February 6th, 2007 §
Sigh. Here’s my commute, written up in today’s “I’m a commuter, get me out of here!” feature in G2…
“Passengers often can’t get on trains northbound from south London in the mornings or southbound from Blackfriars station in the evening. They thump on the windows and yell at squashed up people inside to squash up more. Passengers say First Capital Connect has cut some of the peak-hour trains from eight carriages to four, making the trains even more packed.
[...]
First Capital Connect blames the Department for Transport for drawing up the franchise badly and claims it is not allowed, under the terms of the franchise, to buy more rolling stock. The DfT acknowledges it gave the franchise to FCC because it offered good value for money to taxpayers, not necessarily the best service for customers. It is clear that the system, by selling to the highest bidder, gives little incentive to a train operator to lease more rolling stock – quite the contrary, as it wants to maximise profit.”
Meanwhile, in Scotland…
“If you are strap-hanging on train lines in England and value the remains of your sanity, look away now. It will do you no good to read about the record 88% satisfaction rates that Scottish rail commuters report, nor the £1.9bn, seven-year programme to introduce extra carriages, longer platforms and new rail lines across Scotland, or that train operators rarely breach their promise that no one should stand for more than 10 minutes. Even a recent BBC Radio Scotland phone-in on commuting struggled to find hair-raising stories. In fact, several callers bandied words such as “excellent” and “very comfortable”.
December 17th, 2005 §
Sometimes, a post isn’t really for visitors right now (sorry). It’s for the Google bots that pass by the parish from time to time. This is one of those posts.
So, simply, to praise our vets, who have offered superb care and help to us and our furry housemates over the last couple of years, and especially in the last month or two. If you’re looking for a vet in south London – SE1 and SE16 especially – then I can heartily recommend Andrew Kirby’s practice. We know finding a good vet can be hard – but we’ve found one here.
October 30th, 2005 §
Dropped Mrs Tosh off at City airport tonight, and on the way back decided to take a slightly circuitous route, and try the new camera out on the inky, pitch blackness (really) of the Thames.
The camera, on automatic settings (but sans flash) caught this… It’s nothing like what I was seeing, which was mostly darkness punctuated by the lights and that aircraft you can make out on the fringes of the cloud.
But I like the fact the camera, presumably because of the long exposure, saw something quite different, and much more beautiful, perhaps a truer portrayal of the light pollution from the South East (that’s the Isle of Dogs to the left, Greenwich ahead and Deptford to the right). One day I’ll know how to take these deliberately.
There’s more on Flickr, including new cat pics, natch. And Hammersley’s been up to it as well, roaming Florence to impressive effect.
July 7th, 2005 §
Over the Thames towards St Pauls and the City and the Millennium Bridge, taken tonight on my mobile during the long walk home.
Ken Livingstone today:
“I wish to speak directly to those who came to London today to take life.
I know that you personally do not fear giving up your own life in order to take others – that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society and I can show you why you will fail.
“In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.
“They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don’t want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.”
July 7th, 2005 §
We’re safe, at work, but all thoughts are with those who are not, and their families.
March 30th, 2005 §
A delightful piece about London’s sewers in today’s G, written by Blake Morrison. And I mean “delightful” as in a really well written piece, as opposed to a euphemistic delightful. Here’s a sample…
“Beyond the overflow point, the water slows, and the bottom of the sewer becomes sludgier – this wouldn’t be the place to lose your footing. (Pepys’s Diary, October 20 1660: “Going down to my cellar … I put my foot into a great heap of turds.”) There are odd niches and corridors off to both right and left, and you begin to grasp the scale of Bazalgette’s labyrinth, and to see how artful he was in diverting excrement away from our homes – unlike his great-great-grandson, Peter, producer of Big Brother and other reality TV shows, who, critics allege, has poured it back in.”
And you’ll never want to live in the new Thamesmead developments if you read to the end.
A sidenote: two rather good books for people interested in this amazing feat of engineering beneath London’s streets are Deborah Cadbury’s Seven Wonders of the Industrial World and Stephen Smith’s Underground London, both of which I’ve read and can recommend heartily.
February 20th, 2005 §
My regular reader will have deduced I like pictures of bright lights, and especially ones taken at night. So here’s another night view of the city; looking south across the Thames, from the bar of Rhodes 24, the rather fantastic restaurant in Tower 42. Mrs Tosh took me there for my birthday last week. Fans of British cuisine take note: they serve amazing kidney sausage with their steaks, and the mutton Irish stew suet pudding is to – almost quite literally – die for. We wanted to try the steamed jam roly poly but, frankly, the cardiac team was already on standby.
More snaps from up there in the Flickr photostream, along with some pix of Guardian Unlimited’s new quarters, atop the Guardian HQ in Farringdon Road (Simon Waldman has some nice images from the old place). We move in tomorrow, first thing. The views aren’t quite as good as Tower 42, but all I’m hoping for by 9am tomorrow is a few more tables, chairs and computers than there are in the pictures…
November 28th, 2004 §
It’s hard to describe how surreal it is to wander downstairs on a Sunday evening and see, through the ground floor windows, not the occasional passing bus or car, but a tide of humanity; thousands of people, running really fast right to left, mostly silent except for the occasional bleep from a heart monitor, or the clearing of a throat.
The picture above is of that scene, outside my front door tonight. It’s of fit people (including Gamesblog’s Greg Howson) running on the Run London 10k event, sponsored by Nike. We live on the London Marathon route, part of which they adopted for this event, thus guaranteeing another pang of guilt at our exercise regime, or lack thereof. But, given the nippy, damp weather, and dinner cooking upstairs, that pang didn’t last too long…
Paula Radcliffe was running, they say – I may have spotted the huddle she was in, in the first group that hurtled by early on. So soon after victory in New York she wasn’t running competitively, but she was still fast enough to be long gone before I’d so much as managed to open my camera up, let alone take a snap.
November 2nd, 2004 §
Peter A Rossi writes of a London neighbourhood restaurant that invites customers to pay only what they think their meal’s worth. Location is important – the owner admits that having this in central London would make it hard to build up trust, but the area has to be reasonably affluent to sustain the operation. He thinks meals (which get variable reviews) are worth roughly £20 a head – if diners pay much less, he simply thanks them and hands the money back, thus ensuring they never return.
[via Kottke]
October 4th, 2004 §
I suspect the press release below should have gone to Ben Hammersley, rather than me. After all, he likes nothing better than to stalk the Florentine streets with his hounds and pith helmet, in a state of permanent emergence from a wreath of finest Cuban cigar smoke…
“The latest, and most exciting venue to offer live music and cabaret opens in London’s Soho at the end of October.
Floridita London, a vibrant Cuban bar, restaurant and club with an adjoining luxury cigar lounge and boutique, La Casa del Habano, will evoke the magical, sultry heritage of the original El Floridita in Cuba, offering the very best Cuban cocktails, food, cigars and live music.”
At, one suspects, very unrevolutionary prices. Here’s their website.