in sound and pictures. And that's bad news for blogs like mine which rely on words. People can't be bothered to read words any more, not when they can be spoonfed moving images with an accompanying soundtrack instead. Could be a music video, could be a film trailer, could be a TV snippet, could be two spotty teenagers shouting into a webcam in their bedroom. Whatever the content, sitting back and soaking in a visual experience requires far less effort than having to decode a long string of written sentences. Words are dead.
If I want to survive in the cut-throat online world, I need to evolve. I need to follow the herd and abandon verbal content in favour of embedded YouTube videos. Because, like, you know, they're hilarious, and they're what the public really wants.
So I've had a go at making my very own diamond geezer video podcast. That's me you can hear in the audio, and that's me you can see in the video. I'm a bit new to this, so please forgive me if it's a bit amateur. Until last night I'd never tried recording either sound or vision on my laptop, let alone marrying the two together in a perfectly crafted simultaneous broadcast. I'm not sure I did very well. But it's a start. Because the future's audio-visual. And the written word is dead.
Although, actually, sound and pictures aren't that great, are they? You can read words online much quicker than you can listen to them. You can skim a written post in seconds whereas you might end up wasting five minutes of your life watching rubbish. And if you don't have audio enabled, or if there's too much ambient noise and you can't hear anything, then what good is a post where all the meaning comes from sound? Maybe the written word has a future after all. I hope so. I don't think I'm cut out for video.
I was forced to travel on public transport recently because my car was in for a service. Little did I know that my journey would soon become the bus ride from hell! As I sat on my slightly soiled seat I could feel the squalor of the working classes assaulting my senses on all fronts, but I stared manfully out of the window and tried hard to blot it out. Oh how I longed for a heavily pregnant woman to board the bus so that I could offer her my seat and then stand smugly for the rest of the journey, but no such luck.
As I flicked through your excellent headline article about the continuing mystery surrounding Princess Diana's suspicious death, my ears were suddenly assaulted by the tinny drone of what passes for music these days. It was most off-putting, and I found myself looking over to see which teenage asbo whore might be responsible for this cacophony. Imagine my surprise to see instead a pigtailed blond girl, no more than ten years old, clutching an offensive pink mobile phone from which some cheap digital tune was now blaring. And there beside her sat her disinterested mother, blissfully unaware of the aural damage her daughter was wreaking.
I was not just disgusted, I was appalled. This miserable child was unable to survive a short bus journey without the need for anti-social entertainment. My fellow passengers and I were being forced to endure some blaring R&B nonsense so that this poor little moppet didn't get bored during her ten minute bus journey. Worse still, this council estate urchin had clearly been brought up to have total disregard for her elders and betters by a thoughtless mother. I wanted to beat some sense into this woman's tiny head with my rolled up copy of the Daily Express. I'll give her good manners, traditional values and good clean fun. Somehow I resisted.
This is not the Britain my grandparents fought for. This is a nightmare society where discourtesy and insolence are commonplace. What our young people need is a bit of respect drummed into them, and fast. So I'd like to suggest the return of the death penalty for people who play music out loud on public transport. It's the very least they deserve. And life imprisonment for anyone who has the volume on their headphones up so loud that the person sitting next to them can hear it. That'd show 'em.
What we need is a gibbet on every bus and a gallows on every train. Let's stand up for law and order and good old fashioned morality. I'm not afraid to say what I think. I'm crusading for a better Britain. That's why I read the Daily Express.
Yours enraged, Mr Silent Majority (retd)
P.S. And let's bring back flogging for children who forget to say please and thank you, and teenagers who drop litter in the streets, and company managers who relocate their call centres to India, and neighbours whose bonfire smoke blows across your washing line, and people who let their dogs foul the footpath, and illegal asylum seekers, and gum chewers, and freeloaders, and shop assistants who look at you in a funny way, and...
Most Londoners probably think that their nearest beach is in Southend, or maybe Brighton, but they'd be wrong. There are several beaches (or at least bits of foreshore masquerading as beaches) along the Thames, even through the middle of Central London. When the tide's high you can't see them at all, and many tourists probably never even realise that they exist. But as the river level falls, up to 6½m every twelve hours, so the river ebbs away to reveal long stretches of rock and mud. It may not be golden Mediterranean sand, but if you fancy a bit of beachcombing it's a darned sight more convenient to get to. • watch the Thames rise and fall
This is the beach at Bankside [photo], just below the Tate Modern [photo]. It's one of the longer stretches and, if you time it right, also one of the widest. With a bit of luck somebody will have unlocked the gate in the railings along the river's edge [map] and you can make your way down the low stone steps onto the sand. Yes, that's definitely sand at the top of the beach, although it soon gives way to rock and muddy shingle further down. Eroded half-bricks and pebbles litter the exposed river bed, some dark and jagged, others bleached white and smooth. Decaying wooden stumps stick up from the ground, the remnants of some old wall or Tudor jetty. Dark brown rusty pipes snake half-covered beneath the shingle, thankfully no longer dribbling ooze into the river. There's not as much washed-up litter and glass as you might fear, nor as much green slime as you might expect.
Best of all, you've probably got the whole quarter mile of beach to yourself, all the way from Blackfriars Bridge [photo] to Bankside Pier [photo]. Well, just you and a ragbag collection of feral pigeons, swooping seagulls and big black crows. Try picking your way across the rocks directly underneath the non-wobbly Millennium Bridge and looking across the river towards St Paul's Cathedral on the opposite bank [photo]. You might even spot some fragments of pottery or an old sailor's clay pipe in the mud, although I suspect that most of these were spotted and nabbed long ago. Don't stand too near the water's edge, or the backwash from a passing speedboat or Thames cruiser might overflow your boots. And ignore the funny looks you're getting from tourists wandering along the South Bank above you. Perhaps they can't work out how you got down there, or maybe they simply can't imagine why anyone would want to slum it on a low rocky shelf. But they're the ones missing out. Just make sure you get back up the steps before the beach disappears from view beneath the rising tide.
What An Olympic Clock Up!
bad: But at the moment every train on the Metropolitan line has a nominal 448 seats. The new trains will have only 307 individual seat places. If you're commuting for over an hour all the way from Amersham into town, that lack of seats is really going to hurt. Perhaps not surprisingly, Metropolitan commuters are seething.
volume: A forest of flashing speakers has been erected this week in the John Madejski Garden at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This usually serene courtyard is now home to an impressive piece of interactive audio-visual sculpture, entitled volume. Each thin black post, of which there are many, is covered by rows of tiny lights and topped off with a loudspeaker. As visitors wander around amongst the installation, motion detectors control an ever-changing sound-and-light show. Groups of lights glow, and ripple, and change colour, while a random electronic symphony echoes against the surrounding walls. The musical brains behind the volume project are Robert del Naja and Neil Davidge of Massive Attack, and the end result of their efforts sounds both soothing and upbeat (like one of those New Age trippy CDs, but one you might actually buy). The composition evolves, pulsates and modulates, but only until the last visitor retreats from the platform. In the absence of any human stimulation the colours fade away and the electric forest falls silent, pulsing occasionally with white light to beckon back any distant spectators. Go on, step back in, and pump up the volume.
Very Important Pedestrians: Oxford Street and Regent Street have been closed to traffic today in attempt to attract crowds of shoppers to the capital's two main shopping streets. It's not like the pavements are usually quiet, you understand, but today it's possible to step off into the road without being mown down by a passing double decker. Crowds of shoppers have duly turned up, and are swarming around the big (and little) stores snapping up Christmas goodies like there's no tomorrow. The roads aren't completely clear, though. At the intersection of the two streets a group of mysterious white inflatable globes is causing almost as much congestion as the usual traffic lights. Mobile musical entertainment is being provided by bagpipers and a couple of Sally Army brass bands, as well as the odd steel band and ethnic drumming ensemble. Elsewhere there's free mulled wine (if you know where to look), plus the usual balloon-sculpting elves and stilt-walking angels who gravitate towards events such as this. Beside Tottenham Court Road station people are queueing to enter Banksy's annual "Santa's Ghetto" exhibition (photos here). And outside John Lewis I stumbled upon a photocall by Ken Livingstone flanked by a row of grinning Santas (alas, they all buggered off into the nearest department store before I could grab a photo myself). Today's event seems to have been a great success (so long as you weren't trying to ride a bus anywhere nearby), and can only hasten the day when Oxford Street is pedestrianised for good. As for the Christmas shopping, though, it struck me that more pedestrians just means busier shops and longer queues, so I resisted. Maybe I'll return when the cars do - it should be quieter then.
Back in September, when I first gave my blog a festive revamp, you all thought I was being wildly premature. Gearing up for Christmas in late summer was consumer madness, surely? But, ten weeks later, who's laughing now? You're not ready for Christmas at all, are you? You've squandered the last couple of months on mindless trivialities when there were gifts to buy, parties to plan, food to prepare and sparkly decorations to purchase.
I love Christmas. But there's one part of the annual festivities that I hate, and that's buying Christmas presents. It's not that I resent buying gifts for others, you understand, it's just that I find it bloody difficult. And this is because, every year, I make two fundamental mistakes:
Here, as an example, are two images of Prince Charles. One of these is the real Prince Charles, as printed in photographs and as seen by Camilla when she wakes up each morning. And the other is the reflected Prince Charles, as seen by His Royal Highness as he peers into the mirror above the royal sink. One's real, one's an illusion. Is it the left Charlie, or the right Charlie? I bet you've already spotted which is which, because one image somehow looks 'right' and the other doesn't. Unless of course you're Prince Charles himself, in which case Sir will instinctively have plumped for the incorrect image because it's the image with which Sir is most familiar.
Low tide London
This is the beach at Bankside [photo], just below the Tate Modern [photo]. It's one of the longer stretches and, if you time it right, also one of the widest. With a bit of luck somebody will have unlocked the gate in the railings along the river's edge [map] and you can make your way down the low stone steps onto the sand. Yes, that's definitely sand at the top of the beach, although it soon gives way to rock and muddy shingle further down. Eroded half-bricks and pebbles litter the exposed river bed, some dark and jagged, others bleached white and smooth. Decaying wooden stumps stick up from the ground, the remnants of some old wall or Tudor jetty. Dark brown rusty pipes snake half-covered beneath the shingle, thankfully no longer dribbling ooze into the river. There's not as much washed-up litter and glass as you might fear, nor as much green slime as you might expect.
Best of all, you've probably got the whole quarter mile of beach to yourself, all the way from Blackfriars Bridge [photo] to Bankside Pier [photo]. Well, just you and a ragbag collection of feral pigeons, swooping seagulls and big black crows. Try picking your way across the rocks directly underneath the non-wobbly Millennium Bridge and looking across the river towards St Paul's Cathedral on the opposite bank [photo]. You might even spot some fragments of pottery or an old sailor's clay pipe in the mud, although I suspect that most of these were spotted and nabbed long ago. Don't stand too near the water's edge, or the backwash from a passing speedboat or Thames cruiser might overflow your boots. And ignore the funny looks you're getting from tourists wandering along the South Bank above you. Perhaps they can't work out how you got down there, or maybe they simply can't imagine why anyone would want to slum it on a low rocky shelf. But they're the ones missing out. Just make sure you get back up the steps before the beach disappears from view beneath the rising tide.
Back in September, when I first gave my blog a festive revamp, you all thought I was being wildly premature. Gearing up for Christmas in late summer was consumer madness, surely? But, ten weeks later, who's laughing now? You're not ready for Christmas at all, are you? You've squandered the last couple of months on mindless trivialities when there were gifts to buy, parties to plan, food to prepare and sparkly decorations to purchase.
Here, as an example, are two images of Prince Charles. One of these is the real Prince Charles, as printed in photographs and as seen by Camilla when she wakes up each morning. And the other is the reflected Prince Charles, as seen by His Royal Highness as he peers into the mirror above the royal sink. One's real, one's an illusion. Is it the left Charlie, or the right Charlie? I bet you've already spotted which is which, because one image somehow looks 'right' and the other doesn't. Unless of course you're Prince Charles himself, in which case Sir will instinctively have plumped for the incorrect image because it's the image with which Sir is most familiar.
Low tide London
