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Picture this

by on 29 September, 2008 in London, Photography

If it’s not too immodest to say so, I was rather proud of the picture I took last night of sunset over South London:

Sunset over South London

So imagine my surprise when I saw this picture in Guardian.co.uk’s photographic roundup, 24 hours in pictures, today… I thought for a second the picture desk had pinched my picture (and I’d have been very, very proud if they had, of course):

It’s not the same picture of course – the one used on the site was shot by Alessandro Abbonizio of AFP. But I suspect we must live quite close together, as we have almost the same angle on those vapour trails. And I’m happy a pro confirmed I was right to put the silhouette of those houses in the bottom of the picture. It certainly was a spectacular sight.

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Rounding up your London-living advice

by on 8 September, 2008 in London, Notes to self

There was a lovely response to my post last week on living in London, which makes me think perhaps I should do more about the place. Lots of comments, which you should read there – as well as a trio I should pick out…

1. Yes, it’s true that the Waverley – the glorious Clyde paddle steamer which makes an annual visit to the south of England – isn’t due here another month. An Honest Man – who I’ve known most of my life as my Uncle Bill – posted helpful photographic evidence of the lovely ship steaming past Ayr, on the west of Scotland. The Waverley’s fast, but not fast enough to make it down in those timescales. But I’ll be going for a steam next month.

2. James Cherkoff asked why I advised against buying a house with a basement. Well, James, it’s because mine keeps filling up with water and – given that’s where the boiler lives – that’s a royal pain. And an expensive one, too.

3. Graham Beale adds very very good point – join Tate. He’s right about the members’ club, which has the finest views of any members’ room in the country. I’d also suggest the ICA in the Mall which – aside from having quite the poshest address of any club – has a very nice restaurant and a late bar. [Later: Gah! Thanks Graham! How could I forget the Frontline Club, the journalists' club in Paddington of which I'm a founder member and a great fan? Maybe the very fine members' bar has something to do with my amnesia... decent restaurant there too, open to all.]

There are more nice suggestions from you lovely people at the end of the post – do add more there, rather than here – if inspiration strikes.

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Ten years, and ten tips for living in London

by on 2 September, 2008 in London, Notes to self

Right pea-souper, guvnor, etc etcIt’s the 10th anniversary of my move to London, when I left the homely comforts of my little Edinburgh flat in pursuit of a certain girl, and some work. And we all know how that ended up.

So, to mark ten years working here in the big smoke (if not always living here – we’ll always have Swindon), here are ten top London tips. Feel free, of course, to add your own in the comments, for London or your locale of choice.

1. As soon as you live here, you get to be a Londoner. But remember to be a tourist in your own city. Get on the open-topped buses. Sail down the river (I really want to do this on the Waverley this autumn. Hmm. Maybe this weekend, in fact). Do the Tower, and Buckingham Palace, and the galleries and museums one wet Sunday at a time. And subscribe to my mate Andrew’s brilliant weekly email, and buy his gorgeous guidebook, to find more cool things to do.

2. The Tube’s great, sometimes for several complete days a year. But buses let you see more, if you can suss the masonic ritual that is “getting a ticket”.

3. Oyster (Transport for London’s contactless card system) makes life much easier, even on buses. Some privacy activists will tell you, as they adjust their foil helmets, that they won’t use it because Gordon/George/Boris/Ki-moon/Ken will be able to follow their movements as they touch in, and touch out. Yet they have no trouble telling their cabbie where they’re going, and are probably Twittering and blogging the minutae of their paranoid lives from the back seat as they do. Ignore these people, and remember to smile for the CCTV.

4. On the tube, or in the street, keep walking. Briskly. There’s a Facebook group dedicated to Londoners’ fantasies about dealing with those who don’t.

5. No matter how much you earn, and no matter how much more you’re earning with your new London job, you will feel poor. Even Roman Abramovich was surprised at the cost of a loaf down Borough market, and left wondering if he’d taken enough out the hole in the wall for that and an artisan sausage sandwich with organic lemonade for lunch. Really. Or maybe not*. Console yourself with the fact you’re not having to scrape by on less than the London living wage, like one in seven of your new city neighbours. Or maybe you are, in which case, condolences. The government thinks you should survive on the flat-rate UK minimum, despite major banks, other big employers and even the new Tory mayor thinking Ken Livingstone’s higher London minimum is a good idea.

6. Helpfully – because you couldn’t afford a nice car anyway – having a banger with damaged paintwork is the pragmatist’s motor of choice around London. It means you can move into traffic without fear – that BMW/Mercedes/Audi driver will let you in**. It’s not that they’re being nice – they just don’t want to get bashed. Have you seen the insurance premiums?

7. Ah, yes – insurance premiums: for the love of God, shop around. Some insurance firms, landing you with an annual bill that’s one third of your car’s total value, seem convinced London’s full of people madly driving into one another. What? Oh.

8. Don’t buy a house with a basement.

9. Pocketing the money you’ve saved by not buying a house with a basement, save up, and do a really great restaurant. You’ve got an amazing choice, but the best meal I’ve had in London was probably at Rhodes Twenty Four, up the old NatWest tower; British food done really well, with stunning views of the city.

10. But the simple pleasures are good too. Nothing makes you feel like you’re in a great city more than watching the world go by with a late-night/small hours coffee at Bar Italia in Soho, or a greasy spoon breakfast in a formica topped-table caff a few hours later.

* The Abramovich thing is a lie. A flight of fancy, for illustrative purposes only. Sorry.

** This does not apply for London buses. Really. Don’t. Try. It.

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When blogs die

by on 2 August, 2008 in Digital revolution, London

Damn. A favourite blog – London Connections – has suddenly decided to give up the ghost.

It was a site that fed a minor obsession of mine – and, I’m sure, thousands of other Londoners . It told us what, on earth, was going on with all the changes to London’s public transport. Although I didn’t always understand some of the technical diagrams of track layouts, and sometimes it wasn’t even relevant to my routes, I loved the detail and the greater understanding of the complexities of transport planning it gave me. (I know, I know. I am a geek).

The links to public documents about railways works were, in themselves, a valuable civic service that no news organisation provided. It was a site that, far away from all the balls spoken about citizen journalism, proved the huge value of narrow, niche publishing on the web. Just look at the number of comments on the final post to see what value it brought. It was all produced by a blogger who was, I think, anonymous.

But now it’s dead – a risk, I guess, with something powered by passion, not profit. I hope that perhaps the author will take a break, and choose to return, but there’s an air of finality about the final post.

Damn, again.

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Office temperature watch

by on 28 July, 2008 in London

M’colleague Meg, who is unfortunate enough to share an office with me, hit on the splendid idea of bringing in a thermometer to give us some facts and figures on just how sizzling our cubbyhole is. And now we’ve produced (that’s my dreadful scrawl) a list of all the hot places that are, in fact, cooler than here.

Office temperature watch

So: we’ve established, thanks to the temperature charts on the back of the paper, that our office is hotter than many world-famous hotspots. Mexico City, Athens, Bermuda, LA, Harare, Istanbul, Rio and Singapore? We call you all for what you are: cold spots. You ain’t got nothing on our little corner (top floor, left hand window, since you ask) of the building.

But maybe our suffering is as nothing compared to you. Think you can do better? Meg’s posted about it here, and there’s some discussion on her Flickr pic as well, and we’re offering “something suitably cool” – maybe a nice Vindaloo – as a prize for the best submission. Let’s be hearing about your Hottest Day In The Office.

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A TV news report that could make you sick to the stomach

by on 20 July, 2008 in Current Affairs, London

My attention was grabbed by an ITV London Today story this lunchtime, firmly stating that not only is water in the Thames clean, but that it is easily drinkable – the best in the country, no less. London Today claimed: “99.98% of tests taken on samples from the river met national and European standards of safety, appearance and taste.”

Surely not, I thought.

Y’see, the River Thames doesn’t look like a clean river, and it’s not. Anyone living here knows. Its distinctive swirling brown murk is caused by silt stirred up by the fast-flowing tides – that’s not the real problem. The biggie is that sewers often overflow directly into the river after heavy rainfall, meaning it’s still quite possible that the river is – in a sense only too literal for those keen on watersports, or surfboarding to work – full of shit.

We even know 2012 London Olympic organisers are fretting that the sight and smell of London’s backed-up sewage might mar their events. It’s a great scandal.

Yet here was ITV’s local news suggesting otherwise. And not just that there was not a problem; that this was the best draw of water in the land.

A quick (web) surf turns up the truth, in a press release from Thursday: Thames Water, the water company which serves the south east of England, is indeed serving up commendably clean water. But Thames Water does not draw its water from the Thames river, thank God, and this report does not mean the Thames River is clean.

So, ITV News’s claim that “samples from the river” have done so well is, alas, as full of shit as the river itself after a heavy downpour. They mean Thames Water, not the Thames river. But that’s not what they said, while showing library shots of the murky old river itself – just to add to the confusion.

The offending 30 second item is below, recorded off my TV – sorry I can’t stand still. And a warning: paying attention to this news bulletin could be a mistake you come to regret, quickly and repeatedly, all because someone somewhere can’t take a days-old press release and rewrite it properly for a bulletin.

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Scots away

by on 22 May, 2008 in London, Notes to self

Missing boxLuckily Mrs T regards herself as British. Otherwise, she might have struggled with this NHS registration form today.

Alongside an eclectic selection of other nationalities, she could have registered her Englishness, Welshness, Cornishness, Northern Irishness and Irishness… but not her Scottishness.

I don’t think, however, that treatment is affected by which box you tick, or by the accuracy of that tick. Which is probably just as well.

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Applauding Shirky’s light touch

by on 19 March, 2008 in Books, Digital revolution, London, Uncategorized, Web/Tech

Clay Shirky rolled into town yesterday, giving a lunchtime lecture to a packed house down at the RSA on his new book Here Comes Everybody.

It’s about how online crowds form and act, but the title could have adequately described the packed auditorium; the gang was all there, as many techie, socialie, liberal-artsie types as you could shake a stick at. It was particularly fun to see a vast number of friendly faces from my years working on the Guardian’s tech section. “Shouts out”, as I think the youngsters like to say these days, to Vic Keegan, Sean Dodson, Jim McLellan, and Pat Kane. There were I’m sure, others.

Given the sheer heft of blogging power in the room, I’ll leave reporting what Shirky actually said to others.

But I will note how Shirky said what he said. It is a rare talent, I think, to wear your learning lightly, especially around that intersection of the social sciences and new media. Maybe it’s because this is such a new area, and we’re still evolving the language to discuss it. Maybe it’s because some of the early practitioners feel they’ve got to baffle their audiences to earn their respect (or paper over the cracks).

Either way, it’s not unusual to hear people speaking (or writing) about this area struggling to make themselves clear or, even worse, not really trying. Even some of the questions asked after Shirky’s initial talk rather lost themselves – and they were only a few sentences long.

Shirky, however, was superb, illuminating his theories with three sharp stories, a measure of wit, and an absence of conceit. His thought is, I’m sure, complex and brilliant and the result of years’ experience and mulling. It’s just he left us to work that brilliance out, rather than rubbing our noses in it, screaming “admire the elegance of my societal observations, you fools!” It made for a far more enjoyable lunchtime, and I’m sure his book will be all the better for it too.

His slick, easy way is quite a talent – but what is it born of? Practice, I’m sure, but maybe also coming from the US? Our American cousins seem, certainly, to do this better, at least in this area. Maybe it’s just that country has such a lead in this specialism. Maybe there’s something in the water. Maybe they set greater stock in expressing themselves in a clear way (or recognise the rewards of doing so).

Either way, it’s quite a talent to talk about complex stuff like that for an hour and hold the attention of a packed room. I hope it inspires others to try out his style.

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First train (or: the saddest post you’ll ever read)

by on 3 December, 2007 in London

First trainHanging from a strap, pressed up against your neighbour and wishing, for the love of God, the thing would just get moving, I suspect every commuter longs for the perfect train – the service that runs direct, is fast, isn’t too busy, gets you into work with the minimum of fuss. But they’re more easily described than found, in this country at least.

My commute through South London, for instance, normally involves a somewhat complex, hour-and-a-bit-long arrangement. There are always at least two hugely overcrowded trains, both vulnerable to delay, with so many permutations (including the Tube) that I’ve taken to working it all out in an Excel spreadsheet, one for the summer timetable, one for winter.

Until now. A close perusal of the train timetables – yes, I really should get out more – revealed a mysterious service leaving a nearby station (three are within walking distance of Tosh Towers) direct to the station nearest work, albeit at the slightly bracing time of 0645.

It was said to run direct from the nearby depot, and is one of only two services all day – the other’s even earlier – on this route. I suspect they’re intended, really, to get rolling stock in the right place for the rush-hour proper – this one’s headed for the commuter town of St Albans – but, happily, they take passengers.

But not many of them, as my picture shows. A brisk walk through the pre-dawn chill revealed a handful of fellow travellers waiting on the platform. While more normal commuter services rolled by, already with people standing in the aisles, we waited for our mysterious service to emerge, empty, from its depot. Almost on time, it quietly rolled in, and we got almost a carriage each. And off it went. Forty-five minutes later I was at my desk.

Remarkably, here was commuter bliss, right here in the heart of commuter hell, and it had taken only taken 18 months to find. Early mornings, and the unutterable smugness they bring, ahoy.

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Londonist’s look inside the new Guardian HQ

by on 12 March, 2007 in London

I’m a bit late to this, but KingsplaceinteriorLondonist scooped us all by getting a look inside Guardian News & Media’s new HQ at King’s Cross. That’s one of their pictures, right.

The redevelopment around King’s Cross is huge; for those who don’t know the city, it’s a pretty rundown bit of town, and is one giant building site as it is torn apart and put back together. The new building itself is also, very much, just a mass of concrete and steel for the moment, but one hopes what it’ll contain will eventually be just as interesting as the architecture.

As well as our offices there’ll be a concert hall, a gallery and decent places to eat – you can find out more at the building’s official website. And… er… you can find out stuff about the building’s fire rating too, thanks to the mighty power of Google.

We move in next year. It’s all very exciting.

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