Trafalgar Square was even worse — there was a big green wall erected at the Strand end, and I don’t know what was going on there as it wasn’t on the procession route (which turned off Whitehall through an archway into Horse Guards’ Parade). I really regretted not writing to Claire and asking her for some sort of letter adressed “to whom it may concern”, explaining what I was doing. But I didn’t anticipate that I would be kept at such a distance such that I couldn’t take decent pictures of the event.

I’ve never been particularly fond of the monarchy, but I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool republican either; all of the most prominent republics have various myths that they like to repeat again and again, usually about “liberty” that turns out only to apply to some citizens and not others. But the expensive pageantry going on at a time when the most vulnerable people in society are having their much-needed services cut to the bone is pretty incongruous. Ironically, a lot of disabled people were watching the proceedings avidly and I’m not going to give political lectures to them, but if we are going to hold a big party at a time when the public are facing hardship, then it’s better that we can all go to the party rather than having to watch at a distance.

I was also pretty disgusted to hear that they had banned the two recent Labour prime ministers from attending, not because I was any great fan of either of them, but because they did invite Margaret Thatcher and John Major, the Conservative prime ministers from before Blair. I think there were technical reasons for whey they qualified and Blair and Brown didn’t (like membership of some obscure order), but let’s face it, the royals are a big land-owning family and guess which party big land-owning families generally support.

Also, I’m a bit apprehensive about what Kate Middleton’s (or Kate Mountbatten-Windsor, or whatever she is called now as the Duchess of Cambridge) life might be like once she’s actually married into the royal family. Big monarchies like ours tend to chew royal brides and spit them out, much like they did with Diana. I don’t suppose the royals are using her for a baby machine, as they did with Diana, or that it will be as oppressive an environment as the Japanese royal family proved to be when one of the heirs to the “Chrysanthemum throne” married a commoner a while back; the wife developed depression under that regime. But being a proper princess, let alone a queen, is going to be a much harder job, with a lot less personal liberty, than simply being a middle-class young woman from a wealthy family.

The Royal Mail is a heavily unionised organisation; they have stiff competition not only from the Internet, which makes the sending of an awful lot of letters simply unnecessary, but from the courier companies which seem to use an awful lot of casual labour, which frequently includes me. I worked for two of them this past week, in fact, delivering parcels to villages outside Guildford on Monday and Tuesday and offloading parcels from trailers in another big depot early on Friday morning (something I hope I don’t have to do too often). I got the impression, in that last job, that health and safety isn’t taken altogether seriously and frequently found myself dodging flying and falling parcels.

The courier companies rely on drivers with sat-navs, and commonly print address labels themselves rather than letting the customer address their own mail. This particular company prints labels which give a broad post town rather than the actual village the address is in, so an address in Worplesdon or Puttenham (both GU3 postcodes) is frequently given as Guildford, when in fact they are well outside Guildford. My A-to-Z atlas has the actual villages in the index, but not the postcodes, so looking up an address in GU3 is next to impossible as I don’t know what village the place is in. Worse, in rural areas they don’t use the “door number, street name, postcode” system, relying on house names, so we have to put the postcode into the sat-nav which takes us to a particular stretch of road. Well, if the street is a narrow, busy main road, we have to drive at 10mph while looking at the house names (not always prominently or legibly displayed) rather than at the road, and if we don’t see it, there is no place to turn round.

My local knowledge of the villages round Guildford is pretty limited, as I’ve never lived there and haven’t been able to walk the round to know where the houses are, which you do if you’re actually a postman. A courier company will get something through if it’s an easy delivery, preferably in an urban area. If your parcel is addressed to someone in a rural area and goes to a courier company’s depot on a day when the regular driver is off sick, the chances are they will send a driver from well outside the area to look for a needle in a haystack, and several relief drivers may fail to find it, resulting in a delay of several days. If you’ve got a parcel to send, it may well be better to send it by the Royal Mail, as the guy delivering it is much more likely to know where he’s going and won’t be a casual van driver as they don’t get postmen on a day-to-day basis from agencies. (Or at least, it’s not work I’ve ever been offered in ten years of agency work.)

(Image courtesy of FreeFoto.)

It was one of the reasons why Ken Livingstone fell out of favour in 2008, and one of the reasons I didn’t vote for him as a first choice. I was never fond of the idea of a congestion charge to begin with; I favoured restricting parking space so that commuters simply could not park in central London, while residents, traders and the disabled could. (Perhaps companies could be charged a premium to allow executive parking.) I don’t know if the mayor could have done this, though. The charge was not intended to reduce congestion at all, but to raise money.

A further problem with the charge is that it closed off a number of routes which were historical main roads, such as the route from Marble Arch to the Westway via Westbourne Terrace and Ranelagh Bridge. With the charge in place west of the Inner Ring Road, they were forced to use the already very congested Edgware Road. Other closed routes include the south end of Buckingham Palace Road, leading to Chelsea Bridge, which was outside the zone. To get from Shepherds Bush to Kensal Rise, it became necessary to go all the way up to Harlesden and back down Harrow Road, rather than using Latimer Road or North Pole Road. For those of us who had to drive in central London, it made life more difficult and less enjoyable.

It’s depressing that Labour have chosen Ken Livingstone to oppose Boris Johnson in 2012. Unless something goes very badly wrong for him, I suspect Johnson will win again, and his time in office has not been the disaster I thought it would be when he stood in 2008. Livingstone himself is an old man, and will be even older in 2016 which is when he will finish his next term if he wins in 2012. The western extension is, I suspect, something that lost Livingstone votes, and it will not do him any favours come the next election. I think Labour should have chosen someone younger, even if they served under Livingstone to begin with, who could learn from his mistakes, which I don’t think the man himself will.

It has a long history — until recently it was called the 726, and has run at various points from Slough to Gravesend, Heathrow to Dartford, Heathrow to Bromley, and as the X26 it runs only from Heathrow to Croydon. It has always been a limited-stop bus, but it now runs basically from town to town. It was historically about hourly; now it’s half-hourly.

The problem is, at peak hours it’s almost always packed, the reason being its abject lack of capacity. It’s usually a single-deck bus, and the space taken up by several of the seats is taken up by luggage racks or “backside rests” mounted on the walls, because the route seems to be run on the basis that it is primarily an airport link, rather than a link between three large towns used by commuters and schoolkids in the absence of a direct rail link (except between Croydon and Sutton). Some of the buses have one entrance/exit at the front, and others have a separate exit in the middle, and as you might expect, this reduces the capacity, and they use both types of vehicles at all times of day, when you need more capacity at peak times. As with many modern buses, the legroom varies wildly from ample (like the groups of seats that face each other), to just about adequate (most of the seats), to just about zero (some of the seats on the bench at the back, crammed in between the back of the bus and the two seats in front).

I’ve noticed that other buses I’ve taken this week have not been full, even at peak times, so perhaps that reflects the slowdown in the economy, but the 213 route (from Kingston to Sutton, also via New Malden) is much more frequent, and uses double-deck buses, and is not always utterly packed. There should surely be a lesson here for the running of the X26 route.

A lot of this has to do with the opening-up of the route — it used to be a Green Line route and the vehicles were coaches, with more comfortable seats than on a normal bus, with limited stops and special fares. Nowadays you pay the same as you do on the stopping buses, which is a good thing, but if more people are to use it, they need to increase the capacity and not reduce it. Surely the regular users should take this up with Transport for London or the operator (Metrobus).

A re-fit, leading to a much brighter “industrial kitchen” appearance and much less comfortable furnishings, as well as higher prices, put an end to that. I became a regular at the local Costa instead. And their coffee is much nicer than Pret’s, and in general, the other UK high street coffee chains’. Starbucks’ has pretty much no taste and Nero’s is a bit watery. Costa’s is usually nicely balanced.

However, one thing that has started to bug me about Costa is the furniture. A lot of it is old, and the seats look like they’ve been used as stepping stools. Some of them have had stuff spilled on them and obviously not cleaned properly. Some have upholstery which is so worn that if you sit back, you’ll feel the wooden frame digging into the base of your spine. Others (like the new wall-to-wall soft seats) let you sink into them, but you actually slide forward so your clothes feel uncomfortable.

It seems like Costa has gone slack on keeping their seating up to scratch. It’s not as if they can’t afford decent seating; I’m sure there’s plenty of nice armchairs available that Pret doesn’t want, but in any case, the prices are the same, whether the seats in that branch are worn and stained or fresh and clean and comfortable. And the prices aren’t cheap, even if the coffee’s (usually) pretty good.

I couldn’t help but notice loads of people crowding round the escalator which would have been pretty dangerous if it hadn’t been a false alarm. When I was a kid, I used to be fascinated by the thought of going through one of those doors you couldn’t go through (except in an emergency), although anyone who’s ever been a delivery driver knows that there’s not much exciting behind them, only long, dimly-lit corridors with breeze block walls. However, yesterday I headed for the nearest fire exit and probably got out quicker than if I’d waited for a place on the escalator. Perhaps they should make the signs light up so people know they should use all the exits.

News reports, instead of saying the robbery happened in Ashford, said it took place in a bank “near Heathrow airport”, as if the proximity mattered much — as if that made it a grave security threat, for example. Nothing could be further from the truth: apart from the fact that a fair number of Ashford’s residents probably work there or in airport-related industries, the branch that got robbed has nothing to do with the airport. It’s just a suburban branch of a bank.

Something I’ve noticed recently, though, is that security at some banks has gone down. One bank I use quite a lot used to have its counters off to the right, halfway to the back of the branch, and behind glass windows and locked doors. Now, you have to walk all the way to the back, but there is no glass screen, no divide of any sort, and not even one of those fast-rising screens you find at some petrol stations. I wonder how safe that makes the staff feel when they’re handling money.

Is there some psychology behind this — perhaps the need for customers to connect with the staff is more important than protecting the money, given that most customers are not bank robbers? Perhaps it’s because losing a few hundred pounds is better than losing several hours business, not to mention the stress on the staff, potential injuries etc. Perhaps the staff can be told to just hand over the money and get on with it, to diffuse any potential hostage situation. Either way, it was a shock when I went up to the counter the first time and found that there was nothing between me and the woman (as it usually is) behind the counter, having had to speak to them from behind a screen at pretty much every other bank branch I’d been to.

There are two adverts they hold up; one is the recent one featuring a woman screaming inside a car, with the text (in all caps) “stop, no, stop please, no, please. Please stop taking unbooked minicabs”. The other features a woman with a partially greyed-out face, with the text, “to find out what an illegal cab could cost you, ask a rape victim”. Both advertise the Transport for London CabWise scheme, in which anyone can get the numbers of taxi and licensed minicab firms by text message. The reason for the adverts is that there are known to be illegal minicab drivers who “ply for hire” by the roadside around bars and theatres in various parts of London. These are cowboy operators who do not keep any records of their journeys. Riding with them is no different from just getting into a stranger’s car.

As in New York, there are two types of cabs in London: black cabs (equivalent to NY’s yellow taxis) and minicabs (equivalent to livery cabs). Black cabs are official cabs; although they are not always black, they are always one of three models of large cars, are meant to be wheelchair-accessible, and there is a fixed (and quite expensive) fare. Their drivers take a lengthy course known as “the knowledge” to make sure they know London, and particularly its major landmarks and routes, inside out. Minicabs are usually family-sized cars and are available on a pre-booked basis only, and their fare is generally much cheaper than black cabs. Most people would take a minicab unless it was really necessary, and black cabs only when they were desperate (such as needing to get to the station from the theatre at 11pm in the pouring rain). Black cabs can use most bus lanes, pick up passengers (“fares”) pretty much anywhere and everywhere, including in the middle of the road when the light has just gone green, and stop on red routes (main roads with stopping restrictions). Minicabs can do none of this. As far as road rules are concerned, they are just like any other car.

I defended the adverts, because rapes and other attacks on women who’ve used unlicensed cabs are a known problem. I am not sure what the other statistics, in terms of robberies (or even sexual assaults) on male passengers, let alone robberies of drivers by passengers, are like, but rape is still enough of a problem as to make it necessary to warn women about it (a man was found guilty last December of two sexual assaults on men while running a minicab illegally). There is perhaps a valid point that focussing on rape may lead men to think it’s OK to ride fake cabs as well (hence the scandal over Darren Johnson using one, and telling the world about it through his Blackberry tweeter, and then complaining that he got ripped off).

One commenter found fault with the apparent moral equivalence of running an illegal minicab service, or being part of the “underground economy”, with robbery and rape. However, nobody ever said that the two were equivalent; there are, however, definite advantages in using a licensed cab, such as that the driver and the car are traceable, the journey is logged and the fare is either pre-agreed or based on what the meter reads. It’s true that one black cab driver was found guilty of a series of rapes last year, but that was one individual; the vast majority of rapes involving cab drivers do not involve black cabbies but illegal minicab drivers. After all, you would not just get into any stranger’s car, but that is in effect what you are doing if you entrust yourself to a fake cab driver.

Nor is it “blaming the victim” to warn women of the dangers. Nobody, except a rapist, wants a woman to get raped. It is not a slur on the character of someone who has already been through it to warn women against using cowboy cabs, any more than warning people not to dive without making sure the water is deep enough is a slur on the character of this woman or this man, who both became paralysed after breaking their necks diving into water that turned out to be only about three feet deep. They were just having fun and the women who took the cabs were just desperate to get home, perhaps cold, perhaps a bit drunk. (I’m not saying some people don’t assign blame to the victim in such circumstances to the benefit of the rapist, just that these adverts do not do that.)

Perhaps the adverts are “hard-hitting” and may be “triggering” to victims of rape or abuse (i.e. it gives them a sharp reminder of their trauma), but such things as graphic imagery of the aftermaths of car accidents and other potentially upsetting material are the norm in British public safety adverts. The Advertising Standards Agency exists to regulate these kinds and if anyone finds this advert upsetting, they may complain online to them or to TFL themselves. However, it is too late to complain about this campaign as it does not seem to still be current; although referred to in archived press releases on the TfL site, the advert was introduced last November for the Christmas period, and their cab information pages contain no references to it today. This does not mean criticism of the advert is not valid, as it is likely that TfL will run more campaigns of this kind in the future, particularly in the approach to next Christmas.

It is a huge waste of money. There has been enough conflict and tension since Brick Lane started developing after the yuppies moved in. This looks to me like a tool of aggravation and is taking a step backwards.

A council spokesman acknowledged that the illuminated arch was meant to symbolise a headscarf, which had been part of many of the cultures which had sought refuge in east London over the centuries, giving a run-down of the many reasons for which someone can wear one. To my eyes, if it’s meant to look like a headscarf, it is not very realistic; from behind, it just looks like a metal arch with a kind of canopy behind it. I am sure many people will see it and not think it’s a headscarf, let alone a hijab, but just another pointless bit of modernist sculpture. The £2m price tag is pretty steep, and I agree with those who say the money would be better spent on rubbish collection and vermin control.

Still, it is depressing that much of the objections seem to be rooted in the fact that they supposedly look like Muslim women’s headscarves, which does not say much about what they think of Muslim women. I happen to think Muslim women in hijab look rather pretty and feminine and, whatever some of the commenters think, you cannot tell if any individual wearer is oppressed unless you ask her. I also don’t agree that we should “keep quiet” and not let any symbols of Islam be displayed lest they offend others, particularly in an area like Tower Hamlets which has such a high proportion of Muslims and which is an area where Muslims feel safe being themselves. But these are plain ugly. How can an arch of cold metal remind anyone of a woman, Muslim or otherwise? They should be opposed purely on aesthetic and financial grounds.

(More: Muslimah Media Watch.)

There is one of these on the Richmond Road just on the way out of Kingston, which also happens to pass by the town’s big Sainsbury’s supermarket. I had to cling to railings at one point to keep from falling into the path of the traffic.

I know they can’t grit every road, but they should make an effort to keep these pavements clear. It’s only a matter of time before someone does fall and get seriously injured or killed.