I woke up this morning to find that my bedside alarm-clock-radio was off, which could only mean one thing: a power cut. That had me worried, because I had heard on the radio yesterday night that people in Neasden (north London) were experiencing an outage which had gone on for 24 hours and were being provided with hot drinks by the power company. This morning, clearly, it was our turn down here in New Malden.
A man's best friend is his dog? Are you barking?
This is a fantastic article which sums up most of the reasons why I hate dogs, and in particular, stupid dog owners:
In the country, where I now live, they bag it, but then sling the whole unpleasant package into a hedge where it hangs, immune from the process of natural decay, as an emblem of our disrespect for public space. Children are bowled over by glossy but feckless golden retrievers, which explode out of the back of Range Rovers like furry Exocets, inserting themselves 'playfully' into ball games or equally 'playfully' jumping up at people who want nothing to do with them.
In my old London haunts, stocky, pit bull-type creatures were towed along by their tracksuited owners as symbols of street credibility. More often than not, the Peckham and Lewisham animals had Class A drugs [i.e. heroin, cocaine etc] secreted under their collars where only the most foolhardy and desperate user, or the bravest police officer, would dare to look. And, years after the introduction of the Dangerous Dogs Act, banned breeds such as pit bulls still run free in our cities. Last week, a man was charged under the act after his dog killed a five-year-old Merseyside girl.
But for most dog haters, the animals are far more of a nuisance than a danger. 'Don't worry, he's very friendly,' is the refrain from owners who watch indulgently as Fido thrusts his snout for the fifth time into your crotch. And does anyone else share my revulsion at the sight of an animal that spends large parts of the day with its face buried in its own or other dogs' nether regions licking the faces of children?
Where I live, the easiest route (if not the shortest) is through a local open space, which is not a park and where there are no "no cycling" signs, but the dog owners apparently think they own the place, letting their stupid animals off leash and, more to the point, out of their sight. This means I often find myself approaching a large or muscular-looking dog and seeing that the owner is several yards ahead with no idea whatsoever off what their stupid pets are doing.
Saracen just made the point (entry below) about how on the High Street, "stock, price and service sometimes leave a lot to be desired", which is why he buys much of what he buys online rather than in the shops. There's one field in which this can't be done, however: food. Of course, you can order a pizza and certain other types of fast food and have it delivered, but it's not the same as paying for food and not doing the washing-up, and sitting and reading the morning papers over a cappuccino in a café. That's why I go to them, usually a place in Kingston called the Meditteranean.
When I was a kid growing up in Croydon, there were two types of buses: red ones and green ones. Red ones were run by London Transport, green ones (including the green and white Green Line coaches) by London Country. You had to get the green ones if you were going out to the country, or if you were going somewhere better, or only, served, by the green ones, like parts of Coulsdon or Sutton. Green buses had 400 numbers (Green Lines had 700 numbers), and anything else was red. Red buses took bus passes, green ones didn't.
Continue reading "How to go west when you live in Kingston" »
New Malden isn't the best-connected of places when it comes to the London public transport system, although I speak as someone who was formerly spoiled, living within walking distance of East Croydon station with its every-few-minutes fast trains to four main London stations (Victoria, London Bridge, Blackfriars and Kings Cross - not counting the less frequent trains to Waterloo and Charing Cross) and fast trains to the airport and the coast as well. Here, we've got a suburban station with six trains an hour to just one - Waterloo - and no fast trains at all.
We don't have any competition here: all the trains are run by the same operator, namely South West Trains. (Admittedly, the two companies operating through East Croydon are both actually brands of the same company, GoVia, which also owns the bus companies London General, London Central and Metrobus.) Now, SWT used to run fast trains out of Wimbledon as well as Surbiton, although they weren't frequent. But apparently the fast Wimbledon trains were holding up their highly-paying customers in places like Portsmouth and Southampton by stopping on platforms 6 and 7 which is next to the fast track ... so they were stopped last year.
But the service at New Malden is just not very good at all. Not just the trains, but the customer service is just abysmal. Yesterday I got to the station around 1.35pm, and found three or four people in front of me. The problem is, I just wanted to buy a one-day travelcard, and these people were buying some sort of season ticket. They took ages, and two trains came and went while I was waiting in this queue. There was another service hatch, which was closed despite there being another member of staff in the room. The ticket machine, although it supposedly takes banknotes, in practice nearly always rejects notes, so there's no point in using it. The newsagents, which also sell travelcards, were shut. The permit to travel machine (basically you have to exchange the permit for a ticket at the first opportunity) was not in use because ... one of the service hatches was working. What excuse for customer service is this?
And then there's the bus connections, particularly the late-night ones. There's a bus, the K1, which goes from near the station down towards Worcester Park and along the main A3 road (near which I live) to Tolworth. In the evenings, it leaves New Malden at a quarter to, and a quarter past, each hour. Mostly, however, it leaves just at the time a train gets in, leaving them to wait another half hour before the next arrives. On a Friday night, nobody wants to be hanging round New Malden, so they call a lift, or get a taxi, or make use of the other buses. It looks like an effort to make an excuse to kill off the service altogether (breaking connections is, as I was once told in Wales where a lot of rail lines were shut down in the 1950s in this way, an easy way to make a line look unprofitable because you want to close it anyway). I'm sure it's not, but I'm sure the service looks like a money-loser when in fact it's missing its most important source of passengers by leaving a couple of minutes too early!
The other periodic annoyance on SWT trains is beggars. You normally see them somewhere near Waterloo as that's where most of the customers are. They always have the same story - that they just need a few more quid to get into a hostel for the night. They always have the same stubbly appearance and put on the same voice that makes them sound desperate. They occasionally have a dog, which always looks very well-groomed. There was a time (in the 1980s) when there were a lot of people out on the streets begging, which is something you don't see much now, and we've not had any New York-style police crackdown on rough sleepers. I don't have a problem giving the occasional bit of money to homeless people, but I'm just wondering if this story about having to pay what sounds like a lot of money to get into a hostel is true. I mean, ã8 short? This sounds like a bed & breakfast, not a hostel. What is the real story about these hostels?
So, London has finally won the 2012 Olympic bid. I'm blogging in the London Apple Store, having come here from Trafalgar Square. The result was announced just before 12:50 London time, and I arrived about 12:20 to find the square packed. The BBC is reporting that London beat Paris by a 54:50 vote, so it was pretty close. As expected, Moscow was knocked out in the first round of voting; I was surprised to read that New York, and not Madrid, was knocked out in the second.
It was obvious that the crowd assembled there was a supportive one, and there was no way I could have spoiled the party. There were quite a few men in suits and special ties (showing the path of the Thames in Olympic colours); I have no way of knowing how much of that crowd consisted of people who worked for the bid anyway. They had some pop singer whose name I've forgotten who sung "Some Girls", "So Good" and "LAX" (perhaps someone could work it out from the titles). They obviously had the time to pad out 15 minutes or so with a few pop songs - the singer was one of the few people (male or female) in the square with bare shoulders. She must have been pretty cold - the weather was cloudy and a few drops of rain fell.
But it rained on Paris as well just as the bid was announced. They played London's promotional video, backed with M People's song "What Have You Done Today" (to make me feel proud). In the few minutes before the announcement, they showed pictures of various crowds such as that in Paris, and people booed when that came up! When the result was announced, the roar in the square was deafening. Vast amounts of confetti were released from gas-powered devices and fell on everyone's clothes. Some red arrows, blazing red, white and blue vapour trails, took off, and flew over just as I was leaving the square.
So people of London, get ready to cough up! How much were we told we'd be paying, and how much extra congestion charge did Ken tell us we'd be paying if he won? (In the latter case none; in reality, it went up by ã3 this week.) I wonder what preparations the ethnic communities in east London are making for their inevitable pricing-out from their home of 50 years. Are there any Photoshop (or GIMP) geeks out there who can edit one of the "London 2012 - Back the Bid" pieces to say "London 2013 - Pay the Bill"?
Did they have a stand-by song just in case London lost, I wonder? Perhaps "Why Does It Always Rain on Me?" would have been appropriate.
I decided to come up to town this afternoon after hearing on the news that that a whole series of events have been laid on to celebrate St. George's Day. For those of you in the US, the Irish and Scots have long had their respective saints' days (St Patrick, of course, and St Andrew respectively), but lately the English have been saying "me too" and wondering what happened to our own national identity.
The events include Morris dancing in Covent Garden, a presentation of "diversity" in Trafalgar Square, and an open family day at the reconstructed Globe theatre. The latter, which I intend to go to later this afternoon, is a reconstruction of the theatre in which Shakespeare's plays were originally performed, built on the inspiration of Sam Wannamaker who arrived in London expecting to find it, not realising that it had not existed for several hundred years. (I'm not sure if it was destroyed in a fire, or just demolished.) The Globe Theatre which did exist is now called the Gielgud Theatre.
The presentation in Trafalgar Square was rather unintentionally comical - it consisted of a collage of pictures of the different colours of people in London set against a big red and white cross (the St. George flag). This, of course, does not say much for the diversity of the capital given that the flag only represents the nominally biggest single religion. But that's not the worst of it. This was sponsored by the Express newspaper group, and contained visible advertising for all their titles (their porn rags were sold off when they wanted to buy the Telegraph). Given that this was organised by the Mayor, why could they not have found a better sponsor? This group has been responsible for some of the most notoriously sensationalist reporting on issues like asylum and immigration, which not long ago began to look like a vendetta - to say nothing of Richard Desmond's performance in front of the Telegraph's executives in which he did a Hitler impersonation and called all Germans Nazis. But then, London's Germans aren't a visible minority, are they?
(I couldn't help noticing also the woman on stilts in a kilt-like skirt outside the Britain Visitor Centre in Lower Regent Street. Did nobody tell her that St George's day has nothing to do with Scotland, or does tartan have an English connection also? And she was neither Scottish nor English, nor Welsh nor Irish.)
I'm a professional driver, but I don't have my own car. My last car was an A-registered (that is, 1982-3) Nissan Cherry (produced just after Datsun was acquired, with the Datsun name still on it), which was adequate, but couldn't do 60 comfortably unless on a downhill stretch. I had to stop using it in 2002 when, due to unwise spending decisions, I found myself unable to insure it. We finally had it towed away by the local council a few months back. My main means of transport is my bicycle.
Today I decided to ride off to the nearest place where you can get a decent cheap halal meal for my dinner rather than my usual fish and jacket potato. The nearest is in South Wimbledon, which is about 4 miles away. The place I really wanted to go to was Masaledar in Tooting, which has a ã3 meal deal with rice, bread, curry, salad and a samosa. But the Karahi Mahal in Wimbledon does a nice, filling ã4 biryani (or curry house biryani - it's not what Amma-ji cooks at home). There is actually a cycle route leading from here to Wimbledon. But if you ride it, you'll find that the cycle route consists mostly of cycle route signs - and even they are inadequate.
True, they've started making concessions to cyclists, such as opening up paths previously reserved for pedestrians. This includes a certain subway under a major road near where I live, but motorcyclists have also taken advantage of this concession, which in fact doesn't include them. It's really dangerous. But in some places, they haven't even bothered to replace the twin barriers, which were meant to keep out cyclists, with bollards to let us through.
Further along, the path leads along a dirt track next to a park in Raynes Park. Fair enough. But when you have to cross the next main road (Martin's Way, from Morden to Raynes Park), the cyclist is directed along a special path in order to cross Martin's Way, at which he has to get off his bike. He could just as easily follow the road and cycle straight across Martin's Way the way a car driver would. And that's one of the most annoying things about these so-called cycle routes - they require you to get off your bike. We're the only road users who are regularly required to do this.
That situation has got better since I first started cycling; cycle route 75, which runs across South London from Kingston to Croydon and beyond, runs through a large park near Sutton, along a wide track with easily enough room for pedestrians to share it with cyclists. When I cycled as a teenager from my parents' house in Croydon to my grandad's in New Malden, cyclists were banned, but now route 75 goes straight through and the "No Cycling" signs are gone. Elsewhere in Sutton, though, route 75 goes along back alleys where we still have to get off. And in other places, the signs hardly advertise route 75 at all. We just have to guess.
But these routes haven't meant the construction of many dedicated cycle routes, or even the opening up of many existing tracks. The Wimbledon route still runs through a lot of residential streets, which are not always as safe for cyclists as people think. I've seen motorists cut corners on some of the right-angle junctions in that area, and a few months ago was hit by an old man who moved into a roundabout near my home as I was turning right. (I wasn't hurt, ma sha Allah, but the bike was damaged.) On the main New Malden to Wimbledon road, I've had a car door opened right in my path, something which could just as easily happen on a side road.
As you can imagine, I've been rather more cautious about using my bike since the accident on the roundabout - that was a really close call. I really do resent motorists who belly-ache about cyclists getting ahead of them by jumping red lights, as if anyone gets hurt, and people who complain about cyclists on pavements. At the end of the day, a cyclist can suffer far worse injuries from a motor vehicle whose driver has decided to cut a few seconds off his journey by cutting a corner than a pedestrian can from a cyclist riding slowly along a pavement. Yes, we can wear helmets, but they only protect your head, not the rest of your body. If the government wants to get people out of their cars, there needs to be better than this half-hearted provision.
Jumping on the desktop-pictures bandwagon ... here's mine, taken with my Mum's digital camera last night:
If I were to post the original version (which I'm not going to, because it's a huge file), you'd know a lot more about my interests. Some of you who have a lot of tech books may recognise some of my books just by their colours, like that turquoise and dark-yellow coloured book on the second shelf up - there's only one book out there that looks like that, as far as I know. And yes, there are really two computers on that desk - the computer belonging to the grey monitor on the right is a Sun Ultra 5 (underneath the Mac) which I bought off eBay, which I hardly ever use because it's massively underpowered. But what do you expect for ã50.
Those of you who've been following the British news might have heard of Zahid Mubarak, a young Asian man who was beaten to death by his cellmate in Feltham Young Offenders' Institution, near London (in fact, very near where I live). The cellmate was a thoroughly disturbed individual with psychopathic tendencies and a known racist. Well, I was certainly not surprised to read that the institution was condemned by the Hounslow Racial Equality Council for widespread racism and discrimination. Black inmates were routinely stigmatised as drug addicts and dealers, received harsher penalties and fewer priveleges than white inmates, and were called black bastards and monkeys and told they should be sent back to their own country.
This isn't the first awful scandal to hit Filtham; in the early 1990s the place was notorious for its bullying and high suicide rate. Still, it doesn't surprise me given the awful reputation the prison "service" has. I heard a woman being interviewed on the Eddie Nestor show last Sunday, who said that when her daughter visited, she was allowed to sit on her lap, but she (the mother) was told to keep her hands on the table. Nestor admitted that visitors are often treated like criminals who have yet to be caught, and there has been legal action taken over inappropriate strip searches.
If you need more information on the abuse which goes on in the British prison system, both juvenile and adult, look at this interview with the Guardian's prison correspondent Eric Allison:
There are subtle ways of bringing a prisoner down, he says - ripping up his letters, moving him to a different prison the night before he has a visit from his family, and "forgetting" to inform them. "It's called winding-up, and it's a real skill. Some of them are top-of-the-tree, premiership wind-up merchants." But things are getting better, says Allison, particularly since the Prison Officers Association, a breeding ground for extremists, lost its stranglehold in the prisons.
I've never been "inside" myself (except to deliver goods, and that was scary enough), but my experience with a special boarding school in the early 1990s leads me to suspect that these officers delibrately left Mubarak and his killer together. I personally witnessed a number of incidents where pupils were racially abused by staff, both behind their backs and to their faces; bullying and intimidation was brushed under the carpet and the victim was often blamed. I don't instinctively give these people the benefit of the doubt, given that they have so much power over people who are basically helpless. Perhaps they did not intend that Mubarak would get murdered, but there are only three things that would lead an entire group of prison staff to leave an Asian (at the end of his sentence!) and a known psychopathic racist locked in a room together: stupidity, laziness, or malice. Or perhaps all three. Some heads really have to roll.
I'm not a big fan of the ASBO system (Anti-Social Behaviour Order, one of our infamous Home Secretary's many schemes) but, given the one they have imposed on Camden Town by which they allow the police to move on groups of troublesome teenagers, why don't they impose one on a patch of ground near the tram line west of Mitcham? I'm talking about a dusk-to-dawn exclusion zone around the tram line from Phipps Bridge to Morden Road, where a few months ago there was a spate of incidents in which stones were thrown at moving trams (at a point where they do 50 mph along a single-track line). Yesterday, I was on one of these trams when a brick was thrown through the window, missing two people's heads by inches.
The stretch of line can be found (I hope) here. The brick came from the north side, to the west of Phipps Bridge station, which probably means quite near the River Wandle crossing. I don't travel much on the line which leads to another rough part of town - New Addington - nor have I heard of these events on the news, but I've never heard of trams on the New Addington line being hit by stones or bricks, which leads me to think that the people responsible live in the area round Phipps Bridge.
I'd like to know what the authorities are going to do about these morons? More to the point, maybe they might provide us with some means of stopping the tram in the event of the driver taking a brick in the face.
The title says it all. I just hate the train "service" to New Malden. Especially in the evening. When I lived in Croydon the nearest station was East Croydon, and there were fast trains there several times an hour. At New Malden, there's six an hour during the daytime, four of which are next to each other (18 and 21 past the hour, and 48 and 51 past), and in the evening they are half an hour apart. And I used to hate Croydon as well. Everyone hates the "architecture" which is characterised by brutalist 60s concrete and glass stuff. There are really dodgy nightclubs like the Blue Orchid (which the German news magazine Der Spiegel used as an example of how grim it was in Croydon, and the local weekly paper made a huge fuss over it), and there is a crime problem, but it's very convenient for London and for the coast. And there's a thriving Muslim community with loads of halal restaurants (even if they do play that dreadful Indian music, or the dreadful western music, they're just as bad as each other). You don't get any of that in Kingston, much less New Malden.
So you Muslims who think you live in a dodgy area - take my advice. Don't flee to the leafy suburbs! Do your best and clean up your area, and be grateful for what you have.
Last month I blogged a bit about the ridiculous situation of the local buses here in New Malden - the K1 bus which goes off just before the people off the train from London can get on it. It looks almost like a conspiracy to drain the bus of customers so the bus company can pull it (as is alleged to have happened before the Beeching closures in the 1950s), or maybe it's just stupid. But it's not just crazy timings - it's crazy drivers as well. Nobody can fail to notice that a whole load of new buses have been brought in, including accessible buses and bendy Mercs. The Mercs had to be pulled off the roads a couple of weeks ago after three of them burst into flames, but they are now running again. But last night on a ride on the 131 from Raynes Park to Burlington Road, I got a taste of the dodgy quality of some London bus drivers: they drive too fast, they accelerate too fast, and they brake too hard. People were swaying on their feet on the top deck as they try to make their way to their seats.
It's not the first time I've been on a bus where the driver goes too fast for the road. It's mainly that the engines are too powerful - right now they are powerful enough that they can send a double-decker along the steep hills around Sanderstead on the 412 route, once the preserve of little "midi-buses" ie. short single-deckers. Worse than this, some of these drivers are arrogant and inconsiderate to their passengers in other ways, such as driving off without looking to see if more passengers want to get on, even when they run up right in front of the bus or knock on the door. One bus driver even expected me to get on a moving bus!
The stretch of road where I live has had two of its bus shelters smashed over the last couple of weeks or so - what do people get out of smashing up bus shelters? It was the glass that was smashed - it was clearly not the work of a car accident. On one of them, the Mayor's office have placed a poster showing a fairy picking up a discarded fast food box, with the slogan, "when you leave things on the ground, will a litter fairy come around?". That's originality.
A couple of months ago a trust fund my parents put away for me matured, and I was richer to the tune of 2,100 pounds or so (about $3,700). One of the first things I did, of course, was buy the Mac I am writing this on. Gradually more and more of it got spent (a lot of it on computer books) and now only about 300 pounds of it remains. It's my mother's birthday on Monday, and usually I buy her books. This year, I wanted to buy her something different, and I have been looking around at the skirts in the shops. But it is almost impossible to find something that is neither unsuitable nor too expensive. My mother is not Muslim, so the rules concerning our women do not apply to her. But I wanted to buy her a classic long skirt, which was neither see-through, nor too short, nor too tight. I looked in a number of shops in Kingston: Talbots, Laura Ashley, Monsoon, and a few of the places in Bentall's which is a department store with a lot of outside vendors including Jaeger, Phase Eight, French Connection, and loads of others. And I came away disappointed. I had been looking at a nice long blue skirt in Phase Eight, which costs about 75 pounds (about $133), which they may consider reasonable but I consider it extortionate. A Jaeger skirt, which was admittedly beautiful, costs well over 100 pounds; and the situation is similar in Talbot's. Worse, some of the clothing I checked out turned out to have been made in China - so the people who made it got a pittance, no doubt. I refuse to pay 80 pounds for something made in this way when I do not have to.
Actually, skirts are much thinner on the ground nowadays compared to even ten years ago when I left boarding school for my mixed sixth-form college. Then it was quite common to see girls in nice long skirts, even 16-year-olds. Nowadays, although you still see them, it is far less common, especially among younger women, and women are showing much more of themselves than they did even then. One even sees teachers wearing clothes they wouldn't have dreamed of wearing when I was at school, in front of the children! And whether the difficulty in obtaining a nice skirt came before or after women stopped wearing them as much as they used to, I've no idea. All I know is, it's difficult to find a nice skirt to buy my Mum for her birthday. I think I'll buy her a book, after all.