Category Archives: London

Some M’s

m23

M23 – A rebel group that operates in the eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was formed by loyalists to the Tutsi warlord Gen. Laurent Nkunda and takes its name from the date of an agreement signed on 23 March 2009 between Rwanda and DRC to cooperate on the eradication of a Hutu rebel group called the FDLR. It is widely believed that M23 are directly controlled by the Rwandan government.

m25

M25 – A motorway that encircles Greater London. It has various cultural meanings for people in the UK, defining for many the boundary between city and countryside. It also played a huge role in 80’s rave culture as people whizzed around it on their way to parties in rural barns and warehouses. Iain Sinclair wrote a geeky book about it which was made into a movie by Channel 4.

m83

M83 – A nice and melodic electronic band from France. They used to be pleasantly obscure but they recently composed the soundtrack for a movie called Oblivion that’s being advertised on a lot of buses at the moment so they may become famous and lose some of their exclusive charm. They are named after a spiral galaxy called Messier 83.

Class War #23

A picture of an angry man with a shaved head

So I’m cycling up Brook Street in Mayfair. If you’re not familiar with the area, it’s one of the two most expensive squares on a Monopoly board, the home of Claridges, Hermès and Halcyon Days, official supplier of objets d’art to the Royal Family.

A delivery man carrying a pile of boxes for Halcyon Days saw me riding towards him, decided that he didn’t care and walked straight into my path.

I swerved around him and called him a moron. He said, “Fuck off you white, middle class wanker.” He was white himself, stereotypically shaven-headed, but apparently the “middle class” insult wasn’t enough on its own. I rode back to him, annoyed.

“You thought I was going to get out of your way, didn’t you! Clear off and read your Guardian.” He yelled with the bitter, assumed contempt of a committed running-dog.

“You think you’re pretty hard don’t you?” I said, looking him in the eye.

“Piss off before I come and take your satchel off you,” he sneered, and walked straight into a lamp–post.

On my bike

Bike Frame

Someone sneered at my bike yesterday. It was Steve Hellier. He was lounging around outside Bush House, by the crossing, and I stopped in front of him because the lights were red. He looked down at my bike with a mocking laugh and said, “That’s a blast from the past!”

“I got it for my eighteenth birthday,” I said.

My Mum actually drove me up to the Brixton Cycles co-operative to choose it. I lived in Surrey at the time and to my delight as we drove into Brixton a mob was hanging Thatcher in effigy from a tree outside the Ritzy cinema. I particularly wanted to get my bike from the co-op because I knew a couple of the people involved in setting it up and I was sure they wouldn’t sell me a dodo. After we’d talked through what kind of cyclist I wanted to be they suggested a Holdsworth Claud Butler tourer with a Reynolds 531 alloy frame, made in Birmingham. The only problem was the colour; like a child I wanted it to be red but all they had was a very uncool turquoise. It was also a bit more expensive than my Mum had budgeted for, but she could tell it was a great bike and so could I, so we bought it despite the uncool 70’s styling.

“It looks like it,” Steve said with a curl of his lip, “Doesn’t it belong in a museum?” “Curses,” I thought to myself, “should have seen that coming.” Luckily the lights changed and I rode away before he could pour further scorn on me.

I love my bike and I’ve had it so long it really seems like a part of my body when I’m riding but it also has a life of its own, springing forward with energy and enthusiasm when I get on to it. It is so efficient and well-designed that I sometimes overtake people on mountain bikes as I free-wheel downhill.

It is this fantastic efficiency that I love about bikes and also what I find depressing about cycling when it’s perverted by sport. The great thing about a bike is that you can spring onto it and immediately go where you want to, with no mucking about. So why do people feel the need to get up in fancy dress when they’re riding? It’s the influence of things like the Tour De France, I tell you. It’s not healthy. That’s why Steve thinks a bike needs to be new to be good. Bikes become like mobile phones, people start to think their bike says who they are: Am I a Californian downhiller, am I an aesthetic pursuit rider, am I wearing my yellow sweater, is my helmet cool yet?

Come on cyclists, we’re better than this. We don’t need daft Lycra outfits to ride in, and our machines are easily efficient enough to carry some baggage without slowing us down. We can ride everywhere, the more we do it the easier it will be. Don’t kid yourselves by buying a mountain bike if you live in the city, that’s like those idiots in the SUVs, get a bike that will take you where you need to go. Most of all, don’t let the pernicious influence of sport turn cycling into a marketing opportunity for the capitalists. Bikes are cheap, they don’t need accessories, they perform best when you are happy and you don’t need any help from The Man to do that.

Al-Qaeda my arse

Airport Fire

Back in the last century the IRA, a small militant republican movement from Northern Ireland undertook a bombing campaign in London. As I say, they were a small organisation with scant resources but even so they managed to carry out a large number of spectacular and disruptive attacks while killing relatively few people. Judging by the very informative timeline of London bombings over at NPR there were 29 attacks between 1971 and 2001, an average of about one a year, causing millions of pounds worth of damage and huge disruption but only murdering 27 people in the process.

In this century we have Al-Qaeda who, we are told, are a global ‘terror network’ with access to unlimited funding, training and equipment. We are shown videos of masked men in secret training camps doing karate chops in balaclava helmets and clambering under barbed wire dressed as Rambo. They aren’t ‘nice’ like the IRA, they don’t give warnings. They have learned to make ‘Improvised Explosive Devices’ in Iraq, they defeated the Russians in Afghanistan but now the three countries they hate the most in the world are Israel, the US and Britain. Surely we are doomed.

They have had their successes: In the US in 2001, in Spain in 2004 and in London in 2005 but their failures have been so useless and embarrassing. The shoe bomber, the castor oil poisoners, the chapati flour and hair dye bombers and now the Camping Gaz and petrol drive-by bombings. It’s like being attacked by ten year olds from a rough estate who’ve got their hands on The Anarchist Cookbook. We shouldn’t raise the threat alert to maximum, we should ignore them, like spam or graffiti. They’re hopeless, ignorant, sexually frustrated losers who think that if they nick an SUV and burn it out in Glasgow airport instead of in some car park somewhere they’ll get more attention and unfortunately they’re right. What they’re not is members of some shadowy international ‘terrorist’ organisation. No way.

Cycling in London

Bike

Every now and then I hear people saying that they’re scared to cycle in London. There’s no reason to be scared, it’s easy if you follow these simple tips.

  1. Car drivers may seem to be scum but that’s because you’re thinking of them as people. When a person gets behind a steering wheel they stop being human so don’t act all surprised or angry when they behave like a moron. It’s your job to anticipate and prevent their stupid behaviour. Don’t bother shouting or getting all het up, they will never improve. Just accept them for what they are.
  2. Wear an iPod. If you’re using the standard ear buds they won’t block out enough road noise to make things any more dangerous but they will discourage other road users from talking/shouting at you because they will think that you can’t hear them. Music will also make your ride a great deal more enjoyable.
  3. Stop at every red light. As a good middle class man/woman it’s your responsibility to set a good example to those people who may not properly understand the rules of the road. People who jump the lights deserve to be run over.
  4. Keep at least a metre of space to your left. Force cars to make a positive decision to over-take you otherwise they’ll just try and squeeze past. If a car does get too close to you then ride further out in the road otherwise it will just happen again.
  5. Try not to let busses get in front of you, they’ll just leave you no room at the next junction.
  6. Be cool, you’re the winner, you don’t have anything to prove.

How do you fend off a dangerous dog?

Dangerous Dog

The BBC has published a namby-pamby article about what to do if a dog attacks you. They suggest that you put your hands in your pockets and turn away. I prefer the advice Richard Ballantine gave in his excellent Richard’s Bicycle Book. He points out that humans are bigger than dogs and thus should be able to win any fight. With big dogs he suggests that you stick your fist down their throat so that they choke. With a whole arm in their mouth they won’t have enough leverage to do much damage. With smaller dogs he says you can quite easily break their sternum by pulling their front legs sharply apart, or with tiny dogs you could wave your bicycle pump around until they grab hold of it with their teeth and then dash their brains out on the pavement.
If you’re a dog lover and are tempted to comment I’d point out that I’m talking here about self-defence against attacking dogs. My youngest daughter has been literally terrified three times in the last two weeks by nasty yappy dogs that jumped up in her face in places where they should have been kept on a lead, in every case the owners acted as though it was her fault and didn’t apologise. Saying that it’s the owners and not the dogs that are to blame is like saying it’s not guns that kill people, but people. In other words, of course a dog can be safely and responsibly owned, it’s just that they frequently aren’t.
I don’t think that dog ownership is sufficiently well regulated and until any dog (or its revolting by-products) can be easily and definitely traced to a specific owner I don’t think that they should be allowed to roam freely in our cities.

BBC NEWS | Magazine | How do you fend off a dangerous dog?

“I have a memory of an alternative reality…..”

Train

Working in News can be difficult. You listen to stories all day, most of them depressing. Some of them stay with you and some of them disappear inside without a trace. Leaving work and joining the wandering tourists outside you can experience your emotions like a wine-tasting. Sadness, pity, an aftertaste of anger that’s hard to get rid of. But today I’m thinking about what happened yesterday afternoon, a story about me.

I was traveling in to work on the train, listening to 9 on my iPod. The window was really clean, for once there was no graffiti on it, and everything outside was lit with the low, clear sunlight you get on a perfect autumn day.

At Loughborough Junction a woman got on and sat nearly opposite me. I could see, out of the corner of my eye, that she was dressed sleekly, all in black, with straight dark hair in a bob. I was about to glance over at her, but then I decided not to. I always look at attractive women, what’s the point? Isn’t it better just to be glad she’s there?

A moving pool of sun was lighting up her hands as she got out her book. I could see the reflection clearly in the window, superimposed on the moving city outside. It was a hardback novel, her hands were graceful, holding the book carefully. The building sites looked sharp and intense, everything seemed so real. I was finding it really hard not to look at her and it looked like she was glancing up at me. Maybe she could tell.

The way that tower blocks move past when you’re on a train listening to sad music is so achingly, cinematically perfect. Damien Rice was singing Does he drive you wild, or just mildly free? and now she had put down her book and was looking straight at me. I was desperately searching the landscape for beautiful things to look at: open windows, someone ironing, broken cars, flags. Maybe I looked like a tourist, someone who’s never seen a big city before.

Now we were slowing down for Elephant and Castle. She put her book away, stood up and went and stood in the lobby by the door. We both knew it was over, but she was still looking at me and I was stupidly staring at the platform. As she got out I shut my eyes and only opened them when the doors closed and we pulled away.

I felt a tear running down my nose as we passed the new Palestra building in Union Street. For the first time since it was built the wind turbines on its roof were turning.

Dead

Air Ambulance

My children saw their first dead person today.
As we were coming out of school an Air Ambulance was circling lower and lower overhead, looking for somewhere to land. By the time we got out of the school gates it looked as though it was coming down just up the road so we went up to see it land, but it dramatically veered away at the last minute. By that time though we could see the blue lights from an ordinary ambulance and a police car so we carried on walking, actually the kids I was with were running ahead, very excited.
When I caught up with them at the police line we could all see what had happened. A man was lying on the road with no shoes on, a paramedic was trying to resuscitate him, his motorcycle helmet was lying beside him. A little way down the road there was a load of debris and a blue car with a big dent in its wing.
After a couple on minutes the air ambulance people walked up from where they had landed but it soon became obvious that they weren’t in a hurry any more. Someone got out a defibrillator and then put it away again. People started to drift away.
The kids I was with weren’t as freaked out as I thought they would be. One of them said that she felt sorry for the man, even though she didn’t know him, then she said the idea of him lying there dead made her feel a bit sick. Another said she thought she knew who owned the car that the bike had ended up underneath. We all talked about how careful you should be, even on quiet roads like that one. My oldest daughter didn’t think it was ironic that she was carrying a death mask that she made this week in her Tutankhamun project. As we walked home they soon started to talk about other things and hardly noticed the air ambulance as it flew off again on its way to the next pitiful engagement.

I fought the law, and the law (as usual) won

Ticket Inspector

At last. Today I finally got to try out my new Fare’s Fair approach to train tickets. Let me explain…

I generally travel to work by train. The railway company has a penalty fare scheme which means that if you get caught without a ticket by one of the roaming ticket inspectors you have to pay a penalty of £15. This means that if you arrive at the station and the ticket office is understaffed, causing a huge long queue, you have to miss your train or risk paying a penalty. So you are obliged to arrive at the station early, just in case. However, if your train is late, as long as it’s less than 30 minutes late, you get no compensation at all. I think this is unfair because it demands utter punctuality from you but only vague punctuality from the train operators.

Because I thought the system was unfair I devised a compensation scheme of my own. If a train was delayed I wouldn’t buy a ticket on my next journey. If a ticket inspector happened to turn up I would happily pay the penalty fare and then get the money back by not buying tickets on future jouneys until I was even again. It worked because you only get a ticket inspector about once a week, but some of my friends felt that it was wrong for me to be fare-dodging so often and I wasn’t completely comfortable lumping myself in with the hard-core elements who never buy a ticket, so I came up with a new scheme.

What I decided to do was to pass any delays on to the ticket inspectors. So if a train is delayed by three minutes then the ticket inspector should have to wait for three minutes before he can see my ticket. I know it seems petty but it makes me feel much more relaxed about problems if I don’t feel completely powerless. Unfortunately every delayed train I’ve been on lately has not had an inspector on it, until today.

The 06:40 didn’t arrive until 06:43 and just after I’d sat down the inspector came along. I felt nervous but I knew I had to go through with it. I told him that I did have a ticket but I couldn’t show it to him immediately because the train was delayed. He looked annoyed straight away. I didn’t have the courage to tell him that he was going to have to wait three minutes. He told me that he had the power to chuck me off the train at the next stop. I hadn’t thought of that. I prevaricated, he said that he was going to ask me one last time. “I’m going to show you my ticket” I squeaked and got out the huge pile of old tickets I’ve got in my coat pocket. As I nervously fumbled through them, as slowly as I could in a last tiny act of defiance, I realised that my hands were really shaking. It was much more scary than I imagined it would be.

Have I gone soft? I’m sure I never used to find confronting authority figures so difficult. I hope I get a chance to do it again soon. Next time I don’t think I’ll tell him why there’s a delay, they do that to me often enough.