It's always a pleasure to receive mail from one's readers. I've had quite a bit recently (well, more than the usual couple a month), so I thought I'd share some choice correspondence with you. I get more proper email than spam these days - it's great.
Great Aunt Annie wrote from New Zealand with her wartime memories of a V1 bombstrike on SW London.
"My mother, sister and I were sleeping on a double mattress on the sitting-room floor, my father was dozing in an armchair, and my other sister was sleeping, Harry Potter style, in the cupboard under the stairs. I woke up to hear my mother telling me not to move because there was glass everywhere. The blast from the bomb had blown out all the windows but my mother had pulled the covers over us. Thankfully we were all uninjured. I moved my head just a fraction and heard glass tinkling on the pillow. I think we must have stayed where we were until the all-clear sounded. The next thing I remember is us all walking down the main road, heading for the school shelters. To my six-year-old mind, the most bizarre aspect of the situation was being out in the street in my dressing-gown and slippers in the middle of the night. It was eerie; no street lights, no traffic, just the five of us trudging along in the moonlight, like an L S Lowry painting."
James Blogwell wrote because he's delivering a literary conference paper about London Blogging and is planning to include my site amongst the sixorsevenLondonblogs he's featuring. Me, academic source material? Much honoured, Sir.
"The conference is at Senate House on Friday and Saturday 16-17 July. Unfortunately it's a miserable £50 to get in, though obviously for that you get much more than my twenty-five minutes - you get about 100 papers with titles like 'A Society of Gardeners: Writing and Gardening in Eighteenth-Century London' and 'Kicking the Dog Will do: J.G. Ballard's Peripheral Vision of London'. Details are here. I'm on just after midday on the Saturday."
Anne wrote to my Gmail address to tell me that my blog has been banned in Korea.
"It all started on 24 June when the video of Kim Sun-il's murder started circulating. The Korean Ministry of Information and Communication (Orwellian or what?) closed access to internet sites showing it. They could only manage it by the bluntest of means - by closing access to the hosts. As you are with blogspot, and they are one of the hosts of an offending site, Korean access to Diamond Geezer is denied. The same is true for all Blogger blogs and Typepad. OK, so there are lots of far more desperate human rights issues round the world, but I thought you might be interested since your blog is involved, and be able to spare a moment to sign one or both petitions."
Tanya Millard wrote after I'd praised her '100-square of bus photos' currently appearing at my local art gallery. I'd also really liked a series of photographs of London greens - a sort of Dulux colour chart of turf close-ups with matching streetnames (this is 'Stepney Green') - and wondered if that was her work too.
"Yeah, the greens are mine too. That project was more problematic as not all the greens in London have a sign saying the name of the green, and not all of them are actually grass, some are road names."
Mr Kim is also local.
"Congrats on site. You seem to have most of my interests!!! What about a section on local pubs? (Or is that thought just TOO depressing?) I took attached pic from my window...do you recognise location?"
Sorry Mr K, I'm not impressed enough by my local pubs to run a series on them, although I have written a post about one of them before. And yes, I recognise which window in which nearby block of flats that picture must have been taken from, but I shan't let on where it is.
Can I also thank Brian for his newspaper cutting (no, I haven't recently been ordained), thank Terry in Indonesia and MikeMK for their kind comments, and apologise to George that there isn't an RSS feed of my blog available, just an Atom feed that appears to have stalled in early February. And thank you all for bothering to write, it's appreciated.
The currant editors of the Oxford English Dictionary have issued a press release. They're latest research suggests that people are making more spelling mistakes than ever before. These eminent lexicographers reckon that the golden days of literacy have past. Our language skills are going backwards, they're not stationery.
The problem is that writers are showing little flare when selecting the correct word from two that sound the same. Pour over any word-processed document and you'll soon spot what I mean. This grizzly situation is the fault of computer spellcheckers. Spellcheckers work very well in principal but they can't spot when a word is being used in the wrong place. The overall affect is to produce sentences that make no sense. Its a widespread problem, so they say.
But I disagree with the manor of their conclusions. This is just a bunch of publishers with a new dictionary to pedal. Somebody needs to reign them in before they get too big-headed. Who's idea was it for them to lecture us all in this way anyway? They'll soon loose all credibility if they carry on like this. We can't just wave this incident through.
So I reckon someone needs to diffuse the situation. I think I should send those dictionary editors a discrete email. I'm loathe to do it but somebody has to put a stop to this groundless publicity-seeking. Just to drawer their attention to how wrong they are on this particular subject. I refuse to tow the line. I shall not be phased. I won't be paying them any complements either. OED, your so wrong. Our spelling is grate.
It's nice to have a Mayor who's an optimist, and Ken Livingstone most certainly is. Earlier this week he slipped out a new map of London showing how the tube network might look by 2016. You can download the whole map here, assuming you can cope with pdfs, or view some choice segments elsewhere courtesy of Geoff and Annie. Is there a word for a London tube map o-holic? If so, I confess to being one. <hit> <hit> <hit> <hit>
Only three extra Underground sections are planned - the EastLondon Line, a tunnel out to Heathrow Terminal 5 and the tiny Croxleylink (which you probably don't care about, but I do because this particular link has been on the drawing board for the last 30 years in the village where I grew up). The 2016 map also features various potential tramway projects, Crossrail, Thameslink and a few DLR extensions, further details of all of which you can find on the brilliant alwaystouchout website. I suspect only a fraction of the new lines shown on the map will actually get built because they require those two most rare of commodities - money and commitment - but we can dream.
Here's how Stratford station in east London might look one day, an overdeveloped mass of lines and interlocking circles. There's the Central line and the end of the Jubilee line, there's mainline services to East Anglia, there's the North London Line northwest towards Hackney, there's the existing DLR and a new DLR extension to Stratford International, there's the new Eurostar terminal and finally there's Crossrail. Blimey. Too late for the Olympics though, alas (and probably almost as likely to actually happen).
Meanwhile here are some additional new lines Ken appears to have missed off his 2016 map:
• Grand Prix Circle Line: A guided trackway capable of transporting individual helmeted passengers round the West End and back to their starting point 75 times, and a bargain at only £10 million per ticket.
• Northern Line extension: Now that London's economic hinterland reaches as far as Grimsby, so does the tube network. Bloody long way to commute though.
• Very Cross Rail: "Why has this train stopped in the middle of a tunnel, and it's far too overcrowded, and have you seen the price of a ticket, and that bloke's not wearing any deodorant."
• Central Iraq Line: The quickest and most convenient way to transport British troops to the Middle East. "This train terminates at Baghdad Parkway."
• East London Line extension: 500 yards of new track branching off from Walford East calling at Launderette, Allotment Central and Arthur's Bench.
• Docklands Heavy Railway: A special commuter link with extra-wide seats for obese Canary Wharf workers.
• Lovely Jubbly Line: "You want Peckham do you? Sorry mate, we don't go south of the river."
• A brand spanking new underground network full of air-conditioned trains that travel on time: By 2016, even with PPP funding? Fat chance.
Formula 1 cars came to the streets of London last night. At least I think they did. I was standing right next to where I think they were, but I didn't actually see any. I think there were eight of them, judging by the number of times I heard a noise like a herd of demon dentists armed with pneumatic drills passing by, but I saw nothing except a few clouds of burning rubber.<
Trouble was, lots of other people had come to see the Formula 1 cars too and they'd got to Waterloo Place before me. Trouble was, the pavements from here up to Regent Street are very narrow so there was very little room for half a million spectators to stand. Trouble was, I ended up way back on the seventh row of the pedestrian grid squashed into a tiny space about the same size as a Formula 1 cockpit. Trouble was, the event was supposed to start at 6 so everyone got there at 5:30 but the first car didn't set off round the course until 7. Trouble for the people on the other side of the road was, the organisers parked the street cleaning vehicles right beside them completely blocking their line of sight which nearly caused a mutiny. Trouble was, everyone around me seemed to be a six-foot-something petrolhead wielding a camcorder blocking off any last slivers of the remaining view. Trouble was, the event wasn't so much a race as a relay, with each car having to wait for the previous car to get back to the start before it could rev up and zoom off. Trouble was, Formula 1 cars go past very fast indeed so they're very hard to spot before they're gone. Trouble was, and this is the real killer, Formula 1 cars are only three feet high, so whichever jerk thought it would be a good idea to parade them through the streets of London in the hope that huge numbers of the public would be able to see them needs their head examining.
Variouspeople are now supporting the introduction of a London Grand Prix racing round the streets of the West End. These people are hideously misguided. The last thing London needs is three days of road traffic chaos so that almost no spectators can watch 20 overpaid motorists negotiating traffic islands and cycle lanes whilst trying very hard not to crash into a department store window, all for the benefit of multimillion pound sponsorship deals and a global television audience. Bunch of Prix, all of them.
TV programme of the month: The Long Firm (BBC2, Wednesdays in July, 9pm). Sixties gangland is brought to life in this acclaimed BBC drama adaptation of Jake Arnott's debut novel. We follow gangster Harry Starks, a nightclub owner, racketeer, porn king and avid Judy Garland fan, making and losing his fortune in swinging Soho. Starks is played by Mark Strong who you'll remember as that dark-haired bloke in Our Friends In The North. He's supported by the godlike Sir Derek Jacobi and the iconic Phil Daniels, as well as a bit of rough kicked out of Eastenders. Absolutely BAFTA-winning, so make sure you're watching it. (Er, yes, I know I'm gushing and I haven't actually seen the the first episode yet because it's not being broadcast until tonight, but it'll be fantastic because the book was. I'll come back here tonight at 10pm and change my mind if the BBC have got it wrong, but I doubt that I'll need to)
You can't move in Hyde Park without bumping into some memorial to Princess Diana. That's because she used to live up at one end in Kensington Palace, looking winsome and being sick occasionally. There's a Princess Diana Memorial Walk which snakes its way through the park marked by raised studs in the footpath. There's a Princess Diana Memorial Playground which is full of pirate ships and wigwams (and really rather fantastic for any kids with an imagination). There's a Princess Diana Memorial Brick-Spiral-Thing outside the Serpentine Gallery, of which she was patron. And, as of today, there's the new Princess Diana Memorial Fountain, which looks like this:
The fountain is a grey stone oval the size of half a football pitch set into the grass beside the Serpentine. It's been built from 545 chunks of Cornish granite, each slab lovingly sculpted to fit together in a curving channel complete with every water feature Charlie Dimmock ever dreamed of. 100 litres of water per second will gush, cascade, bubble and babble down this liquid necklace from the top level (rear right of photo) to the pool at the bottom (lower left, where all the workmen's tools are lying). It wasn't bubbling when I was there at the weekend because there was no water in it, but it'll be bubbling today once the Queen's stood beside it and said how much she really quite liked Diana, honest.
The fountain's not quite as pastoral and idyllic as it looks. That turf is brand new and has yet to bed down. And what you can't see in the photo are the Lido tearooms to the left and the newly-tarmacked car park to the right, immediately beside the busy road that runs through the middle of the park. But I rather liked the fountain. Some have said that Diana deserved better than a mere 'puddle', but to me this giant paddling pool looks perfect for wading in, exploring and generally interacting with for many generations to come. It's for children, not for adults, and if I were five years old again I'd be in my element.
Meanwhile, just under a mile to the west, Diana's real shrine can be found outside the gates of Kensington Palace. Even seven years after her untimely death the railings are still festooned with laminated photographs, newspaper cuttings and cheap bouquets. It would have been Diana's 43rd birthday last week (she'd have been heavily into Botox by now, wouldn't she?) and the fresh birthday tributes pinned to the gates are the outpourings of the irrationally obsessed. Especially the poetry. I had to photograph a couple of the most toadying eulogies just to take in the sheer awfulness of them. Click here for one particularly verbose devoted dirge, and click on the extract below to read the full gobsmacking text of the following.
It was left to another mother talking to her children outside the Palace gates to come up with the perfect summary of Diana's life. She was trying to explain who the princess was to her three daughters, none of whom had even been born while Diana was alive. And Mummy came up with the following. "She was a nice lady who died." And yes that's all she was, in the right place with the right face at the right time, just as flawed as the rest of us and probably more so. At least we got a couple of heirs, a few less landmines and a nice paddling pool out of her. I hope that one day the cult of Diana can finally be laid to rest. And if not, well, at least the poetry's a scream.
Hyde Park is no ordinary park. It's enormous, a giant green grass rectangle only slightly smaller than the City of London. The western half of the park is officially called Kensington Gardens. It's all ancient land, acquired by Henry VIII for hunting almost 500 years ago. It's beautifully landscaped, with carriage drives, tree-lined avenues and open lawns. It includes the Serpentine, an elegant thin lake slicing down the middle of the park. It includes the Albert Memorial, a garish golden pinnacle gilded in the blood of Empire. It includes Rotten Row, originally the fashionable riding track between Kensington Palace and Piccadilly. It includes Speaker's Corner, that bastion of free speech where you can hear boring fanatics drone on about some supposedly burning issue. It is no ordinary park.
And yet Hyde Park is also a very ordinary park. I went for a wander around Hyde Park yesterday afternoon, and in many ways it's probably very much like your local park. It has all the usual park-y features, as listed below. Aren't parks great?
Grass: Got nothing to do? Never fear, because park lawns are a green canvas for your imagination. You can sit on them, have a picnic on them, kick a ball about on them, sunbathe on them, read a book on them and snog on them. And look, that's a whole afternoon filled already. Hyde Park has immaculate grass, all 600 acres of it. Paths: These are essential to the smooth running of any park, helping divorced dads to get their offspring to the ice cream van and back with ease. They're also perfectly designed for pushchairs, bicycles, joggers and those little green trucks that parkkeepers drive, so watch where you're walking in case you get knocked over. Hyde Park has official 'skate instructors', trying desperately to teach wobbly rollerbladers to stand upright. Wildlife: Britain's parks are like mini zoos, each containing exactly the same cuddly animals much loved by little children everywhere. See the little squirrels nibbling their nuts in the rosebeds. See the mangy ducks quacking loudly for crumbs of sliced wholemeal. See the fat pigeons lolloping along because they're too heavy to fly. And don't see the rats because they only come out at night. Hyde Park has very tame squirrels, as you can see. Turdbins: Many years ago you couldn't sit down in a park for fear of lowering yourself onto something brown and smelly. Nowadays you can't walk for more than a minute in a park without seeing some well-meaning dog owner scooping up something brown and smelly and placing it in a plastic bag. I don't know which is more unpleasant. Hyde Park is jam-packed full of dogs, many of them brown and smelly. Tearooms: If you've been stupid enough to forget your picnic basket, never fear because your local council will have opened up a small kiosk selling weak tea, Cornettos and pre-packed biscuits. Hyde Park has some very upmarket tearooms of a distinctly 70s design, selling posh ice cream and paninis. Bandstand: The old Victorian bandstand always stands rusting in one corner of the park, lonely and unloved. Local youngsters are more likely to use it for graffiti practice than for band practice. In Hyde Park yesterday the band outnumbered the geriatric deckchair-bound audience. Pond: When children get bored, send them off to stand around the shallow duck sanctuary filled with stagnant water and crisp packets. No paddling, swimming or divebombing the swans is permitted. As well as the Serpentine, Hyde Park also has its own proper pond called the Round Pond, which is actually octagonal. Civic artwork: Municipal art usually comprises of three ugly concrete blocks erected at the behest of some council committee who hoped it might improve community focus. They were wrong. Hyde Park has plenty of statues and also its very own art gallery (admission free, and well worth a look). Fountain: In the centre of every park lies a stone statue featuring the only genitalia your Victorian forebears were permitted to gawp at, leaking off-colour water into a large bowl probably filled with washing-up liquid. Hyde Park has a brand new fountain, of which more tomorrow...
Spamnation: Last Wednesday I commented on 100 other blogs. It seemed like a good idea back then, but today appears to be payback time because I've been targeted by the dreaded spam commenters. Bugger. The first spam comment appeared at 8am, then a couple during the morning, and then 21 in half an hour between 1:15 and 1:45 this afternoon. All the spam comments are supposedly posted by males whose surname is also a forename (like 'joseph dennis' or 'harold michael'), they all feature a desperately limp comment (like 'You are right of course... But..' or 'Thanks. I hope other people test it too.') and they all end up by giving a URL they'd like my readers to sample (like we're stupid enough to fall for that). All the comments have arrived from different IP addresses, so I can't ban any particular one and block the spam out, and I have a horrible feeling there may be an awful lot more on the way. At least there's some comfort in the fact that the idiots behind this spam scam are commenting on posts from days, weeks or more likely months ago that none of you lot are still reading. If they ever work out how to automatically target the top post on my main page, then we're in trouble. In the meantime, any pest extermination experts out there?
Indie music quiz: For the fourth of July, can you identify the 13 American cities appearing in either the title or the artist of the following UK hit records? (Answers in the comments box)
BB5 update: It's the most action-packed Big Brother, ever. Conspiracy, snogging, cliques, threats, bedsits, nervous breakdowns, evictions, ejections, violence and sex. And there are the most flawed characters in the house, ever. Camp, strident, bullying, smug, vain, screeching, false, jealous, selfish, immature, sulky and chicken. And I'm the least interested in the whole series, ever. Normally it takes us weeks to get to know the housemates inside out but this year we've uncovered far too much far too unpleasant far too early. I'm still addicted, obviously, but not as much as I should be. Shame.
BB25 update: We've had Bendy Buses on route 25 for a week now. There's no getting rid of them then. They're still hunting in packs, alternately crammed and half-empty, scuttling down the Mile End Road like a plague of giant red caterpillars. Bow Church station appears to be the designated stop where all the drivers change over, or at least where five drivers stand and queue and wait in case any much-delayed bus should actually turn up for them to board. A large number of existing bus shelters are suddenly being dug up, which means the newly-installed ticket machines are temporarily fenced off and nobody can buy a ticket before boarding any more. My nearest bus stop has been downgraded to a request stop for no adequately explained reason, physically moved to the opposite end of its bus shelter and no longer has a timetable posted. And I'm disturbed to discover that there are proper official planning proposals in the pipeline to extend the road markings for this particular bus stop from 19m long (1 bendy bus length) to 45m long (2½ bendy buses!), which will mean the obliteration of the only parking space along this strip of road. Apparently this is progress. I still yearn for the golden era, just one month ago, when cuddly Routemasters and nice friendly double deckers served my local community rather than dominating it.
BR update: Bow Road station, that Victorian jewel on the eastern District Line, continues to undergo 'renovation'. It's been four months since proper work started, apparently. All the surfaces along the platforms and across the front of the station are covered by blue walls, behind which it's still not clear that anything has actually happened. The ticket hall, stairways and platform roof are not covered by blue walls, and are therefore still as grimy, untreated and rundown as they've been for decades. I have a horrible feeling that this renovation is going to take far far longer than planned. It's also getting more and more difficult to find something new to write about each day given that absolutely nothing at all appears to be changing, but I'll keep trying. Daily commenting continues in the comments box below.
1) To go somewhere I haven't been before. I've not done terribly well at this first resolution. I did go to San Francisco in April, but I'd been there before so it doesn't count. There have been a few choice locations that I've visited for the first time this year though, including Stanmore, a beach near Lowestoft and Monterey (which is just south of San Francisco and so probably doesn't count either). Verdict: Must try harder.
2) To reduce my spam intake. My inbox used to be fuller than a pair of Vi@gra-boosted trousers, plagued by Nigerian lotto scams, fake diplomas and online pharmacists. Not any more. My ISP installed spam-blocking software at the end of January and now only a few rogue Russians slip through the net. It's restored my faith in humanity, even if I rarely hear the life-affirming "you've got mail" ping any more. Verdict: Result!
3) To keep my place tidy. It was never that bad, you understand. My carpet isn't prematurely brown, my kitchen isn't home to an array of single-celled plantlife and my toilet would only keep Kim and Aggie occupied for a couple of minutes. It's the piles I need to deal with, piles of important paperwork and less important ephemera that I leave lying around on various available surfaces because I'm not quite sure where to file them away yet. There's certainly no chance of anyone using my dining table as a dining table at the moment but, overall, my piles aren't spreading as far as they might. Verdict: Could do better.
4) To go up to anyone I see wearing more than one item of Burberry clothing and call them a tosser. Was it really only six months ago that half the population seemed to think that wearing Burberry was the height of fashion? Thankfully most people have seen the error of their ways and now it's only the saddoes who still have England flags on their cars who remain coated in oh-so-common beige plaid. I can't claim to have been brave enough to call many of them 'tossers'. But I have thought it, several times. Verdict: Fading into irrelvance.
5) To go back to the cinema again. I didn't go to the pictures for over a year until May, at which point I finally managed to find three films worth seeing in the space of a fortnight. What with threemorecrackers and a maybe due out this month I think I may finally have kicked this bad habit. Verdict: Big screen salvation.
6) To shed pounds. Not weight, but money. Sadly, if anything, I'm doing even worse at spending money this year than I was last year. I still can't spend money on myself to save my life. I've not bought any gadgets or any homeware or any clothes, and my music consumption is definitely in decline. In fact I've only spent more than £100 on something once this year, and that was on a transatlantic plane ticket. Obviously the ability to save money is a dead useful skill, but it would be nice to blow some of it every now and then. Verdict: Still in need of retail therapy.
7) To search out new and exciting webpages and stuff for all my readers. Ah, I can do this one. I probably do this one too much actually because my webpage tends to have links everywhere. People notice, you know. Back in January Ian commented "I think it's about time I gave SimeWorld a kick up the arse. It's never going to be a contender to Diamond Geezer in terms of quantity of content (is he sponsored by the number of links he has on his page, or does he have some kind of link-related medical condition - like Tourettes syndrome but with Anchor tags?)" Only he didn't include the hyperlinks, I added them. See, I really am that bad. Verdict: 100% linky goodness.
8) To drink at least one of the three bottles of complimentary champagne sitting in my kitchen. They're all still there because I don't fancy drinking them by myself. I just need something worth celebrating and someone to share each bottle with. Verdict: Still half the year left - don't lose hope yet.
The top 3 albums of halfway-through-2004 1) Destroy Rock And Roll - Mylo (reviewed June 15) 2) A Grand Don't Come For Free - The Streets (reviewed May 11) 3) Scissor Sisters - Scissor Sisters (reviewed March 31)
(and yes, it is exactly halfway through 2004 right now, honest)
Well that was interesting. I'd been wanting to write 100 comments on 100 different blogs for a while, but I needed a weekday to do it and I needed a weekday when I was actually at home and not at work, so tube strike day was perfect. The opportunity to 'work from home' is not one to be sniffed at, and it was of course possible to fit in a full day's work inbetween the commenting. Honest it was. And here's what I found out.
How to find 100 blogs worth commenting on • It's easy to begin with, you just work down your blogroll. • Then you work down the list of UK Updated Weblogs to see who's just updated (although it turns out that lots of sites at the top of the list haven't actually updated in days, or even weeks, or in some cases months. • Then you start looking at other people's blogrolls, which is where you start coming across blogs you've not read before, which is great. Except that some are really dull (mainly the US-political or techgeeky ones) in which case you can't find anything interesting to comment on at all. • Then you start looking at the blogrolls of people you found on other people's blogrolls, which is where it starts to get a bit desperate, but it turns out there are still some gems out there. • Finally you return to your original blogroll and check out the people who hadn't posted anything at noon but had by 9pm. Result.
Commenting on 100 blogs • A lot of people in blogworld yesterday were writing about the same thing. I left lots of comments about Mike's new hyphen, almost as many about the tube strike and quite a few about the brilliance of the Firefox browser. • I never left the same comment twice. • Ahh, don't some people write great stuff on their blogs?
Leaving comments on 100 blogs • There are two different ways to leave comments on blogs. You either get a pop-up box to write in or the comments are added to the blog page itself. • Pop-up boxes are better because they're much quicker and because you don't have to navigate off the main blog page. Moveable Type pop-up boxes are best of all because you can preview your post and avoid embarrassing spelling mistakes. • Comments posted on the same page as the post itself are worse because the whole process of clicking through to individual pages is sooo slow and because you end up on a single-post page, not the blog front page. Typepad and Blogger commenting is the slowest.
What happened after I'd commented on 100 blogs • People started noticing that I'd commented on their blogs, particularly on the 80-or-so blogs where I don't normally comment. And some of them tracked back to my blog to take a look, as did some of their readers. By midnight last night more than a quarter of the 100 blog owners had visited here and left a comment themselves. Ta. • Some people noticed that, as well as commenting on their blog, I'd also linked to them on my big 1-100 list. And a few of them linked back. Ta. • I got more comments yesterday than on any day ever, except for my birthday. But having a birthday is a lot less effort than writing 100 comments on other people's blogs. • I got more visitors to my blog yesterday than on any day in the last three months. About 100 more than usual in fact. It'll never last.
Conclusions • I must revisit those 100 blogs today to see if anyone's commented on my comments. • I can't promise to write 100 comments every day but I shall try to write a few more than the handful I usually do. • Maybe you could write a few more comments too, not necessarily here but somewhere else, somewhere unexpected. Go on, people really appreciate them. I know.
100 comments: There are an awful lot of blogs out there which I read a lot but don't comment on often enough. So today I thought I'd break that tradition and interact properly. My target is to comment on 100 different blogs by the end of the day (inbetween 'working at home' because of the tube strike) and I'm only allowing myself to comment on blogs updated in the last 24 48 hours, which will be a challenge. I'll link to each blog that I comment on, just so you can see how I'm progressing, but I wouldn't bother reading the comments though. Mike, you're first.
123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081828384858687888990919293949596979899100101 Phew, I did wonder if I was going to get to 100 earlier on this morning, and in the end I hit 101. There were lots of other blogs I'd have liked to have commented on but they either failed my 48 hour rule or didn't have a comments system enabled. But it has been great to explore a whole range of blogs I've never read before. Highly recommended.
Gig of the Month: the Mull Historical Society at the ICA (last night)
Only three icons of any cultural importance have ever come out of the Scottish island of Mull - Tobermory the Womble, the children's TV programme Balamory and Colin MacIntyre. Colin's the singer of the Mull Historical Society, a refreshingly ordinary yet extraordinary guitar band, playing last night at the long white arty building up the top of the Mall. Support was provided by the astonishing Alice McLaughlin, a wild-eyed marionette who sang heartfelt jazz/soul ballads with breathtaking conviction. And then our Colin was on, showcasing his latest album This Is Hope as well as audience-pleasing favourites from previous singalong classics Loss and Us. The stage should have featured a 15 foot fibreglass dog in a wig (does any band have a better logo?) but alas it had been stolen earlier. Colin threw himself into the performance with innocent gusto, leaping round the stage, sweating buckets and managing somehow at one point not to topple headlong off the piano stool into the audience. The new songs suggest he's not lost his songwriting sparkle, but the older songs still won the night for me. Well worth beating the tube strike to see, and ten times more inspiring than that other anodyne concert held up the Mall recently.
Britain's newest National Park: the NewForest East End
Dot Cotton, the Urban Affairs Minister, today announced her decision that the East End is to become a National Park. The new East EndNational Park will be the smallest in the country, covering just 20 square kilometres. This remote Cockney wilderness lies to the east of the City and contains some hills topping almost ten metres in height. Most of the area is covered by concrete, and new planning regulations will restrict the amount of green open space in order to preserve this urban blight for future generations. Scenic streams of sewage flow beneath the streets, while air pollution levels above ground are amongst the most outstanding in the country.
The East End National Park offers significant opportunities for outdoor public recreation, fully in line with the natural resouces of this unique location. Visitors are welcome to attend and take part in one of the following local cultural events:
Knees Up Mother Brown: Join a gang of pre-teen street robbers beating up local pensioners outside the post office.
Don’t Dilly Dally On The Way: Keep walking, don't turn round, that could be a mugger behind you.
The Old Bull & Bush: Come drink at the local boozer named after Anglo-American relations.
Show Me The Way To Go Home: Social group meets every night at 11:30pm outside the local pub, then 15 minutes later in the local gutter.
On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep: Final resting place of the pile of inebriated drunkards found previously in the gutter.
Boiled Beef N’Carrots: Nothing they serve up round here any more, but you can get a nice curry instead.
Underneath The Arches: Where to come for all the best drug deals, please bring cash.
Roll Out The Barrel: Leave your barrel in the street next to the supermarket trolley, the rotting sofa and the binbag full of used hypodermics.
Get Me To The Church On Time: Hop on the new bendy bus to Bow, assuming one ever turns up.
Daisy Daisy: Ride a bicycle made for two down the Mile End Road, taking care not to fall beneath the wheels of one of those bendy buses.
Any Old Iron: Bare knuckle fighting takes place round the back of the pie and mash shop every Thursday night.
My Old Man’s A Dustman: That's his cover story anyway. In real life he's heavily involved in a secret life of gangland crime and kneecapping.
Me And My Shadow: Canary Wharf wrecks TV reception for half the residents in the area.
The Lambeth Walk: Take a historic stroll to another nearby borough, only to discover that conditions there are even worse.
Maybe It's Because I'm A Londoner: That I love living here despite all of the above.
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I hate passwords. I know we have to have them but they're always so difficult to remember. I can remember a few passwords without any problem, but what I can't always do is remember which password goes with with login. I could write all my passwords down somewhere, but that would be dangerous. I could try using the same password for everything, but that would be even more dangerous. And they don't let you use the same password for everything - some sites are happy with only 4 letters, some require 8 and some demand mixed alphanumeric characters. Usually I rely on my browser remembering all of my passwords for me, which is great until one day I load up a webpage and discover that it's forgotten too. So sometimes I find myself staring at a blank log-in page wondering exactly which email address I used to set up the account and with which password, shut out until I eventually stumble across the correct combination.
People are generally rubbish at selecting passwords. Many choose the default word 'password' as their password, which must be the most hackable way into anyone's bank account. Names are popular too, either one's own or one's partner or one's pet, again eminently guessable (especially by one's partner or one's pet). Favourite football teams, place names, birthdays - all are nice and easy to remember but therefore just that bit too easy to crack. No, what you need is a password that's impossible to deduce, like jaJwutH2fap0w. Perfect, except that it's also nigh impossible to remember. You might want to scribble it on a post-it note and stick it to the front of your computer so that you won't forget it, except that neither will any passing snooper. And do take very special care typing in that long sequence of gibberish because you're only allowed three mistakes before the system locks you out completely.
If you do forget your password you may be asked to answer a secret question in order to proceed. To be honest these worry me even more than passwords. The secret question is generally something like 'What is your mother's maiden name?' which is a really good question because it's not something any online hacker is likely to know. No online hacker except your mother, that is. I do hope your mother hasn't been rifling through your bank account, your blog and that slightly dodgy website you use sometimes that's based in Amsterdam. And I do hope hope you didn't type your password into that box at the top of the post, otherwise it probably wasn't your mother checking out your online affairs, it was me...
The Olympic flame came to London yesterday for the first time since 1948. It rained, but that didn't extinguish the fire or dampen the watching public's enthusiasm. The Torch Relay organising committee had thoroughly enjoyed themselves putting together the programme for the day, including sections carrying the torch by taxi, riverboat, London bus, rowing eight and on horseback. But the main body of the journey was made up of 140 runners each running 400m, some famous, some worthy and some both. I decided to go and watch the torch arriving in my home borough of Tower Hamlets, just to see how my council tax was being spent, and then caught up with the flame again a few more times along the route.
Around 2pm I was part of a small crowd gathered on the slipway at the very foot of the Isle of Dogs. Teams of mercenaries from the twocompanies sponsoring the Torch Relay busied themselves amongst the spectators handing out numerous small flags for us to wave. A young lady from Samsung tried to thrust a blue flag into my hand, then seemed very hurt when I didn't want to be part of her evil marketing strategy. I turned down a pair of her giant blue inflatable icepops as well. The flame was late, although it was clear from the twirling acrobats hanging from the rigging of the Cutty Sark over the river that it had at least reached Greenwich. Fireworks heralded the launch of a fire-bearing riverboat whose captain showed off by spinning round several times in the middle of the Thames before heading straight towards us.
A grinning Kriss Akabusi disembarked from the boat and ran up the slipway holding the torch aloft, cheering almost as much as we were. And then he was gone, round the corner into Island Gardens where Tower Hamlets had 15 minutes of community entertainment laid on. Five lycra-clad girls performed gymnastics suspended from five coloured hoops, accompanied by ethnic drumming. It may have been symbolically blatant but at least it was cheap. Rather more of my council tax went up in smoke in the ensuing firework display, before various council dignitaries queued up for a lengthy photo opportunity with the flame. This eventually passed to one of the non-famous runners who set off through the crowds towards Docklands, preceded by police motorbikes, a bus full of torchbearers and more sponsored flag distributors.
I reached Canary Wharf in time to see the flame run past in the capable hands of top oarsman Matthew Pinsent. He set fire to a fountain in Cabot Square while a choir dressed in plastic raincoats sang Amazing Grace. Possibly too symbolic that one. Alas I was too slow getting to the Mile End Road to see the flame pass at its closest to the possible site of the Olympic Games in 2012, and to my house. I hope it doesn't rain like this in eight years time.
Never mind, my next chosen vantage point was City Hall where surely our Ken would put on a good show. I could see the flame crossing Tower Bridge, although I was rather too far away to see it was Gandalf carrying it. At City Hall I was prevented from entering the courtyard by a jobsworth security guard who demanded that I keep behind a line of bunting, despite the fact that half of London seemed to be standing on the other side. He was probably trying to keep me out of the path of the 93-year-old Sikh marathon runner who soon swept by. Thousands of Olympic-coloured balloons were released into the sky and the elderly athlete ran straight back down to the main road. The visit of the flame was all over and done in under a minute. Sorry, not impressed.
My final viewing attempt was along Oxford Street, a location where I seem to have spent far too much of my Saturday. I took up position behind the railings outside the exit from the tube station, surrounded by an ever increasing crowd of shoppers and eager families. The sponsored flag-givers were out in force again, as was the rain. We all got very wet waiting for the helicopters overhead to edge nearer, and for the snail's pace queue of ordinary buses to finally end. At last the proper torch-bearing London bus came along, but alas there was no sign of a flame on the open upper deck. Some spectators mumbled and cursed and prepared to slink away disheartened. But no, the torch was still on foot at this point, and there hidden directly behind a number 25 bendy bus came a smiling Roger Black. He stopped right beside me, as you can see, before dashing off to the other side of Oxford Circus where the flame finally ascended to its rightful place on the top deck of a red London icon.
Enough of fire-chasing. I was home in time to see the BBC pretending to show live what I'd just seen for real at Oxford Circus an hour earlier. And in time to see possibly the blandest pop concert ever to limp onto our TV screens, live from the Mall. Great idea, miserably executed. A handful of musical greats allowed to sing no more than two songs each and a bunch of pop wannabes lip-synching their latest hits to an audience too far away to even care. All that media hype for a televised concert lasting just 90 minutes, only half of which featured music, not even half of which was any good. I'm mighty glad I turned down the ticket that was offered to me, even if thosepresent saw rather more acts than appeared on air. But, despite the weather, I'm more than glad I caught the Olympic flame passing through town. And I hope I'll see it again, just up the road, in 2012. In blazing sunshine.
Readers' postbag
Here's how Stratford station in east London might look one day, an overdeveloped mass of lines and interlocking circles. There's the Central line and the end of the Jubilee line, there's mainline services to East Anglia, there's the North London Line northwest towards Hackney, there's the existing DLR and a new DLR extension to Stratford International, there's the new Eurostar terminal and finally there's Crossrail. Blimey. Too late for the Olympics though, alas (and probably almost as likely to actually happen).
Trouble was, lots of other people had come to see the Formula 1 cars too and they'd got to Waterloo Place before me. Trouble was, the pavements from here up to Regent Street are very narrow so there was very little room for half a million spectators to stand. Trouble was, I ended up way back on the seventh row of the pedestrian grid squashed into a tiny space about the same size as a Formula 1 cockpit. Trouble was, the event was supposed to start at 6 so everyone got there at 5:30 but the first car didn't set off round the course until 7. Trouble for the people on the other side of the road was, the organisers parked the street cleaning vehicles right beside them completely blocking their line of sight which nearly caused a mutiny. Trouble was, everyone around me seemed to be a six-foot-something petrolhead wielding a camcorder blocking off any last slivers of the remaining view. Trouble was, the event wasn't so much a race as a relay, with each car having to wait for the previous car to get back to the start before it could rev up and zoom off. Trouble was, Formula 1 cars go past very fast indeed so they're very hard to spot before they're gone. Trouble was, and this is the real killer, Formula 1 cars are only three feet high, so whichever jerk thought it would be a good idea to parade them through the streets of London in the hope that huge numbers of the public would be able to see them needs their head examining.
Meanwhile, just under a mile to the west, Diana's real shrine can be found outside the gates of Kensington Palace. Even seven years after her untimely death the railings are still festooned with laminated photographs, newspaper cuttings and cheap bouquets. It would have been Diana's 43rd birthday last week (she'd have been heavily into Botox by now, wouldn't she?) and the fresh birthday tributes pinned to the gates are the outpourings of the irrationally obsessed. Especially the poetry. I had to photograph a couple of the most toadying eulogies just to take in the sheer awfulness of them. Click here for one particularly verbose devoted dirge, and click on the extract below to read the full gobsmacking text of the following.
Today you would have been 43It was left to another mother talking to her children outside the Palace gates to come up with the perfect summary of Diana's life. She was trying to explain who the princess was to her three daughters, none of whom had even been born while Diana was alive. And Mummy came up with the following. "She was a nice lady who died." And yes that's all she was, in the right place with the right face at the right time, just as flawed as the rest of us and probably more so. At least we got a couple of heirs, a few less landmines and a nice paddling pool out of her. I hope that one day the cult of Diana can finally be laid to rest. And if not, well, at least the poetry's a scream.Hyde Park is no ordinary park. It's enormous, a giant green grass rectangle only slightly smaller than the City of London. The western half of the park is officially called Kensington Gardens. It's all ancient land, acquired by Henry VIII for hunting almost 500 years ago. It's beautifully landscaped, with carriage drives, tree-lined avenues and open lawns. It includes the Serpentine, an elegant thin lake slicing down the middle of the park. It includes the Albert Memorial, a garish golden pinnacle gilded in the blood of Empire. It includes Rotten Row, originally the fashionable riding track between Kensington Palace and Piccadilly. It includes Speaker's Corner, that bastion of free speech where you can hear boring fanatics drone on about some supposedly burning issue. It is no ordinary park.
Grass: Got nothing to do? Never fear, because park lawns are a green canvas for your imagination. You can sit on them, have a picnic on them, kick a ball about on them, sunbathe on them, read a book on them and snog on them. And look, that's a whole afternoon filled already. Hyde Park has immaculate grass, all 600 acres of it.
Wildlife: Britain's parks are like mini zoos, each containing exactly the same cuddly animals much loved by little children everywhere. See the little squirrels nibbling their nuts in the rosebeds. See the mangy ducks quacking loudly for crumbs of sliced wholemeal. See the fat pigeons lolloping along because they're too heavy to fly. And don't see the rats because they only come out at night. Hyde Park has very tame squirrels, as you can see.
Bandstand: The old Victorian bandstand always stands rusting in one corner of the park, lonely and unloved. Local youngsters are more likely to use it for graffiti practice than for band practice. In Hyde Park yesterday the band outnumbered the geriatric deckchair-bound audience.
Indie music quiz: For the fourth of July, can you identify the 13 American cities appearing in either the title or the artist of the following UK hit records? (Answers in the comments box)
BB5 update: It's the most action-packed Big Brother, ever. Conspiracy, snogging, cliques, threats, bedsits, nervous breakdowns, evictions, ejections, violence and sex. And there are the most flawed characters in the house, ever. Camp, strident, bullying, smug, vain, screeching, false, jealous, selfish, immature, sulky and chicken. And I'm the least interested in the whole series, ever. Normally it takes us weeks to get to know the housemates inside out but this year we've uncovered far too much far too unpleasant far too early. I'm still addicted, obviously, but not as much as I should be. Shame.
BB25 update: We've had Bendy Buses on route 25 for a week now. There's no getting rid of them then. They're still hunting in packs, alternately crammed and half-empty, scuttling down the Mile End Road like a plague of giant red caterpillars. Bow Church station appears to be the designated stop where all the drivers change over, or at least where five drivers stand and queue and wait in case any much-delayed bus should actually turn up for them to board. A large number of existing bus shelters are suddenly being dug up, which means the newly-installed ticket machines are temporarily fenced off and nobody can buy a ticket before boarding any more. My nearest bus stop has been downgraded to a request stop for no adequately explained reason, physically moved to the opposite end of its bus shelter and no longer has a timetable posted. And I'm disturbed to discover that there are proper official planning proposals in the pipeline to extend the road markings for this particular bus stop from 19m long (1 bendy bus length) to 45m long (2½ bendy buses!), which will mean the obliteration of the only parking space along this strip of road. Apparently this is progress. I still yearn for the golden era, just one month ago, when cuddly Routemasters and nice friendly double deckers served my local community rather than dominating it.
BR update: Bow Road station, that Victorian jewel on the eastern District Line, continues to undergo 'renovation'. It's been four months since proper work started, apparently. All the surfaces along the platforms and across the front of the station are covered by blue walls, behind which it's still not clear that anything has actually happened. The ticket hall, stairways and platform roof are not covered by blue walls, and are therefore still as grimy, untreated and rundown as they've been for decades. I have a horrible feeling that this renovation is going to take far far longer than planned. It's also getting more and more difficult to find something new to write about each day given that absolutely nothing at all appears to be changing, but I'll keep trying. Daily commenting continues in the comments box below.
Flaming June
A grinning Kriss Akabusi disembarked from the boat and ran up the slipway holding the torch aloft, cheering almost as much as we were. And then he was gone, round the corner into Island Gardens where Tower Hamlets had 15 minutes of community entertainment laid on. Five lycra-clad girls performed gymnastics suspended from five coloured hoops, accompanied by ethnic drumming. It may have been symbolically blatant but at least it was cheap. Rather more of my council tax went up in smoke in the ensuing firework display, before various council dignitaries queued up for a lengthy photo opportunity with the flame. This eventually passed to one of the non-famous runners who set off through the crowds towards Docklands, preceded by police motorbikes, a bus full of torchbearers and more sponsored flag distributors.
Never mind, my next chosen vantage point was City Hall where surely our Ken would put on a good show. I could see the flame crossing Tower Bridge, although I was rather too far away to see it was Gandalf carrying it. At City Hall I was prevented from entering the courtyard by a jobsworth security guard who demanded that I keep behind a line of bunting, despite the fact that half of London seemed to be standing on the other side. He was probably trying to keep me out of the path of the 93-year-old Sikh marathon runner who soon swept by. Thousands of Olympic-coloured balloons were released into the sky and the elderly athlete ran straight back down to the main road. The visit of the flame was all over and done in under a minute. Sorry, not impressed.
My final viewing attempt was along Oxford Street, a location where I seem to have spent far too much of my Saturday. I took up position behind the railings outside the exit from the tube station, surrounded by an ever increasing crowd of shoppers and eager families. The sponsored flag-givers were out in force again, as was the rain. We all got very wet waiting for the helicopters overhead to edge nearer, and for the snail's pace queue of ordinary buses to finally end. At last the proper torch-bearing London bus came along, but alas there was no sign of a flame on the open upper deck. Some spectators mumbled and cursed and prepared to slink away disheartened. But no, the torch was still on foot at this point, and there hidden directly behind a number 25 bendy bus came a smiling Roger Black. He stopped right beside me, as you can see, before dashing off to the other side of Oxford Circus where the flame finally ascended to its rightful place on the top deck of a red London icon.
