On the Tube

If you are anything like me you can probably get to pretty much any destination in London without too much trouble on the Tube. Thanks in no part to the brilliantly conceived Tube map, the construction of which is so delightfully easy to read.

I can count on one hand the number of times I have driven into London partly because of traffic and parking issues but also because the Tube map makes it so easy to work out where I am going and how to get there.

However, years and years of doing this has left me with a massively distorted image of how big central London actually is. I mean it’s big, don’t get me wrong but it’s not as huge as the Tube map makes it look.

It’s only been fairly recently that I have learnt that you don’t have to use the Tube to get around London. You can walk around too and all those individual attractions I have been going to and insisting on going into the nearest Tube station you can actually walk between. Stuff like walking between Leicester Square and Oxford Street or Covent Garden to Soho or Baker Street to Marylebone.

That’s why I really liked the Tube Journey Planner which really doesn’t plan your journey but just shows the Tube map overlaid on a regular map of London.

It’s just a shame they can’t add all those other extra bits of information like the Circle Line being the slowest train line in the world ever, the Northern Line being the most crowded and uncomfortable and the southern section of the Jubilee Line being the smoothest.

The girl

So it looks like the Girl is publishing a book. I wonder if I could get away with reading that on the train? Its not exactly got the most discrete cover. Of course the chance that I could actaully bump in to the author (Londoner) (although invariably not know) whilst reading makes it all the more interesting.

New sofa

After four years of having either a 'temporary sofa' (recently depsoited in the local tip) or having no sofa at all I think I have settled on getting this one.

There is only one draw back. It either fits but doesn't face the tv or it fits and faces the tv but I don't have a dining table, which rather essentially also supports my computer monitor.

So erm... I am going to Homebase now to get a decent tape measure so I can make a plan of my living room and do some lateral thinking.

Who sits next to you?

So I have been doing this commuting into London on the train thing for about three months now. Various things have struck me and I have got used to them over the time I have been using public transport. When I first started doing it the noise from other people, the train announcing tanoy-robot-lady (I can now recount every single train announcement) and the hassle of having to put up with everyone else really irritated me but I have got used to all that and kinda switch off to it.

However as time has gone on one particular thing has started to catch my interest more. Where people sit or, more specifically, who other people sit next to. Now obviously I am principally thinking of who sits next to me.

In the morning the train gets way crowded. At Maidenhead I always get a seat to myself because it is one of the first stops. However by the time it gets to Southall sometimes there is not room on the train for some folks there to actually get on (usually accompanied by banging on the windows and shouts of move down the isle). Anyway I usually have someone sitting next to me by Langley or West Drayton.

This is where it gets a bit odd.

This is totally unscientific but I would guess that by the time I get off the train at Ealing Broadway the demographics of the train population are around about 60% white, 30% Indian-Asian (although this is massively skewed by the Southall effect) and the remaining 10% being oriental or black. It’s around a 50:50 male to female ratio. The boarding of the various different ethnic origins is generally pretty consistent in terms of where they get on too with the exception of Southall (which is very busy and pretty much 100% Indian-Asian) So it’s a wide mix.

However, around about two to three days a week I end up having an oriental girl sitting next to me. And not the same one either, lots of different oriental girls, although I think a few times the same girl has sat next to me (but I am not sure as I usually stick my head in my book and keep it there). Now given the train demographics the chances of this happening at random so often are pretty slim. I mean like generally there is only one oriental girl per section of the train I am in and they are almost always sitting next to me. Furthermore, white guys never sit next to me but girls of all races do and Asian, black and oriental guys do.

So why do I end up with oriental girls next to me so often? When I get on the train on the way home I generally stand until a pair of seats become available that I can have to myself but if I had to pick someone to sit next to I would apply three tests as to whether I would sit next to them; in this order:

1. Is the person in question a hot girl? If so I would sit next to them.
2. Does the person look clean, quiet, normal, not fat and unlikely to invade my personal space. If so I would sit next to them.
3. Does the person look like they are going to get off at the next stop. If so I might sit next to them but probably wouldn't because that kind of thing is really difficult to thin-slice.

If neither of these options are available I would stand. So running my own thought processes on the oriental girls I must either look hot to oriental girls or look clean, quiet, normal, not fat and unlikely to invade personal space. Neither of which I consider to be bad things. But I really don’t know if this is their motivation. Perhaps my fellow passengers are all more unappealing to sit next to than me for other reasons. Perhaps, like me, oriental girls favour the south side of the train (for the morning sun) and forward travelling airline style seats like I do (but I would be surprised if many people had thought about train seating positions quite as much as I have).

My ego isn’t sufficiently big (but it’s a close thing) so as to be convinced that all oriental girls think I am hot. Nevertheless I can’t think of any other reasonably explicable reason why this situation occurs so often.

Regardless, the oriental girl sitting next to me phenomenon is not so objectionable. They are almost always quiet and don't invade my personal space which is about as good as I can reasonably ask of a seating partner.

Extortr

Like Flickr but with extortion. Extortr.

The staggering

This weekend I was on Bongo's stag weekend 'the staggering' in blackpool. Here's the photo of the T-shirt I have to prove it.

Here's Kieron, Dave and Owain Doug (oops) and a girl with bunny ears. We theorised that girls grow these if they go to too many slaggy nighclubs so they can hear better over the loud music.

No booze was consumed at all. Oh, ok maybe a bit.

Who's that weird short guy in background?

The hotel bar and Dave's tongue.

Saturday morning. Andrew and Chris sporting the requisite T-shirts.

Bongo considering jumping?

This was our curry house for Saturday evening. Around about an hour before the Police and (presumably) someone from the Council closed them down. That was reasuring seeing as we had finished our meal by that point.

Erm, a nightclub. Its not a very good photo because the UV lights were making Bongo glow but the statue in the back corner might hint at what sort of club it was.

This was my only photo from in the club (on account of it being sagely suggested to me that the management might not take so kindly to me taking photos of erm, some stuff). Well, except for this one. 'Strictley no touching.'

I told the bathroom attendant (where I took this) that they'd spelt it wrongly. He said they spelt it like that in Blackpool. I think I told him he was an idiot.

(And big kudos to Dave for sorting it all out).

Idiot builders

My flat development is presently getting an upgrade care of the management company. General repairs and repainting of external walls and windows etc. Anyhow the idiot builders doing the upgrade left signs like this on most of the front entrances recently:


Now, I have seen a lot of dumb signs but this has to be the most dumb sign of all time.

'Can all residents leave there doors and windows open on Monday.'

Yeah sure, I'll leave all my windows and doors open for a bunch of builders while I am at work. Having a giant advert to all and sundry that my doors and windows are going to be open all day really makes me want to join in even more.

It gets dumber (setting aside the 'there' and 'their' troubles they were clearly having). The photo above isn't of my entrance door because it fell off. Why? Because they stuck it on freshly painted and rather unadhesive door stain. I mean honestly.

Literature II

My train commuting lifestyle at the moment means that I am ploughing through literature at a rate of around about one book a fortnight. Here is some of the stuff that I have read recently and some thoughts about it without giving away too much about plot details:

Merde actually by Stephen Clarke. This is a book for the guys I think but that’s not to say that the girls won’t like it too. It’s a delightfully randy (without being literary porn) and a highly entertaining little jaunt around France. I thought it was great because the lead character ended up doing what I was screaming in my mind for him to do around a chapter later. This is my favourite recent read by quite a long way, not least because I could totally relate to the lead character. (You also might like to think of reading the prequel, A year in the merde before this though but as I read Merde actually without realising there was a prequel until after I had finished it I wouldn't say it was a definate prerequisite).

A short history of tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka is not about tractors and isn’t set in the Ukraine. It’s a good book but unlike Merde actually I totally failed to relate to any of the characters making it slightly lacklustre, at least for me.

Past mortem by Ben Elton delivered the usual Ben Elton style fairly obvious plot developments but this time coupled with stomach wrenchingly gory scenes. I don’t recommend reading this on a fast train as the combination of blood, guts and gore and the slightly bumpy non-stop section between Hayes and Slough made me feel a little queasy at times. It was still a good read mind.

And yes ok, so I read the Da Vinci code. Yes it’s a bit trashy and the plot developments are pretty obvious and designed to make you feel smarter than the supposed experts that the book is about (sometimes they are way dumb though). But you need to read it before going to see the film and the conspiracy theories are quite engaging.

Blink by Malcom Gladwell isn’t a novel and it’s not a self help book. It’s about ‘thin-slicing,’ using your instincts as opposed to your ‘brain’ to work stuff out. A book about one of my favourite things, teaching you stuff you already know but didn’t realise you did.

I am presently reading Long way down by Nick Hornby which is shaping up to be an engagingly structured piece, albeit a little morbid.

Reblog

Right, it looks like after a little two week hiatus that the blog is back up and running again. So, why the break I have been asked.

Well, when I started this blog I made a commitment to myself to produce five posts a week. The reasons for this were two-fold. Firstly it was so that every weekday morning you visit the site and there would be new content. Secondly it was so I had a schedule to stick to so I would actually make consistent posts. This commitment I made to myself has resulted in posts of varying quality because of my self imposed rules. Rules that, for the most part, I have stuck to except when on holiday or disconnected.

A consequence of this was that every morning or evening I had stick something up. Now I like doing the blog but my self imposed rules were becoming difficult for me to manage. Up until around about March I operated the blog with a ‘buffer’ of around about five generic posts that I constructed in my spare moments. This was generally fairly non-time constrained stuff unrelated to me and gave you such highlights as LED throwies and the thing about how crazy those Japanese people are.

However, with new job, new flat, new lifestyle and generally being busier and having more on my plate these buffer posts started to dissolve and I used them up and ended up blogging on the fly. Occasionally this meant I was coming home from work on the train and thinking ‘omg I have to do a blog post now too in addition to… etc.’ which was really turning it a bit sour for me and hence the break.

But, that’s not to say that I don’t still like doing the blog. I am just amending the terms on which I do it.

I started thinking about how I can change stuff to suit me and experimented a bit with Nick102 but decided not to pursue that because, well, I didn’t like it really, it didn’t feel right. So after that bit of messing around I thought I would kill the blog all together but I can’t do that either. I couldn’t get through a day without thinking ‘hey that would be good in a blog post’ before realising that I wasn’t doing it any more.

Anyway the up-shot of all this is that I am re-opening the blog. Its up and running again but here’s the clinch. I am no longer making any commitment to five days a week posting. I don’t have the time to be consistent like that anymore. So some times you will get lots of posts, sometimes none, you’ll have to live with that, its all dependent on mood and time now.