10th October 1964:Tokyo
I hadn't yet been born but I was present on the planet embryonically so arguably this was my first Summer Olympics. I know my parents enjoyed it because they bought the music used for the BBC Olympics presentation - Tokyo Melody by Helmut Zacharias - and helped propel it to number 9 in the singles chart. As one of a limited number of 7-inches in our record box while I was growing up it got a lot of plays, and I still subliminally love it.
12th October 1968:Mexico City
I remember nothing of this but I probably saw some on the TV. The Opening Ceremony started at ten to six so I had every chance of seeing it before I went to bed, but would never have been allowed to stay up afterwards to watch Dixon of Dock Green and Val Doonican.
26th August 1972:Munich
This started in the summer holidays between infant school and junior school - golden years - and unless we'd gone away for the bank holiday weekend I'm sure we'd have been watching the start on telly. The Opening Ceremony slotted into Saturday's Grandstand between racing from Goodwood and cricket from Lord's.
17th July 1976:Montreal
This is the first time I was in the right country on the day of the opening ceremony, because amazingly my family had flown to Canada three days earlier to stay with my Mum's ex-schoolmate/penpal. Perversely this was the day we set off on a week-long circuit of Lake Ontario in a motorhome, so as the Games began we were crossing the St Lawrence into the USA and never saw any of what was going on 150 miles downriver. While the world continued to watch the athletics I was climbing mountains in Vermont, nipping into the ice rink where the 1932 Winter Olympics figure skating had taken place, standing behind the torrent of Niagara Falls and collecting Olympic gamecards from participating McDonald's restaurants. Our family still owns a souvenir glass tumbler with the Games logo on it, which somehow my brother and I have never smashed over the intervening 48 years.
19th July 1980:Moscow
We missed the opening ceremony because we'd gone for a drive in the Chilterns, indeed we were possibly underground in West Wycombe Caves when the flag was raised. But we watched quite a lot of the rest of the coverage because it was one way of occupying Pascal, my French Exchange partner, and stopped him trying to empty the contents of my bedroom drawers onto the floor.
28th July 1984:Los Angeles
Time zones made this harder to watch, but it was the university holidays and I had no obligations so stayed up until four in the morning to watch the opening ceremony on my black and white portable TV. I enjoyed the rocketmen, the airships and the fluffed oath, but was less impressed when my Mum plonked a cup of tea beside my bed four hours later. Total sports-TV overkill ensued, not helped by test cricket filling the daytime hours. The best thing about the first week turned out to be ITV's late night alternative, the reptilian sci-fi drama V, and Diana's jaw haunts me to this day.
17th September 1988:Seoul
I'd started work so it was no longer the holidays, also this Olympics took place mostly while Britain was asleep so proved much easier to miss. I did watch the repeated opening ceremony over breakfast, aided by usually-screamy toddler Charlotte being out with her parents at the annual Eton College Jumble Sale, but switched off as soon as the proper sport started.
25th July 1992:Barcelona
I've blogged about 25th July 1992 in considerable detail before because coincidentally it was my 10,000th day on Earth. As you'll remember I'd taken the train to Luton to take part in Steve's amateur pop quiz and we watched the opening ceremony while we waited for the other contestants to arrive. It was a ridiculously atypical day, and I was having far too much fun to be particularly bothered with how the rest of the Games played out.
19th July 1996:Atlanta
Opening ceremonies now lasted four hours, but because this one happened overnight I watched the BBC's morning repeat and thankfully they'd cut it down to two. Then I took the train to Luton again, and let's just say it wasn't as eventful as last time. My diary describes the subsequent Olympic coverage as "lots of obscure sports in five minute segments just because there's a Brit involved".
15th September 2000:Sydney
My diary has nothing to say about the Australian opening ceremony because it took place while I was at work, and because I was much more interested in who'd win the first series of Big Brother that evening, which turned out to be Craig.
13th August 2004:Athens
I was now living in London, an Olympic Candidate City, but had spent the day at Ashridge on a work jolly our boss had somehow wangled out of the departmental budget. I spent Friday evening watching on the TV and texting BestMateFromWork who was out on the town with a date who turned out to be a jerk. As I blogged at the time, "I'd forgotten how mind-bogglingly tedious an Olympic Opening Ceremony is. It's basically a one hour art&history lesson followed by a two hour geography lesson."
8th August 2008:Beijing
Ah yes, the Games that started at 8.08 on 8.8.08 for Chinese reasons. I remember watching the opening ceremony on the TV in the canteen at work, being dazzled by the massed drumming out of the corner of my eye while a colleague droned on about his intention to sue for underpaid gym membership. I caught up on the 'printing presses' and 'Sarah Brightman' sequences later.
27th July 2012:London
A localevent which I attended on multiple occasions.
5th August 2016:Rio de Janeiro
Technically the opening ceremony started at midnight the following day UK time, so I decided to stay up and watch the low key presentation, the parkour, the giant microbes and the parade (as far as Great Britain) before turning in. After a decent amount of sleep I skedaddled to the seaside and quite frankly that was a lot more entertaining.
23rd July 2021:Tokyo
The first repeat on my list with the Games back in the Japanese capital. The pandemic meant there'd been a five year gap since last time, and the events themselves were seriously muted by an absence of cheering crowds. My favourite bits of the opening ceremony were the clever pictograms, but I was also secretly pleased nothing had topped the first 20 minutes of London's Industrial Revolution mega-tableau. Maybe never will.
26th July 2024:Paris
And so the Games have come round again, in this case after the shortest ever gap (2 years, 11 months and 18 days). I hope they'll be excellent and I hope the innovative Seine-based opening ceremony is a blast. It unnerves me slightly that this is still only the 15th Summer Olympics of my lifetime and I'm unlikely to see more than 20, so I intend to make the most of it and raise a glass to excellence from the comfort of my sofa. Vive les jeux olympiques, and here's to many more.
Engineering consultants Buro Happold, in association with social enterprise Footways, have just launched a new circular walking route linking 10 central London rail termini. It's not meant for speedy connections, more for recreational wandering, and ticks off "a range of features linked to London’s engineering history" along the way. Further 'Great British Engineering Adventures' are promised later but the Rail & Heritage Loop is blazing a trail. It isn't waymarked but it does have a very precise online map with pop-up pins so I thought I'd follow the loop to see if it was any good. If nothing else, I might now prevent you from trying similar.
Euston → King’s Cross → Farringdon → Liverpool Street → Fenchurch Street/Cannon Street → London Bridge → Waterloo → Victoria → Paddington → Euston
The first problem is it's 18 miles long, far too far to walk comfortably in one go. London's rail termini are impractically spread out, which is essentially why the Circle line exists and that's much too long to walk too. Euston/St Pancras/King's Cross might be really close, ditto Charing Cross/Waterloo, but Paddington and Liverpool Street are over four miles apart and that's only if you go in a straight line which this walk very much doesn't. I therefore decided to skip Paddington, a boss move which knocked eight miles off the walk all in one go, and just did the eastern half from Euston round to Victoria.
The second problem is navigating via the Footways map, which looks easy on a laptop screen but became less practical on a smartphone in the field. To follow the red line I had to keep zooming in and zooming in to discover what the street name was, just to be sure I was on the right route, which soon grew tiring. Also some of the backstreet routes are dead wiggly so you have to keep checking the map a lot, and I didn't and soon went off track. Also if you don't check frequently the map zooms out and you have to pinch and scroll back in again, and on a really long walk this soon gets frustratingly tedious. It turns out I went wrong twice in the first 20 minutes, and I supposedly know London like the back of my hand, so I swiftly decided to ditch the designated meanders and follow my own route instead.
But I did get round eight of the stations, and what's more some highly unusual things happened at some of them, so rather than blabbing about the walk I'm just going to blog about the stations. Sorry Buro Happold.
Euston
They've moved the taxi rank again. It originally shifted out front onto former grass to make way for HS2, and now they're clearing that away because a new taxi rank has opened out front on former grass on the other side. The new taxi rank is less convenient to get to and more likely to involve steps if you go the wrong way, but also considerably prettier with a multi-coloured timber walkway down the centre. I liked it so much I took this photo...
...and was very surprised when a security guard walked over and asked me to delete it. It turned out not to be a security thing, he just didn't like people taking photos of him which apparently "they're always doing". I told him this was strange behaviour in a public place and also that he might want to get a less conspicuous job, but being an obliging soul I duly deleted it and took another without him in it. Only after I'd left did I realise I'd actually taken two photos of him so still had one left, and what's more he was 100% perfectly obscured behind a post so not even his mother with a magnifying glass would have recognised him. How quickly we assume the worst, even when luck is on our side.
St Pancras
People are taking escalator safety really really seriously these days.
This sign leading down to the tube station is titled An Escalator - Seriously Not A Shoeshine, and goes on to warn No Feet Under The Bristles unless you want to lose your toes. I do wonder how many people using that escalator know what a shoeshine actually is, or want to be reminded about digital severance as they step on. Also at the foot of the poster it says Tell Others Too Please so I'm doing as instructed and telling all of you, although what I'd really like to do is sack the copywriter because I am absolutely bloody tired of being endlessly patronised about escalator safety everywhere I go.
King's Cross
On the concourse I had to manoeuvre past a big red box with a model train running round the top, which it turned out was the LNER Carbon Saving Departures Board.
It has a flappy display which is supposed to compare the carbon emissions of trains to planes and other activities, although it appeared to be malfunctioning because five of the letters were missing so it wasn't getting its point across. Anyway because I took an interest a lady from LNER handed me a couple of freebies, one of which was a packet of flower seeds and the other was a rectangle of card telling me that LNER believe in making the environment better. In that case, LNER, why have you printed a load of pointless self-congratulatory flyers which are simply going to get thrown away, and why are you handing out seeds in July which the packet says need to be planted between March and May? No Carbon is being saved by the Carbon Saving Departures Board, indeed quite the opposite.
Farringdon
I've always wondered why the departure boards in the ticket hall at Farringdon don't show actual departures, only an A-Z list of destinations and next trains, so yesterday I walked over to the barrier staff and asked.
They insisted the A-Z list showed departures and was easy to use, and I said there ought to be a simpler list as well. They said the A-Z list was quick to use, and I said it wasn't as quick as a simple list of departures. They said they couldn't see why that was necessary, and I said the Crossrail platforms have a list so why not the mainline trains. They said it might be because this is a new station, and I said those two boards at the end are always empty so could easily display a chronological list. They said maybe it's because this is a special station, and I said sure but no other station relies on just an A-Z list. Eventually (after much polite interaction) they said the boards were like that because "this is what they gave us", and I said that was likely the best answer and thanked them for their time.
Moorgate
This isn't on Buro Happold's list of stations but it is en route so I dropped by. Out front I was approached by a charity worker in a blue tabard, and normally I'd walk on by but this time I thought I'd pause for blogging purposes and see what he had to say.
"Could you take a group photo?" he asked. I was somewhat taken aback, but once we'd established the group didn't include me I agreed to take it. He handed me his phone, then he and his three Orbis colleagues stood beside their Orbis rostrum and held up their Orbis leaflets and smiled. Apparently they had to send the photo to their supervisor to prove they'd turned up, and wow the lack of trust in the zero hours economy is depressing.
Liverpool Street: The interesting anecdotes dried up at this point, but Ian Visits has the story of how they're replacing the food outlets by the gateline into 24 more ticket gates. Cannon St/Fenchurch St: The Rail & Heritage Loop splits across the City, forcing you to choose one station or the other, but I looked at both routes and thought "sheesh that's annoyingly indirect" and gave up and caught the bus instead. London Bridge: I failed to spot the just-unveiled 57m-long mosaic outside the station, despite ending up in the bus station where it actually is, but here's Londonist's gorgeously-colourful report which confirms "You won't miss it". Waterloo: I couldn't face this walk either because I've done the entire South Bank many times before, so hopped on a train to Waterloo East instead. Charing Cross: This isn't on the official list of stations either but the walk grazes it, so I went anyway but nothing interesting cropped up. Victoria: This was quite dull too, unless you wanted to stand around gormlessly watching a Despicable Me trailer on the concourse. It's also where I gave up because I was skipping the final eight remaining miles via Paddington, remember, and you might want to skip a lot more than that.
The Museum of the Home in Hoxton has evolved again. It used to be the Geffrye Museum, a linear celebration of historic middle-class interiors. In 1998 it extended beyond the almshouses into a loopy extension with cafe and gift shop. In 2021 they added a thematic basement, shifted the cafe and renamed themselves. And yesterday they opened seven new Rooms Through Time covering the period 1878-2049, simultaneously more of the same and even less of a celebration of historic middle-class interiors.
The rooms look fairly bare by modern standards with limited furniture and none of the clutter that the industrial revolution kickstarted. They continue to be representative of better-off homes, focusing on those with servants rather than the servants themselves, and also reflective of white English society as was the case in rural Hackney in those days. The seven updated rooms are very much a cultural counterbalance.
(cross the entrance foyer, pass the gift shop, enter the extension, maybe sit down and sit on some pebbly things and watch a throbbing cyclorama, maybe not)
» A Townhouse in 1878 An Ayah, Bunoo, is packing up her things in this terraced house on Oakfield Street in Chelsea.
You can sense the leap already. We're specifically in Chelsea, no longer Hackney, and the focus of the scene is an Indian nanny charged with accompanying the family's three children on a voyage home from India. You discern none of this if you just walk up and look at the room, it still looks properly chintzy peak Victorian with its gaslamps, embroidery and floral patterns, indeed very similar to how it looked previously. But look closer and there are pashminas in a small travelling case, toys scattered on the floor... and yes, this is the most understated of the themed rooms. Boxes ticked: ✅ Indian, ✅ Empire, ✅ children
» A Tenement Flat in 1913 On Friday nights the Delinsky family welcome in Shabbos marking the Jewish day of rest, which begins at sundown in a few hours’ time.
Now we're changing rooms. Previously this space housed a smart Arts & Crafts living room with highback chairs and emerald fireplace tiles. Now it's a rather more austere interior representative of a flat on the Rothschild Estate, enough to benefit from a newfangled inside loo but little decorative to shout about. It's only obviously Jewish if you check out the slate shopping list on the kitchen table, scrutinise the ornamentation or read the information panel out front. And here's the real innovation... you can now walk into the room itself and explore it properly, taking on board the iron bedstead and family photos up close, and that's excellent. Boxes ticked: ✅ Jewish, ✅ council housing
» A Room Upstairs in 1956 Newlyweds Kathleen and Jack are getting ready for a big night out at the Galtymore dancehall in Cricklewood.
This too is neverbeforeseen, a bedsit in a postwar newbuild with a cheap wardrobe, one-bar electric fire and woodchip walls. Because the setting is prior to a night out there's perfume on the dressing table and a pair of trousers on the ironing board, and because the young couple are Irish there's a fiddle on the table and a crucifix above the mirror. In common with the other spaces this was curated with the aid of experts, in this case the London Irish Centre, so don't assume anyone's being deliberately stereotypical. I like the really little touches, like the chunky Monopoly box on the upper shelf and the "oooh my nan had one of those" bedside clock, and even better the complete bathroom they've added alongside with its copy of Picture Post and a working radio set. Boxes ticked: ✅ Irish, ✅ white
» A Terraced House in 1978 The family have all gathered around the television for the premiere of Empire Road.
This is another recycled room, previously A Front Room in 1976 but nudged forward a couple of years to coincide with a ground-breaking drama series. Look, BBC2 is playing on the telly. The designers have toned down the wallpaper considerably, which seems a shame, but the carpet and rugs still blaze tropically orange and the iconic Caribbean pineapple is still in pride of place on the drinks trolley. Non-specific period touches include a paraffin heater, a transistor radio and GPO rotary dial telephone, and I see they've removed one of the sofas to enable visitors to walk a little further in. Of all the extension rooms, this unarguably has the most character. Boxes ticked: ✅ Afro-Caribbean, ✅ migrants
» A High-rise Flat in 2005 Nadia, Ashley and Alex have grabbed a paintbrush and are personalising their shared home.
This time we're talking flatshare, a modular space partitioned off into two small bedrooms, shower room and toilet. We're also talking LBGTQI+, although the three lesbians would never have called themselves that back in the day because the curators are framing two decades ago through the lens of the present. The decor is spot on, from queer art on the walls to a glitterball in the toilet, plus a Diva magazine open at the sex toys page and a couple of Greggs pasties on the bed. Other incredibly-of-their-time artefacts include a well-thumbed A-Z, a Pure Evoke digital radio, trailing cables and CDs everywhere, a tower PC running Windows XP and an actual NE London bus map blutacked to the wall. Who knew that 21st century living could be so nostalgic? Boxes ticked: ✅ LBGTQI+, ✅ women
» A Terraced House in 2024 It is Sunday afternoon and the Nguyễn family are spending quality time together, having lunch and singing karaoke.
A 2024 room is technically the easiest to fill and also the most unnecessary, so the big question is how have they chosen to fill it? The answer is with a Vietnamese family and a typically crowded housing association flat, which helps explain the Quang Dũng song playing on the karaoke (but not the Daniel O'Donnell teapot on the crockery shelf). The kitchen at the rear is fantastically done - fully stocked with a colander of noodles on the hob, beansprouts on the chopping board and a half-empty bottle of Tesco washing-up liquid by the sink. As with a lot of the rooms the aim is no longer to resonate with your experience but to encourage you to compare and contrast the way that others live, and I'd say this is an inspired choice. Boxes ticked: ✅ Asian, ✅ family
» A Converted Flat in 2049 The Innovo Room of the Future explores home amid technological and societal changes.
All you can say about this last space is that it's going to be wrong, but it is at least an intriguing glimpse into a potential future. A minimalist room suggests most 'stuff' has gone digital. A set of sparse plates suggests food is very-differently sourced. A wall of fungal insulation suggests the climate is not what it was. And if you look out of the 'window' you'll see automated vehicles in the street, highrise farms, a mini nuclear power plant down the road and a pelican perching on the derelict gasometer, suggesting someone's had a lot of fun devising this. I looked in the backstory book on the dining table and apparently the main family here is a thrupple, because never assume. I suspect a lot of museum visitors will shrug off all of this as fanciful, but who's to say where another 25 years of domestic inequality will take us. Boxes ticked: ✅ climate change, ✅ innovation
It's very apparent that Rooms Through Time now has fewer sampling points, or at least wider gaps as it skates between the selected years. But it'll still fascinate the next time you visit, and because it's more diverse will fascinate a much wider spectrum of visitors than before. I look forward to seeing how they'll dress it up for Christmas.
FLEET STREET Colour group: red Purchase price: £220 Rent: £18 Length: 500m Borough:City of London Postcode: EC4
And so to one of the oldest streets on the Monopoly board, named after the river which used to flow across the foot of it. Fleet Street precisely links the edge of the ancient walled city (at Ludgate) to the edge of the expanded medieval city (at Temple Bar). It has a global reputation as the home of the British newspaper industry, even though barely any of that remains today. And yet again it has a densely-packed heritage I can barely scratch the surface of in a single post, so prepare for a thematic skating-over of its finer points, or should I say a fleeting glimpse?
Brief summary: Strand becomes Fleet Street at the plinthed dragon which marks the site of Temple Bar (an ornate arch since relocated for traffic-blocking reasons). It kicks off between the Courts of Justice and the Inns of Temple, briefly supporting the A4 before that turns off up Fetter Lane. It then curves right and starts a gentle descent past several historic alleyways, a lone survivor of the Great Fire, the odd pub, multiple lunch opportunities and some extensive building sites. Eventually St Paul's Cathedral appears across the valley, this being one of London's protected views, but that's the other side of Ludgate Circus and no Monopoly piece goes there.
The press: The area's been big on printing since the days of William Caxton, lured here by the opportunity of supporting the adjacent legal trade. Britain's first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, was published at the Fleet Ditch end in 1702, although technically on the wrong side of the water to be the street's first paper. Big titles coalesced here during the 20th century turning Fleet Street into a gossipy boozy nexus for famous journalists, then skedaddled elsewhere once union-bashing and technology allowed. The last sort-of survivors are DC Thomson at number 185, whose glorious tiled frontage may still reference the Evening Post and the Dundee Courier but all that's left inside are the Beano's art studios and a stack of free copies of Stylist magazine in a rack in the foyer.
Amongst the other ridiculously famous newsprint residents were The Sun at Bouverie House (a massive presence, now serviced offices), the Daily Telegraph at Peterborough Court (lofty Art Deco in an Egyptian style) and the Daily Express at number 120 (a sleek black and silver edifice exemplifying Streamline Moderne). The Telegraph building is currently half-scaffolded because it's being upcycled by a Qatari consortium, because of course it is. Elsewhere The Scotsman was based above G&S opticians, Reuters is now occupied by a Cordon Bleu restaurant and you'll look in vain for the News Chronicle building because, like the newspaper, it's entirely vanished. A rather nice recent touch on the wall alongside Bouverie Street is a Heritage Sundial depicting five former titles, although because it's vertically aligned it only tells the time until 11am when it falls entirely into shadow.
The pubs: Many's the newspaper story that's been mulled over over a pint down Fleet Street, although the number of pubs has dropped somewhat since the NUJ alcoholics departed. They're bookended by The Old Bank of England (where the Law Courts did their financial transactions) and the Punch Tavern (named after the humorous magazine once written close by). What used to be The Boar's Head is now The Tipperary, a longstanding Irish pub under very new management, while Ye Olde Cock Tavern is a fire victim so what you're seeing inside aren't the same carvings Dickens and Darwin would have enjoyed.
But the most famous pub here is Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a labyrinthine 17th century chophouse where sawdust is still sprinkled on the floor twice daily. You can judge the importance of alcohol hereabouts by the fact the pub was rebuilt in 1667, the year immediately after the Great Fire of London. An attempt to add Charles III to a list of reigning monarchs out front looks somewhat unconvincing and will eventually need to be shunted up slightly to squeeze in William V. And to answer the important question, yes they do a cheeseboard, yes they only do English cheeses and yes if you want all four it'll set you back £23.50.
The churches: One of these is full-on streetside and other merely very close. St Dunstan-in-the-West survived the Great Fire and used to be sited in what's now the street, but was demolished in the 1830s and rebuilt in its former churchyard to make way for more traffic. The communion rail is a Grinling original. Out front is a splendid clock where Gog and Magog bash the bells every quarter, and below that a statue to Lord Northcliffe, the Mail/Mirror tabloid magnate. Rather more famous, but technically up its own passage, is St Bride's with its wedding cake spire. The current incarnation is by Sir Christopher Wren but there have been at least five others, possibly stretching back to the 6th century. In good news it's one of the few City churches you can regularly get inside, including a small museum in its crypt, and in bad news if you do your blog research on a Sunday morning when there's a service on it has to remain unexplored.
The alleys: Officially they're Courts and eight of them bear off along the north side of the street. The strangest-named is Hen & Chicken Court which leads to the supposed site of Sweeney Todd's barber shop (ignore all existing barbers with similarly-named frontages). Then there's Johnson's Court that leads to Doctor Johnson's House, Hind Court and Bolt Court that both lead to the other end of Gough Square and Wine Office Court that dribbles past Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. All eight have a stone plaque laid in their entrance depicting an aspect of the history of the newspaper industry, from vintage headlines to sans-serif printing type, plus a depiction of Space Invaders for the last one which supposedly represents the invasion of technology. This isn't a genuine network of medieval alleyways but it feels a lot more like one than most of the multiply-redeveloped City.
The gaps: In common with a lot of the Square Mile what isn't listed is always up for commercial redevelopment. That's particularly true on the south side where a 16 acre block between Whitefriars Street and Salisbury Court has recently been entirely demolished leaving a gaping hole in the street frontage. Architecturally it's no great loss bar the aforementioned News Chronicle building, the rear of the site being mostly slabby 1970s blocks, but at least three longstanding alleyways will suddenly cease to exist. What's coming instead are the new City of London Law Courts on Fleet Street itself, a police station behind, the obligatory office block and some 'public realm' to keep the tickboxers happy. Almost as large is the demolished city block beside the Daily Express building, a development which I was disturbed to see will eventually be 21 storeys high... although it'll step back along Shoe Lane so won't intrude on St Paul's line of sight.
The rest: Then there's Prince Henry's Room, the birthplace of the AA, the 20 foot high St George's cross, the Park City HQ, the clockmakers' plaque, the open-topped tourist buses and a wealth of other stuff that's all apparent if you take a ten minute end-to-end stroll. Or you could simply dip into The Heritage of Fleet Street, a comprehensive history project begun in 2021 with the aim of generating 70 A3 information panels for display in situ and online. You can see some of them in Fleet Street windows and the entire set here, although because they're all individual pdfs you may lose the will to download more than a few of them. And that's the last street on the Monopoly board that isn't in the London borough of Westminster (although we'll be back in the City for two more stations yet).
The best-known numberplate game is probably Consecutive Number Plate Spotting, or CNPS, in which you have to spot all the numbers from 1 to 999 in order. First you spot a 1, then a 2, all the way up to 999. It just takes a very long time to complete. I played it once and it took nearly four years, eventually finishing the sequence with an F-reg Landrover on the A14 near Ipswich, but that was 25 years ago before the numberplate format changed. The big problem is that UK car registrations are no longer issued with three digit numbers except on vanity plates - haven't been since 2001 - so the game would now take hugely longer. Even waiting to spot a 427 could take months, let alone how long it'd take to get that far, so completing CNPS is now a virtually impossible task.
We need some better numberplate games for the modern era, so here are some.
AB 12 CDE
Game 1: Spot all the two-digit numbers in order.
Every two-digit registration number gets six months in the spotlight so there are a lot of each around. Each year we get two different numbers, 50 apart. The sequence started in September 2001 with 51, continued with 02 in March 2002 and has currently reached 24 (March-August 2024). Note that 01 was never used, which means the sequence you're currently looking for is 02 03 04.... 22 23 24 51 52 53... 71 72 73. Verdict: A bit artificial but very playable.
Variant 1a: Spot all the two-digit numbers in chronological order. Variant 1b: Spot all the two-digit numbers in reverse chronological order.
I prefer variant 1b because the game starts off fast with easy-to-spot numbers, then gets sequentially slower. The sequence you're currently looking for is 24 73 23 72 22 71 21 70... 04 53 03 52 02 51. This is rather harder to remember than the non-variant ordering but I think it makes for a better game. I can generally finish this in 2-4 days. Verdict: Quite a good game for a long journey. Blogged:here
A 123 BCD
Game 2: Spot all the registration letters in order.
n.b. To be clear, this is letters at the start of a plate, not the older format with the letter at the end.
This is the A to Z of registration letters, or rather A to Y because I, O, U and Z are not used. Also Q is only used for imported vehicles and they're so rare on our roads that you must absolutely ignore Q when you play this game. That means the sequence you're looking for is A B C D E F G H J K L M N P R S T V W X Y, i.e. 21 letters in total. Generally you're only going to see these letters on vanity plates and on vehicles that are more than 23 years old. The game moves fastest in neighbourhoods with disposable income (i.e. many personalised plates). I can generally finish this in about a week (and frequently do). Verdict: Absolutely the best medium-term numberplate spotting game. Blogged:here
ABC 123 D
Game 3: Spot all the registration letters in order.
Very much the same as Game 2 but for older vehicles with the registration letter at the end, i.e. those registered between 1963 and 1983. These are quite rare, hence the game can take months. During lockdown I managed it in five months, but only by making a note of where certain awkward letters were parked and making a special effort to go back and see them. Verdict: Much too slow.
AB 12 CDE
Game 4: Spot all the regional identifiers in order.
Back to the current style of numberplate. Vehicles in the Anglia region are issued a plate that starts A-something, Birmingham B-something, Wales C-something, etc. The game is to spot an Anglia plate followed by a Birmingham plate followed by a Welsh plate, etc. The letters I, Q and Z are not* used. The letters J, T, U and X are not used as regional identifiers but do appear on personalised plates. That means the sequence you're looking for is A B C D E F G H J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Y, i.e. 23 letters in total. The game's relatively quick - I have finished it in a day. U usually takes the longest.
* TN07 was used in Scotland in 2007 to avoid the issue of SN07 plates looking like 'snot'. This has no material bearing on the game whatsoever, but if I don't mention it someone will chirp up excitedly in the comments, indeed this has happened six times in the last four years. Verdict: A good game for a long car journey. Blogged:here
AB 12 CDE
Game 5: Spot all the opening letter pairs in order.
This means looking for AA, then AB, then AC all the way up to YX and YY. There are 529 pairs altogether which is a ridiculously high number. Also several of the pairs (like DJ and EH) only appear on personalised plates so are much rarer). Also some pairs (like FU and NF) are never issued so you have to know to skip those. I've been playing a version of this where the order doesn't matter, I just have to see them and cross them off my list, but I've been playing for eight months and still have six left. Verdict: Never play this game, you will never finish. Blogged:here and here
Variant 5a: Spot all the double letter pairs in order.
This is much more manageable, it just involves spotting AA BB CC DD... WW XX YY. The three that don't exist are II, QQ and ZZ. I've seen all the rest so it's very doable, although UU is especially rare and might be an insurmountable hurdle. Verdict: Works better if you don't look for them in order.
ABC 12
Game 6: Spot the first 99 numbers in order.
This game solely involves pre-1963 plates, many of which have been transferred onto much newer vehicles by drivers with money to burn. You're looking for a 1 on any GB plate without a registration letter, then a 2, all the way up to 99. But be warned, I played the "see them in any order" version and it still took eight months, finally ending with an 86 on a Mini Cooper on Richmond Hill. Verdict: Do not touch with a bargepole.
A 12 BCD
Game 7: Spot all the personalised letter/number pairs.
This is a game for 1983-1999 vehicles and personalised plates with a registration letter at the front. You're looking for every alphanumeric pair from A1 to Y20, including B3, F9, L11, P16 and X18. There are 420 combinations altogether and you'll need a list to cross them off as you see them. I've played this more than once, and generally it takes about a week to see half of them, a month to get to 90% and then an indeterminate time to mop up the stragglers. Requires a certain level of geeky diligence but is unexpectedly rewarding. Verdict: For dedicated platespotters only.
Variant 7a: Spot one set of personalised letter/number pairs.
Because I live in East London I like to look for E1 E2 E3 E4... E20 because these are local postcodes so they tend to be quite common on personalised plates. E19 isn't a postcode so that's usually the one I see last. You can pick any letter you like, obviously. Verdict: A bit more manageable, but still slow.
AB 08 CDE
Game 8: Count the symmetrical letters/numbers.
First you have to spot a numberplate where none of the letters/digits have a line of symmetry (e.g. GP 57 JNR), then a plate with just one, then two, all the way up to a plate where all seven are symmetrical (e.g. AB 08 CDE). This is quite a quick game, but you have be spatially adept to cope with the speed of it all. And yes, I admit the games are getting a bit desperate now. Verdict: Good if you need a quickie.
AB 12 CDE
Game 9: Spot the alphabet in order.
This is about the last letter on a modern numberplate. First you're looking for an A, then a B, all the way up to Z. This time Z does appear, but I and Q don't so you have to skip those. I've never played this but how difficult can it be? Verdict: A simple game to shut the kids up.
AB 12 CDE
Game 10: Spot a numberplate.
Does the vehicle have a numberplate? If yes then hurrah you've won and can stop playing these ridiculous contrived numberplate games, you big nerd. Verdict: Enough already.
Every 10 years the Routemaster Association likes to take over Finsbury Park with a mass line-up of London's favourite heritage vehicle, the RM bus. Unfortunately this year Haringey council made things difficult so the 70th anniversary bash, RM70, had to find a different home. They settled on a very different location, the whoppingly modern Chiswick Business Park, for the fairly good reason that this used to be the site of a bus engineering works. And then they organised an astonishingly feeble publicity campaign to encourage people to turn up at 'The Former London Transport Works, Chiswick' (precise times and events to be specified) over the weekend of 20/21 July 2024. A lot of Men Who Like Buses managed to put the clues together and turned up yesterday to find the eastern car park chock-a-block with well over 50 buses in a very very long line. Hearts quivered.
Even a non-expert would have spotted that not all Routemasters are the same. Some were green or even blue and white rather than red. One was missing its top deck because it was used as a tow truck. One was owned by the Minister of State for Rail. One served teas and coffees. One was RM1, the prototype whose 70th birthday this was. Some were utterly pristine but some were shabby wrecks awaiting renovation. Many displayed evocative heritage adverts but one was in full Pride livery on behalf of a German supermarket. Most were proper RMs but some were longer RMLs. Some were taking punters on a free trip round the local neighbourhood while others stayed resolutely still while the owners hid inside. And all were being quietly worshipped by men with cameras waiting patiently for everyone else to get out of the bloody way.
Once you'd walked up and down the line a few times further amusement could be had from a variety of stalls offering souvenirs and ephemera. Official anniversary merch included pin badges (£4), lanyards (£4), programmes (£5), mouse mats (£6), notebooks (£14) and hoodies (£eek), plus tins of liquorice allsorts, fruit pastilles, mini shortbread rounds, fudge selections and stem ginger biscuits. Other traders had tables of diecast models, redundant bus stop tiles, vintage bus timetables, yet more diecast models, subscriptions to voluntary organisations and books on such diverse specialist topics as South Wales Buses in the 1990s, Independent Buses Around Stoke-on-Trent and Wemyss Trams. In a massive pile of fare charts I spotted one for London Country route 385 dated 1968, which would have been pretty much exactly when I was learning to the read the destinations on the blinds of buses passing my house, but I couldn't wait ten minutes while some other collector hunted agonisingly slowly through the stack, plus it would most probably have got distressingly wet before I got it home.
The best thing about the venue was probably the footbridge leading to Chiswick Park station which offered a pleasingly unusual vantage point above proceedings. The other best thing about the venue was that it's the actual terminus of route 70 (Chiswick Business Park - South Kensington) which was perfectly appropriate for a 70th anniversary. The best thing about the event was that it was undertaken for the love of buses so admission was unticketed, walk-up and free. The other best thing about the event was the opportunity to meet likeminded souls, so a special mention to the three readers who came up and said hello and engaged in transport-focused conversation. But quite possibly the best thing about the event, given the desperately lacklustre publicity, is that it's a two day event so if you really want to go you haven't missed it. Everything kicks off again at 10am and runs until 6pm, just across the road from Gunnersbury station, and if you miss it it's a very long time until RM75, RM80 or whenever this riot ofRoutemaster royalty next reassembles.
✉ Head south from Hunstanton and the first village you graze is Heacham, home of Norfolk Lavender. It describes itself as "England's premier lavender farm (est. 1932) with nearly 100 acres of lavender" so we had high hopes, but it was also free to visit so all the clues were there. We saw the big lavender field while we queued for ages at the strange roundabout, rippling purple because we'd had the foresight to visit peak season. But we never found the way into the big field, the signage being very poor throughout - no visitor reception, no map of the site nor any decent wayfinding provided. Instead Norfolk Lavender is more a garden centre/gift shop/farm shop/play barn cluster with a few surrounding gardens, the biggest of which sprawls beyond the millstream and contains no substantial lavender at all.
The best part is the National Collection of Lavenders, which sounds admirably definitive and supposedly contains over 50 different varieties arranged in planted beds. The stripes form pleasingly contrasting shades of whites and pinks and purples but they don't quite stretch off to the horizon, only to the hedge beside the B1454, and floral interpretation stretches to little more than a Latin name label in the first bush. To anyone who's gambolled through the massive fields at Mayfield Lavender in Sutton it was all somewhat of a letdown, entirely worth the admission price but eminently skippable.
✉ Head south from Heacham, round the Dersingham bypass, and the next utterly famous place you reach is the Sandringham Estate. This royal hideaway was a 21st birthday present for Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, and covers 20000-acres of mostly woodland. It's where royalty tends to spend the winter months, hence was where George V (Jan 1936) and George VI (Feb 1952) took their last breaths. And during the summer months they open up the house and gardens to visitors, plus they offer 30 minutes free in the car park so we zipped in past the famous gates to see what we could manage to see in half an hour flat.
Crazy golf (with central red telephone box); woodland drives; period lampstands; obligatory gift shop; restaurant and/or cafe; ice cream dispensary; kiosk where you buy tickets (£24); royal thrones (aka public toilets); postbox; the Sandringham bus stop (route 34 hourly); road called Scotch Belt; focal war memorial; entrance to the paid-for bit; hmm, hang on, gate at end of short drive leading to... ooh.
St Mary Magdalene is extremely well-known as the church where the royal family go at Christmas, the focus of many a news broadcast when no other news is happening. But it's also open to the public daily from April to October and for free, so you can walk up the grass where the wellwishers huddle and climb the steps to the churchyard where royalty emerges. The church is much-upgraded Tudor, especially inside where the chancel is sumptuouslydecorated with carved angels hanging from the ceiling like golden bats. The altar and pulpit have a heck of a lot more silver than your average average-sized church, the royal pew is roped off in the chancel and the font is where Princess Diana was baptised. Next Christmas I shall be watching with more interest.
✉ Head south from Sandringham, past the junction where the Duke of Edinburgh notoriously overshot, and the next attraction is Castle Rising. It's one of the best-surviving 12th century keeps in the country, putting a lot of lesser ruins to shame, and English Heritage only charges £6 for the privilege of admission. We didn't go - there is a limit to how much you can cram into a 130-mile round trip from Norwich - but I got a briefly decent eyeful driving past along the A149.
✉ Head south from Castle Rising along Queen Elizabeth Way and you eventually hit the outskirts of King's Lynn. Look, there's the famously falling-apart Queen Elizabeth Hospital with its roof held up by props, a building project the local MP sadly never saw to completion during her seven weeks as Prime Minister. And I've blogged about King's Lynn before so let's leave the journey there.
Hunstanton is a seaside town at Norfolk's northwest tip and reputedly the only resort on the East Coast that faces west. It's like Great Yarmouth in that it boasts amusements, tattoos and chippies, but also smaller, newer, remoter, genteeler, cliffier and less likely to return a Reform MP. To get there head for King's Lynn and keep going along the side of The Wash until you can see Skegness. I'd recommend visiting before the school summer holidays, but you're just too late for that sorry. [Visit Hunstanton][8 photos]
✉ The resort of Hunstanton was the brainchild of the gloriously named Henry L'Estrange Styleman Le Strange, a young Victorian local nobleman. In the late 1840s he eyed up a patch of land south of the cliffs, built a hotel and then a surrounding cluster of Old-English-style buildings, before luring in punters with a convenient railway. Henry died just as things were picking up but so successful was his project that the medieval village of Hunstanton soon became Old Hunstanton while New Hunstanton became plain Hunstanton.
✉ Hunstanton's railway connection ended in 1969, the alternative now a 50 minute bus ride from King's Lynn, but if you want to relive the branch line's twilight years Sir John Betjeman obligingly made a celebrated 10 minute documentary in 1962.
✉ The heart of the town is The Green, a large wedge of greensward sloping down from the Town Hall and the aforementioned hotel, now The Golden Lion. The medieval cross at the top of the lawn was filched from Old Hunstanton in 1846 as an initial act of placemaking and is now sadly topless. Close by is a statue of Henry Le Strange, phenomenally bewhiskered in a pose that would have made many a Victorian lady tremble. The town sign is a bit lower down and depicts St Edmund and a little wolf.
✉St Edmund was teenage East Anglian royalty, reputedly landing below the cliffs in Hunstanton in 855 to claim his crown. His elevation to sainthood came after he was defeated by a wave of Danish invaders in 869 and executed for refusing to denounce his Christian faith. Legend says a young wolf was found nuzzling his decapitated head, or some such romantic fiction, hence a small lupine statue now sits beside the remains of the memorial chapel on the clifftop. Follow the Wolf Trail along Cliff Parade for the full story. Also I suspect everybody takes this photo of the lighthouse through the arch and I was no exception.
✉ Hunstanton's had a lighthouse since 1665 because manoeuvring into The Wash can be very dangerous. An earlier version contained the world's first parabolic refractor, or so the plaque says, this back in 1776. The latest white tower was decommissioned in 1921, then turned over to the Royal Observer Corps and is now used for self-catering. Hunstanton's land train turns round here and heads back to the town centre and Searles Holiday Resort, but only hourly and not on Fridays so don't rely on it.
✉ The cliffs are splendid, maybe 80 foot high and unusually stripy. They run for a mile with a layer of white chalk on top of red chalk on top of brownish sandstone, like a stretched-out frothy coffee or a massive neapolitan Viennetta. The red layer brims with tiny fossilised squid and shellfish, not necessarily visible, and the brown layer gains its colour from the presence of iron ore. To see them properly you have to walk the beach, there being no promenade below, and best come nearer low tide so you're not restricted to a thin shoreline strip.
✉ At the northern end the white layer is by far the thickest, and the beach is broad and encouragingly sandy. Keep heading south, past occasional piles of collapsed chalk, and the red gradually rises to almost nudge out the white. The beach simultaneously gets rockier with little pools, nothing overly challenging but enough I suspect to dissuade the geologically apathetic. Less adventurous souls can instead choose a £10 shoreline chug aboard The Wash Monster, an amphibious vehicle painted with shark's teeth, or alternatively go on a longer seal safari (tide permitting).
✉ Hunstanton used to have a pier but it didn't have a lot of elemental luck. Fire destroyed the pavilion at the far end in June 1939, a storm destroyed most of the rest in January 1978 and a fire in May 2002 finished the job. Today the site is occupied by an arcade and bowling alley complex which, though elevated, fails to jut out beyond the shoreline and is a Pier in name only.
✉ North of the pier are the formal gardens, the crazy golf and the bowling green, i.e. the Cromerier side of town. South of the pier it's much more Great Yarmouthy, a long promenade lined by tacky kiosks and unhealthy food outlets leading to an amusement park with spinning rides. If you want a 50p stick of rock, a bag of candy floss and a slab of nougat before a walk through the Crazy House and a splash down the waterslide then head south.
✉ If the weather's less fabulous than it's been this week, the chief indoor attraction is the Sea Lifecentre where penguins, piranhas and rescued seals are amongst the highlights. If the tide's in and the beach has disappeared then the Oasis pool offers seal-free splashing and a long swooshing slide. Elsewhere in town you'll find Britain's Largest Joke Shop, called World of Fun, and for something a tad more cultural the Hunstanton Heritage Centre (but this only opens four afternoons a week so quite possibly not).
✉ As you'd expect there are a heck of a lot of fish and chip outlets from lowly takeaway cubicles to proper sitdown restaurants. Henry's proudly boasts across its frontage that it earned third place in the National Fish and Chip Awards 2023, while Fishers on Greevegate has just been listed by The Times as one of the 23 best chippies in the country. I thought Fishers' cod was proper tasty but their chips were stodgy, undercooked and disappointing, indeed unfinishable, and the gull eyeing up my greasy box nearly got the remnants.
✉ Fish and chips aside I rather liked Hunstanton, a layered resort with a prim end and a common end both firmly anchored in the seaside tradition, and some special stripy cliffs to boot. It's just a shame it's so far from anywhere I'm likely to be, so if you're any nearer best take advantage.
Bus Route Of The Day 197: Croydon to Peckham Quadrant: London southeast Length of journey: 10 miles, 65 minutes
Because it's 19th July I've been out riding the 197, because that's the Bus Route Of The Day. My apologies for the repetition.
In the roulette game of "where on earth do buses in Croydon currently start from", the answer in the 197's case is the Fairfield Halls. It then weaves round the iconic Threepenny Bit building, stopping not quite outside East Croydon station, before ejecting itself from the town centre along a canyon of newbuild flats. According to signs this is now Lower Addiscombe, which seems a lot more takeaway-focused than Addiscombe proper, which we're skipping. Instead the 197 ploughs a lonely furrow past a pandemic academy, a shabby Londis and a car showroom called Classic Automobiles which appears to sell anything but. Blackhorse Lane marks the 1½ mile point and I don't know about you but I can't face the rest on the bus so I'm bailing here to catch the tram.
When the 197 reaches South Norwood it starts to shadow the 157, and I've already done that this week so let's not bother. In Anerley it splits away and heads for Penge, but then just shadows the Overground so what's to see? It splits again at Forest Hill and crosses most of Dulwich on its eventual way to Peckham, but I've already been there this week on the 177 so it seems I was right to alight several miles ago. The problem with Buses of the Day is that they too quickly get too repetitive, even in abbreviated form, so let's not even consider droning down the Uxbridge Road tomorrow.
• Two US fighter planes interrupted lunch on the new patio
• The train turned round just as we reached the lighthouse
• We got home to find a celebrity's father spraying our gravel
• Half the B1145 shut by nasty accident involving crumpled car
• Retiring teacher to receive trafficked £25 gardening voucher
• Sixty bikers roared off after we tried taking their photo
• Receipts for 17 year-old ink cartridges fed into shredder
• Perennial Christmas news venue is smaller than it looks
• The tortoise ate all the dandelion leaves before breakfast
• Windfarm shore access rig spotted in North Sea off Kelling
• Small brown deer wandered into back garden during elevenses
• 50% off big terracotta pots at Chelsea-winning garden centre
Bus Route Of The Day 187: West Hampstead to Park Royal Quadrant: London northwest Length of journey: 8 miles, 60 minutes
Because it's 18th July I've been out riding the 187, because that's the Bus Route Of The Day. It's no big hitter.
Officially the route is Finchley Road O2 Centre to Central Middlesex Hospital, but West Hampstead to Park Royal explains it better. The 187 is one of inner London's minor workhorses, a fleet of ancient rattly single-deckers twiddling round backstreets in an inefficient manner. Starting in a car park round the back of a shopping centre the bus manages to just miss the Abbey Road zebra crossing, Lord's Cricket Ground and Little Venice, all in favour of tracing streets where people actually live instead. Those who live in this corner of zone 2 suburbia have generally done very well for themselves, at least until we reach some of the council estates Dame Shirley Porter decanted her undesirables into. Maida Vale gradually blends into West Kilburn and then Queen's Park, and if you can imagine how bucolic Kilburn Lane must once have been you have a better imagination than most.
The shops at Kensal Rise thrive off disposable income, as befits a fine street of smart late Victorian terraces. But once you turn off Chamberlayne Road the architectural clock abruptly jumps ahead by 30 years, now passing bay-windowed pseudo-semis with gardens that make decent parking spaces. A teensy shooping parade here hides a cafe which started out as a grilled cheese stall in a Hackney market (that's Morty and Bob's) and what looks like a converted garage is actually a martial arts and wellness space. But mostly it's all houses, a few streets back from anywhere important, as we trace the outer fringes of Willesden. Look, we're just about high enough up to get one good view across west London. The owner of a Jaguar plated NW10 ROY must be living his best life. Who even knew there was a street caled Wrottesley Road? After minutes of mild mundanity a backed-up queue of traffic is your welcome to Harlesden, the shops on Park Parade kicking off with a vinyl/rugs stockist from the 0181 era, then Victory Divine Tailoring Alterations which might well be older.
Central Harlesden is a jumbly bazaar with a jubilee clock, eventually escaped past the County Court and the RC shrine on Acton Lane. Crossing the mainline brings the wafting smell of McVities digestives - if you're lucky - heralding the outer perimeter of the Park Royal trading estate. It's the 187's task to mop up some of the grubbier streets to the east before circling round towards the inevitability of the Central Middlesex Hospital, like a moth to a flame. The 22nd April, 22nd June and 22nd August can all whisk you away if you choose, but that's it for July.
The project that's got a lot of East East Anglia fuming is the proposed imposition of a 110 mile line of pylons all the way from Norwich to the Thames. It's needed to help connect an increasing number of wind farms in the North Sea to population centres in London and the southeast, because it's no good having all that cheap energy if you can't deliver it. But it also means plonking 50m-high pylons across swathes of rural Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, for whose residents this is all pain and no gain. [map]
The route starts just outside the ring road at the 50 year-old Norwich Main substation which is being massively extended to cope with inflow from Hornsea Project Three and Equinor Sheringham Shoal and Dudgeon. It then runs south across field after field to almost-Ipswich, almost-Colchester and almost-Chelmsford, diverting slightly to link to the East Anglia Connection Node on the Tendring Peninsula. The end target is an upgraded Tilbury Substation, just downriver from the port, where the energy generated by offshore windfarms will be connected to the transmission network. In the latest version of the consultation they've agreed to bury the cables across Constable Country in the Dedham Vale, which has pleased some, but elsewhere it's pylons all the way despoiling the landscape and furious communities who don't want to have to look at them. As here.
This is where the megapylons will cross Shelfanger Road, just north of Diss by the awkward double bend on the B1077. As you can see it's an open arable landscape, or if you can't see that sorry but this was the best photo I could take through the windscreen. Telegraph poles already stalk the wheatfields so the area's not exactly pristine, but they're not the lofty metal whoppers proposed to dominate instead. "I've never seen people either quite so angry or quite so in despair," said Diss's local county councillor. "I think this development, even the prospect of it, has stolen a lot of my happiness," said Gillian who lives just up the road in Bunwell.
For those who'll benefit from the transfer of green electricity, which is millions of people elsewhere, this moaning is all a bit NIMBY. Pylons aren't exactly a new thing and many areas across the country already have them and manage to live perfectly oblivious lives. My auntie lived under the pylons fanning out from Sizewell for decades and you never heard her moaning about the cables that stalked her lovely garden. Obviously it'd be nicer if all the new pylons were replaced by buried cables or undersea routes, preserving local loveliness, but that'd be prohibitively expensive and also much slower and sometimes you just have to get on and build stuff. Expect a lot more of this kind of tension as the new government goes for growth and if you happen to live in the way bad luck, somebody somewhere has to take the hit to keep the lights on.
Summer Olympics of my lifetime
