Modernisms #3

Astonishingly, a further instalment in the ongoing series of Things You Wouldn't Have Heard Ten Years Ago:

#3: I need to top up my Oyster

Travel used to be relatively straightforward. You wanted to go somewhere, you bought a cardboard ticket from a large man in a small office, you got on your chosen mode of transportation and you got off again at the other end. As that irritatingly ubiquitous meerkat might opine, "Simples!". However, rather like the proliferation of self-service checkouts in supermarkets, London Transport came up with* the rather super idea of allowing people to come and go as they please on the tube and buses, as long as they carried with them a credit-card sized, pre-paid 'token'. Brilliant. Or, in fact, not. Because as fast as they could introduce rules to govern the use of these cards, regular travellers were not only finding ways to bend the rules and commute for cheap and/or free (compulsory amongst the modern youth) but also that the system utterly failed to take account of relatively normal city-wide travel behaviour; unsuspecting Oyster punters were often charged the full single fare for entering a tube station at which they were told the line they wanted was closed but they would have to swipe their Oyster card to get out and try a different route. Brilliant money-making scam; less-effective urban transport policy. They claim to have fixed that now, although 2010 sees the Oyster system being extended to the entirety of the suburban London railway network. I know; God help us all.

* OK, they copied it from any number of other schemes around the world, not least the similarly-monikered Octopus card in Hong Kong, but give me a break here...

Time Travelling

Recently, I had cause to travel into central London on a Sunday, to watch England play Australia in a cricket match.

Obviously, this blatant disregard for the Sabbath meant I should have had an inkling but as I checked my options I found that the 1) Jubilee Line (to St John's Wood) was closed and that 2) Charing Cross trains were diverting to Blackfriars which might have been OK but for the fact that 3) Blackfriars tube station was closed for running repairs, so I thought about taking our other line to 4) Victoria but the trains to there were not running from Catford due to over-running engineering works, which meant I could still walk over the hill to 5) Honor Oak Park but Southern Trains were only running southbound from Platform 2 due to roof repairs which was the wrong direction for me so I had to wait a further 30 minutes for a reduced service from 6) Catford Bridge to London Bridge, get a shuttle to Charing Cross, take the Bakerloo to Baker Street and walk a further 20 minutes to Lords.

And we lost.

Looking forward to the 2012 Olympics, anyone? Christ.

PubStop

Brilliant idea; no more KFC rip-offs or oily £8.49 3-item Granada breakfasts:

PubStop

Or you could not bother actually going anywhere for your summer holiday and spend two weeks in your local :) Still, we shall be using this next time we venture North...

What I Done On My Holidays #1

Today was spent getting more and more furious at easyJet's apparent failure to realise that to run an airline with any genuine intention of getting your paying customers* from A to B - in this case, Gatwick to Toulouse - you are actually going to need what is commonly known as a PLANE. One that works. And is where it is supposed to be, when it is supposed to be there.

Scheduled departure time 0940; actual departure time 1300. FFS. Still, at least I now know all the Mr Men books off by heart...

* and none of that 'You get what you pay for' nonsense; these flights were the same price as BA charged us last year, but who no longer offer Gatwick to Toulouse, the bastards.

It's A Fix(ture)

This is a fascinating insight into the vagaries of the football fixtures calendar.

BBC Sport: Secrets of the fixture computer

Essentially, it's a massive Zebra Puzzle (incorporating the railways, the police, the FSF, bank holidays and horseracing amongst other things) and takes months to complete. For example:

"West Ham are paired with Dagenham and Redbridge. But for reasons of revenue, Southend request they do not play at home on the same day as the Hammers as they believe it impacts upon their attendance."

However:

"Southend are in Essex, as are Colchester, so they cannot play together on the same weekend. Colchester share stewards with Ipswich so those two clubs also request they do not play home games on the same weekend. Transport links dictate Ipswich and Norwich do not play together on the same weekend either. In other words, when West Ham play at home can have an impact on when a club as far away as Norwich (108 miles) play their home fixtures."

As I say, fascinating. Geek out.

Plane Crazy

Having vented about our recent Heathrow Terminal 5 experience on Twitter, I was pointed at this by a top-secret inside source (hello, H!)

Terminal 5: Mood Clouds

I am speechless. It's a sodding airport, it doesn't have emotions! Stop this incessant anthropomorphising in the name of soft and cuddly customer relations. We're not idiots.

And it still doesn't have enough trolleys *fume*

I Can't Believe Its Butlins

The line-up for this festival looks absolutely amazing:

BLOC 2009

Aphex Twin / Future Sound of London / Jamie Lidell / DJ Qbert / Carl Craig / Green Velvet / Afrika Bambaataa / Skream & Benga / Busy P/ Altern-8 / 4Hero / Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry / Rusko / Ed Rush and Optical / Mad Professor / Modeselektor / Beardyman / Appleblim / Joker / Ulrich Schnauss / BassClef / Rob Da Bank / Billy Nasty / Radioactive Man (and those are just the ones I've heard of...)

Lord knows I'd like to go, but I've never been to a Butlins before - will they still have a poolside knobbly knees contest? Maybe a gurning competition might be more suitable :)

Home Alone

It's very, very quiet here.

This year, it is once again time to spend Christmas in Dubai, with Solveig's family. Although very much a Muslim country, the proliferation of western ex-pats and massive shopping malls means that Christmas is a big deal over there. Despite my default setting at this time of year being a Level 37 Scrooge, I do rather enjoy the incongruousness of eating the traditional Christmas roast dinner* outside, near the desert, in 25 degree heat, under a portable gazebo :)

Anyway, the other factor is of course that Dubai is a long way away: five four hour time difference and roughly a seven hour flight. So it's clearly not worth popping over after work on Christmas Eve and buggering off around teatime on Boxing Day. This year, Solveig was understandably keen to get as much time as possible there, with ready access to delighted babysitting grandparents for Theo and energetic older cousins for Freyja (warm weather, good shopping and a heated swimming pool may also have featured in the discussion). I could just about negotiate two weeks off work (as I did the Christmas week graveyard shift last year) but with her on maternity leave, it would be silly not to stretch it for the rest of the family as much as possible.

The long and short of this is that yesterday she loaded up the car with children, luggage, pushchair, travel sweets, magazines, Kendal Mint Cake and a navigator (her excellent sister Angharad, who Freyja adores) as well as printed maps, laptop-based routefinder, sat nav, A-to-Z and mobile phone with me on speed dial. After the first call ("How do I make the water squirt onto the windscreen?") they were off. BA flight 109 from Heathrow T5 to Dubai was waiting. After the traditional crawl round the M25, they arrived at BCP to be told that yes they could park there but the courtesy coach could only take them to Terminal 4, from where they would need to take a regular scheduled London bus to Terminal 5**. Not happy, but what can you do? Anyway, finally the call comes - they're there, checked in, had dinner, kids in pyjamas and waiting to be called for the flight. Phew. And sure enough, woke up this morning (after what can only be described as a three-hour lie-in) to a text message saying that the kids were brilliant on the flight and everyone is smiling and happy in the UAE sunshine.

So I can relax. With TMS commentary of the India test, Arsenal the lunchtime match on the box, a pork pie in the fridge as well as it absolutely chucking it down outside (so I couldn't rake the metric tonne of leaves off the garden, even if I wanted to, which I don't) it's pretty relaxed chez fourstar. I shall miss them all terribly for the next week, but it's good to be able to breathe out once in a while :)

As I said, it's very, very quiet here...


* Which I have just realised, with the arrival of Theo, will be for 11 people this year!

** Having been informed of this by a rather stressed wife I decided to look into it and as far as I can tell it turns out that yes, there is Long Stay parking at the shiny new T5 but it is exclusively run by BAA, is literally TWICE the price of the other operators and they won't let the independents (BCP, Purple, Flyaway, etc) run their courtesy coaches direct to T5. Insert insulting swear word of choice here.

En Vacances

Currently, here at Lascombe (just outside Cahors in southern France) the temperature is a blistering 34C (93F in old money) and the sky looks like an Yves Klein canvas:

Now some of you will be thinking, "Yeah, right, he's just put a bit of Yves Klein canvas up, the cheating monkey" so here is the same shot with a bit of foliage in it, innit:


It's bloody hot :)

Tellier What

When we used to live in Hong Kong, I distinctly remember my father bringing home some cassettes of Jean Michel Jarre (I initially thought it was The Concerts In China but that wasn't until 1981 so it must have been something else - Equinoxe?). Whatever you think of his concerts (and looking back with the jaundiced eye of a some-time electronic artist, they were perhaps rather pompous) with his banks of massive synths and radical laser shows, it fair blew the mind of this 8-year old boy and I was definitely hooked on all forms of electronica from then on.

Anyway, thirty-odd years later, recently perusing one of the many (27 and counting) MP3 blogs in my RSS reader, I came across a remix of a Sebastian Tellier* track (the ridiculously titled 'Sexual Sportswear') which took me right back to those early days of JMJ discovery:



What do you reckon, Dad, have things come full circle?

* Yes, the very chap that represented France in the Eurovision Song Contest this year. He came 18th; the UK came joint last with Germany and Poland. No, my pleasure...

Overheard #45

What goes in Vegas, stays in Vegas:

"So Mindy? If I'm standing, I'm drinking..."

Ding Dang Dung

Yikes.

It seems to be time for the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest already. Since the success of the magnificently inappropriate Lordi in 2006 and bespectacled radical Flump Marija Serifovic in 2007, I have absolutely no idea who might win. To be fair, neither do I give a flying muskrat. What I do know is that they will be hard pushed to scale the dizzying heights of Teach-in from the Netherlands in 1975. Now I'm pretty sure they weren't miming, coz that ain't allowed, so the sync on the video must be terrible. Anyway, enjoy:



Despite the fact that the start of the middle eight is a dead ringer for the Grandstand theme, get a load of the pianist's trouser/boot combo as well as the fact that the guitarist on the right is clearly about 8'3" and wouldn't have been out of place in the aforementioned Lordi. Genius. Altogether now:

"Ding-a-dong every hour,
When you pick a flower,
Even when your lover is gone gone gone..."

Awesome. Especially the face on the xylophonist* at the end.

* I imagine it might be some sort of vibraphone but 'xylophonist' was too good to resist. How many times a year do you get to put that in a blog post, eh?

London Gondola

What a fantastic idea, beautifully recreated:

More here.

BiTE Me

Ever feel peckish at a railway station but feel they bump the prices up because of a 'captive audience'? Well you can get 20% off with the BiTE card...

BiTE, the free discount card for rail travellers
Millies Cookies, Ixxy's Bagels, Ritazza, Upper Crust, Delice de France, The Pasty Shop, Burger King, etc

Late-night post-pub munchies just got cheaper! Not that I would ever ... I mean, only if ... I'll stop now.

From .ad To .za

Another gem via strange maps; the world 'sliced and diced' by ccTLDs.

WWWorld Map

Geeky? Yep. But cool? Hell yeah, I want the poster :)

Dali-ston Junction

Nicely observed.

The Surreal Line

"On other trips, I've seen a woman waft a man with handfuls of cash, a giant offer a businessman a plateful of jelly and a mischievous squirrel attempt to leave a box on a man's shoulder. I've sat in a train and been eyed up by gawping giants. Watched a pair of eyes roll by the carriage windows, sneaking a peak at a commuter's paper in the time-honoured tradition. Before I can point this out to anyone, as if by magic, I'm suddenly back again. Like Mr Benn, with a token souvenir of his dressing room travels, all I have left are these pictures."

[via Going Underground]

Paint It Black(burn)

Can Blackeye Rovers (as The Fiver famously tagged them) continue to kick lumps out of other teams and pretend that it is Premier League football? The display at Ewood Park was disgraceful - yes, it's a man's game, blah blah blah, but if I remember correctly the point is to pass the ball from player to player and try to create a scoring opportunity; not to see how brutal a challenge you can get away with, before the referee remembers that there are assessors in the stands and brings out the yellow cards. And they only had ONE player sent off (their captain, if that is any indication of their utter shamefulness). It's a disgrace and this picture sums it up:


One of these players is a skilful top-level international midfielder attempting to reach the ball* and the others play for Blackburn Rovers. As Cesc asked of Mark Hughes last season:

Didn't you play for Barcelona? Because that's not Barcelona football.

Yes, I know we only managed a 1-1 draw because Crazy Jens made his second successive bizarre error (three and you're out?) but I imagine we might have scored more goals had we realised it was actually hurling/Aussie rules/WWF.

Tsk.

UPDATE: Goodplaya agrees with me

* for those of you wearing blue/white, that's the round thing that the other team are attempting to pass around, but don't worry yourself with technicalities; ankles and knees look awfully similar when your hair flaps in your eyes...

One For The Rails?

The ever-reliable Going Underground comes up trumps again with this Tube map 'mashup' on LastRounds.

LastRounds Tube Map
It tells you the times of the first/last Underground service from each station, as well as the staggering distance from the local hostelries. So you can order that final pint of Stocks Old Horizontal, safe in the knowledge that you can still catch the last tube home. Genius (and minicab drivers are going to hate it :)

Smoother Ride

Going Underground tells of another new design for the Tube map, this time with curves, making it easier to follow whilst being more similar to the geographical map (without the scale issues that brings in the very middle and at the outer reaches):

I really like it - clean, easy-to-read and indicates better the actual direction you are heading. But is London ready for it - what do you think?

Le Stumping

The Corridor, esteemed cricket-type blog, sent me off in the direction of this - a poster explaining the rules of cricket in French (not French cricket which is an entirely different animal). I am obviously very keen for our Gallic chums to discover the delights of the noble game so we can go on a GRACC tour to the Lot region, stay in the house in Cahors, drink excellent wine and if we can find the time to fit in a match, utterly thrash them.*

* yeah, right!