At the start of the month, when 20 ticked over to 70, I suggested three numberplate spotting games. Three different sequences to try to follow on new-style registration plates, for no particularly good reason other than to pass the time while out and about.
» Alphabetical By Area Code: A~, B~, C~, D~, E~, F~, G~, etc
» Sequential London Identifiers: LA, LB, LC, LD, LE, LF, LG, etc
» Reverse Chronological: 70, 20, 69, 19, 68, 18, 67, etc
I've now tried playing all three and can confirm that one of the games works really well and the other two very much don't. I was intrigued as to why, so this week have undertaken mass collection of numberplate data to try to understand.
Alphabetical By Area Code
This is the game where you try to spot a plate beginning with A, then a plate beginning with B, then C and so on. Each letter represents a different part of the country so A is for cars registered in East Anglia, B for Birmingham, C for Cymru and so on. You can see a full list of area codes here.
Alas this is one of the games that doesn't really work. Only 19 of the 26 letters of the alphabet are in regular use as area codes, so if you try working your way through this particular alphabet you will get repeatedly stuck.
• Codes I and Z are never used (because they look took much like 1 and 2).
• Codes Q and X are only used on vehicles purchased tax free for export, hence particularly rare.
• Codes J, T and U have no meaning whatsoever, but can still be purchased as part of a personalised plate, so are very rare too.
Experiment 1 - first letter
I stood beside Stratford High Street long enough to watch 571 vehicles go by. I tallied the lot, I didn't wait to do them in order. I wondered what the overall distribution of first letters might tell me. Here are my results as a graph.
There's a lot to unpack here. Numberplates starting with L were a lot more common than any other letter - 22% of the overall total - because L is for London. In second place was E for Essex with 11%, and in third place K for Herts/Beds/Bucks/Northants. I suspect if I'd stood in a different part of London I might have seen a lot more G for Kent or R for Reading. The least common regional plates were C for Wales and V for Worcester because they're a long way away, and O for Oxford because it's only small. I saw more Ss than expected because a lot of our local double decker buses were registered in Scotland.
At the lower end I was amazed to see a Q among my 571 vehicles because they're ridiculously uncommon, and far less surprised not to see an X. Of the three letters used only on personalised plates I only spotted a J, this on a white van owned by J Kent Roofing Specialists from Basingstoke. I could probably have stood there for most of the morning and not seen a T or a U. And this is why Alphabetical By Area Code doesn't really work, the letters are very much not evenly spread.
Sequential London Identifiers
This is the game where you have to work your way through all the initial two-letter pairs in your local area, which in my case means starting with LA and ending with LY. It's crucial to know which pairs were never released, which in London's case is LI, LQ and LZ, and not to waste your time waiting for those.
I know from my previous experiment that around 20% of vehicles in London have L codes of some kind, so there ought to be plenty of spotting opportunities. But when I tried playing the game I got very stuck around LE to LH, wasting days looking without getting any further forward, so something untoward was evidently going on.
Experiment 2 - first two letters
While walking around London I spotted 636 vehicles whose registrations started with L. I tallied the lot, I didn't wait to do them in order. It took a couple of days. I wondered what the overall distribution of area codes might tell me. Here are my results as a graph.
The two-letter codes are a lot more equitably spread this time. Most of the 23 possible codes appeared a reasonable number of times, so if you were hunting for (say) LA then LB then LC then LD you ought to be in luck. But two codes appeared a lot more often than the others, namely LV and LX, with LV easily the champion with 12% of the total. Meanwhile two codes, namely LE and LU, hardly appeared at all. I was so surprised when a single LU finally turned up that I went over and took a photo of it. But I didn't spot LH at all, indeed still haven't, despite the fact it has allegedly been released.
When the new numberplate system was launched in 2001 London had three separate DVLA offices. Wimbledon issued codes LA to LJ, Stanmore used LK to LT and Sidcup took LU to LY (although these offices closed in 2013 and everything's now run from Swansea). These sub-areas may help explain the overabundance of LV and LX in east London, but not the mysterious scarcity of LE, LH and LU. All I can say is that Sequential London Identifiers doesn't really work because there are too many exceptionally rare occurrences along the way.
Reverse Chronological
Which brings me to the game that does work. Counting back from 70 (September 2020) to 51 (September 2001) works rather well, so long as you manage to keep remembering which number comes next in the sequence. There are just enough 70s out there now to start you off, and still just enough 19-year-old 51s to allow you to finish.
Experiment 3 - age identifier
I stood beside Ruckholt Road long enough to watch 417 vehicles go by. I tallied the lot, I didn't wait to do them in order. I wondered what the overall distribution of age identifiers might tell me. Here are my results as a graph.
At last a genuine pattern, and one that makes economic sense. Most vehicles on the road are fairly recent, hence the hump at the beginning, while there are fewer older vehicles the further back you go. I saw more 68s than anything else but the other codes from 2016 to 2020 weren't far behind... indeed 43% of the overall total came from the last five years. Meanwhile a quarter of the total came from 2011-2015, and this dropped to just 5% by the time I got back to 2001-2005.
The surplus bar at the end of the graph includes all the vehicles registered before the current system was introduced, plus all the personalised numberplates that sit outside the system. Altogether they made up about 7% of the total, or one in every 15 vehicles. On this particular dual carriageway they split roughly fifty-fifty between old and personalised, but you'd get a very different split if you surveyed traffic in Barking or Belgravia.
And this is why, if you want to play a sequential numberplate spotting game, it's much better to focus on ages than area codes. Always do your research before undertaking a potentially pointless activity. I'm sure you'll all be rushing to have a go this weekend.
Before entering this webpage
please scan the QR code below
using the NHS COVID-19 app
It is now a mandatory requirement to collect details for NHS Test and Trace upon entering a public place.
Over two thousand people gather on this website daily, many of whom may be asymptomatically infected with coronavirus. It is therefore essential that we all check in and share our personal details every time we visit the blog in order to stay alert and control the virus.
Do not scroll down until you have scanned the unique QR code using the NHS COVID-19 app.
If you do not have a smartphone you must enter your details physically.
name: telephone number: e-mail address: postal address:
Please note that NHS Test and Trace cannot guarantee the security of the personal data you have entered here, just as it cannot guarantee the security of any data you may scribble on a piece of paper before entering a restaurant, bar or leisure centre. The app's much-lauded decentralised security protocols only apply to people with suitable smartphones, and everyone else is stuck with plain text.
Please do not feel tempted to enter false data for contact tracing purposes, even though this is very easy and nobody will ever know.
The new NHS COVID-19 app is now available to download for free in England and Wales. It has a number of tools to protect you including contact tracing, local area alerts and venue check-in. It uses proven technology from Apple and Google designed to protect every user's privacy (unlike the bespoke app the UK was promised in May but which had to be scrapped in favour of something which actually worked).
Checking-in is simplicity itself, using long-standing QRtechnology with which the entire nation is familiar. Hold your phone near the QR code, or maybe point your camera at it, or perhaps you have to fire up the app first - you'll certainly know which of these it is.
A confirmation screen will pop up displaying your location, while simultaneously storing your location in case anybody else at this location should test positive during the relevant window.
Intriguingly the sole smartphone requirement in The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Collection of Contact Details etc and Related Requirements) Regulations 2020 is that an individual should use it "to scan the QR code with that smartphone as, or immediately after, they enter the premises". Nothing in the legislation states that the NHS app must have been downloaded, nor that the scanned QR code has to trigger anything whatsoever, so you could probably get away with waving your dud phone at the code and walking straight past, but please don't do that.
Do not question how the NHS COVID-19 app actually works, just be reassured that it probably does. Privacy is paramount, which is the main reason it's taken four months to develop, and the relentless drain on your battery is a small price to pay. Only by testing and tracing can we control the virus, and this is a big step towards making contact tracing almost work. Prompt effective nationwide testing, alas, may take considerably longer.
When I went to Ramsgate last week I didn't stop there, I continued around the coast. This means I can also bring you reportage from Broadstairs, thereby getting additional value from my day out (and if you're really lucky I'll bring you Margate later).
✉Broadstairs is probably the most seasidey of Thanet's coastal towns, and in a good way too. A horseshoe of a promenade overlooks a crescent of a beach, very much from above, with food and ice cream up top and sand and seaweed down below. A lift connects the two but it's often closed, and permanently closed at present, so rather a lot of stairs remains your best option. This is Viking Bay, no longer subject to horny-helmeted invasion from offshore and all the better for it.
✉ One arc of beach huts runs along the sand and another, much smarter, on a raised terrace behind. The southernmost corner of the sand has been genteelly fenced to surround swings and roundabouts - more of the former than the latter. The beach wasn't at its busiest midweek, despite the very decent weather, so two very large signs pointing inland towards 'Deckchairs' were proving unnecessary. That said a few topless bookreaders had turned up, plus a grazing couple safely tucked behind a windbreak, and I was wholly unnerved by the ring of seagulls surrounding one particular elderly couple.
✉ Up on the boardwalk a lot more activity was going on. A crowd of appreciative pensioners were engrossed beside the bandstand listening to a bloke in a flat cap singing Valerie. Restaurant terraces were packed with couples dining on seafood and fizz, especially at the back of the hotel where Charles Dickens stayed in <checks plaque> 1839, 1840, 1845, 1849 and 1853, penning a few chapters of Nicholas Nickleby while he was here. The Broadstairs Information Kiosk apologises for being closed for the remainder of the year, a sign which I suspect went up in March, but hopes to be back in 2021. The longest queues were outside Morelli's, Broadstairs' fabulously Art Deco ice cream parlour, which was a shame because the prevailing rigmarole proved just enough to put me off buying a classic double scoop.
✉ Twirling offshore were the turbines of the ThanetWind Farm. They're actually eight miles offshore, so somewhat indistinct, but a decent zoom (or a good pair of binoculars) make them a lot clearer. The 100 turbines are laid out in rows half a mile apart, so if you walk along the coast to the right point the seemingly random blades suddenly combine to form a multi-fingered beast. This wind farm was the largest in the world when it opened in 2010, generating enough juice to power a quarter of a million households, but technology has moved on since and it's no longer even in the Top 20. Plans for 34 more turbines, closer to the shore and collectively more powerful, were turned down by the government earlier this year.
✉ The clifftop between Ramsgate and Broadstairs makes for an attractive (and extremely accessible) stroll. At one point the path heads through a secluded park but most of the way it's all coast-facing promenade, lined on one side by homes you'd retire to (or buy up well before you retired to take full advantage). A lot of dogs get walked here, generally of the small kind. Memorial benches remind passers by that Jack and Doreen, Gordon and Vera, Moss and Joyce loved this place. What I didn't really get was a proper sense of the sheer chalk cliff face beneath me, save at a few choice spots where a headland provided an oblique viewpoint... or by reading the repeated signs warning me that clambering over the railings probably meant death.
✉ Outside one of these clifftop houses I found this car with this numberplate, which I present without comment, other than to say of course it's a Kia, and that when this particular plate was released in 1996 the DVLA can't have been as censorious (or as alert) as they are today.
✉ The only break in the cliff face south of Broadstairs occurs at Dumpton Gap, a V-shaped notch where a steep straight path provides access to a small beach. In 1914 this spot was chosen as one end of the Siemens Brothers Anglo-Belgian telephone cable, consisting of 28 copper wires wound into seven groups of four, the other end being at Ostend. A separate cable ran from here to the North Goodwin Light Vessel. European communication is no longer reliant on the hut at the top of the ramp, so you could probably ring down to Sam's Cafe and get them to do you a bacon sandwich using much superior mobile technology.
✉ Meanwhile to the north of Broadstairs the sandy bays and residential clifftops continue. The surf was up this time last week so a few groups of wetsuited boarders trod water in the breakers waiting to ride the North Sea back to shore. Cyclists whizzed by in slightly podgy lycra, following the Saxon Shore Way for an exhilarating long distance ride. And on North Foreland, where the houses got larger, grander and much more security conscious, I made sure to check out the top of the staircase cut into the chalk which inspired John Buchan's 39 Steps. I wish I'd dared to follow it down to the beach the first time I came here in 2008 because it's subsequently been gated and locked with an electronic security code. I tried 3939 on a hunch, but sadly it didn't open.
Today it's six months since the Prime Minister addressed the nation and ordered us to lockdown, and the toilet roll ran out and the economy collapsed and everything was cancelled and thousands of people got sick and died and we didn't see one another for weeks and months, maybe still haven't.
And last night he was broadcasting to the nation again, reversing some of the normality he'd chosen to unlock and warning us these restrictions might be in place for another six months, six months, crushing normality until next spring or even longer, who's to say, that is if normality ever comes back at all because our old lives might just be gone and this is how things are now, forever maintaining a distance from one another as the economy crashes beyond the point of no return and everything we ever built up is systematically destroyed by a mismanaged pandemic.
They urged us not to catch the virus and then caught it themselves, they told us to stay at home if we were ill and then drove across country regardless, they failed to plan ahead and left millions vulnerable, they appointed their mates, they misjudged the tipping point between freedom and common sense, they paid us to eat out and then told us off for mingling together, they urged us to go back to work and then urged us not to, they promised a world-beating system which failed to deliver, they dripfed us rules too complicated to follow, they blamed us when everything went wrong, they left us to burn.
The country's been going to hell in a handcart for some time now, society has somehow been divided into two opposing factions, entrenched positions well beyond the fault lines of normal politics, prejudices keenly whipped up by social media and a hysterical press, fellow citizens hurling insults and invective, each side hating the other with deep-seated intolerance, how dare they think that, breaking us apart at precisely the time we should have been working together, whatever happened to consensus, it's now one extreme or the other and woe betide if you dare to disagree.
And it's not just us here in the UK, other countries have found themselves engulfed by division, America in particular, what did they do to deserve the current incumbent of the White House, a man so self-obsessed that he lies by default, a dangerous ignoramus who should never have been allowed near high office in the first place, and yet he could easily be re-elected in a few weeks time because millions believe what they're told without question, and admittedly we've survived almost four years without him pressing the nuclear button, or worse, but that's no guarantee we'd survive another term.
Meanwhile Brexit is still ticking away, not the endless agonising debate that's now behind us but the awkward truth of what happens next if at the end of this year a deal fails to materialise, like that hasn't been the underlying plan all along, unless it's all a grim game of poker and our side is holding out against sanity until the last gasp, but the Irish border question remains logically unsolvable, an entirely undeliverable pipedream, so best expect paperwork meltdown, queues at the border and gaps on the shelves one week after we've all failed to meet up for Christmas.
How did we end up with a government like this at a time like this? Boris's election strategy last year flushed out the moderate MPs and appointed only lickspittle disciples, ideal for voting through the necessary agenda but hardly a pool of talent, from which has been selected an inexperienced cabinet dealing with problems the like of which nobody has ever seen before, for which the country will pay the price for a generation, and all the while forwarding a radical deregulation agenda, because what better time to tear apart our national institutions than under cover of a global disaster.
The economy was always too finely poised, the rules of competition forcing companies to function on the narrowest of margins, hard enough to make profitable in the best of times, nigh impossible in a year of unprecedented disruption, and if you had the bad luck to be in a business targetted by social distancing doubly so, some jobs simply won't be coming back, so when furlough tips over into redundancy millions of workers' livelihoods are doomed, it's a benefits lottery on a grand scale, and while it's possible to continue to throw away billions to keep the wolf from the door the country'll be indebted for years, if not the rest of your life, if not forever.
Our fellow citizens have become intransigent and bitter, getting furious about things they'd never previously been angered by, jumping to conclusions based on incorrect assumptions, twisting words to ridicule opinions never intended, cancelling others on limited evidence, emboldened by support from people as irrationally furious as themselves, screaming into the void and poisoning public debate, because this is how we live now, in an echo chamber of hysterical fury, overlooking consensus, seeing only the bad, raising hackles rather than listening to reasoned arguments, forever ignoring the fact we might be wrong, and history warns us where all this ends up.
Meanwhile the ice sheets melt and the atmosphere warms up, inexorably, because although we could do something to stop it we can't be bothered, why save the future if it might inhibit the present, and yes we might create deserts where there are none, and yes we might end up flooding the land where billions of us live, and yes we might eventually struggle to feed the planet, and yes if you think the migrant crisis is bad now just you wait, but never mind because it's only our grandchildren who'll suffer so who cares that an investment not made today will be a catastrophe tomorrow.
And who's to say there isn't another pandemic waiting in the wings, and what happens anyway when all our antibiotics stop working, and a single solar flare could neutralise all our technology tomorrow, and we're only ever one large meteor away from total destruction, and artificial intelligence is sure to rise up one day rise up and override us, and it only takes one human error to create the doomsday scenario that destroys modern society, and what if 2019 was genuinely as good as it ever gets and from this point on we are merely freewheeling to our doom?
We are but one tiny planet in the vast emptiness of the universe, maybe even the sole example of cultural intelligence in the history of creation, custodians of innumerable generations of human advancement with a whole range of possible models of society at our disposal, and yet we seem happy to throw everything away and live in increasing misery, led by idiots we somehow elected to a position of absolute power, brought to our knees by a virus we always expected but never prepared for, and all because self-interest and short-term thinking trump foresight and cooperation, until the whole of human existence collapses around us and if we weren't all dead we'd only have ourselves to blame.
At the autumn equinox, which is precisely now, the northern hemisphere passes from the brightest half of the year to the darkest. But how much darker is it? Let's bash some numbers.
London gets about 4480 hours of daylight a year (the equivalent of 187 days). If that daylight was spread equally then each month would see about 8% of the year's total, but it's not so they don't.
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
8%
7%
6%
5%
6%
6%
8%
9%
11%
11%
11%
10%
September and March get the average of 8% because they're the months when the year's two equinoxes take place. December has the least daylight, less than half of that enjoyed in June and July. July actually has a smidgeon more daylight than June, solely because it's one day longer.
But what I'm more interested in today is what percentage of the year's daylight falls between the autumn equinox and the spring equinox. How much darker is it about to get?
In London autumn and winter get 39% of the year's daylight while spring and summer get 61%. This may not be as great a variation as you were expecting given how dark it's about to get. But viewed another way it means that spring/summer has about half as much daylight again as autumn/winter, and maybe that chimes better with our imminently disappearing evenings.
The daylight balance varies at other latitudes.
autumn/winter
spring/summer
London (51½°)
39%
61%
Paris (49°)
40%
60%
Rome (42°)
42%
58%
Cairo (30°)
45%
55%
Manila (15°)
48%
52%
equator (0°)
50%
50%
The closer you get to the equator, the smaller the discrepancy between the brighter and darker halves of the year. In the tropics it's almost imperceptible.
But the closer you get to the North Pole, the greater the imbalance.
autumn/winter
spring/summer
London (51½°)
39%
61%
Newcastle (55°)
37%
63%
Shetland (60°)
34%
66%
Reyjkavik (64°)
31%
69%
Svalbard (78°)
13%
87%
North Pole (90°)
0%
100%
The further north you go the smaller the proportion of the year's daylight occurring over the autumn and winter months. Up in Shetland it's only one-third, and by the time you hit the Arctic Circle more like a quarter. The North Pole's weird, so let's not go there.
In short, the further north you live the gloomier the next six months are going to be, possibly quite significantly so. Hang on in there and the good times will return, half a year from now.
