The Hackney Empire
The Hackney Empire is one of London’s great theatres and was rescued a few years ago with help from Grif Rhys-Jones, Alan Sugar and Harold Pinter.
The Hackney Empire
I must try to get to a show, especially as it’s about five bus stops away.
ASLEF Put Their Marker Down for the Olympics
The various rail runions have never got on well and have always tried to see that they could get more out of owners, managers and ultimately taxpayers for as long as I can remember.
Today’s action by ASLEF was supposedly about triple pay and a day-off for working Boxing Day, in variance with an agreement they are reported to have signed, but was it also to show their power with the Olympics coming in 2012? They didn’t get the Danegeld this time and as millions of Londoners and tourists were seriously inconvenienced, I doubt they’ll get it if they try to do something similar about extra benefits for themselves during the games.
I was seriously inconvenienced today, as I had intended to get a Central Line train to Newbury Park for a friend to take me to the football at Ipswich. As I said earlier, the direct trains weren’t running. Instead I tried to take a 25 bus to Ilford, from where I would complete the journey on another bus.
But I was running seriously late for a pre-arranged pick-up time on a bus that would have had just a small bit of space for a couple of Snow White’s friends. All of the overcrowding could be put down to the non-running Central Line, as people had things like cases and bags of presents with them. So I abandoned the bus with some difficulty at Stratford and thought I’d get a bus home. The queues were enormous, as I suspect many had come to the interchange to get buses like the 25 to Oxford Circus. The shopping centre by the interchange was very busy too and it looked like things were getting worse rather than better.
I’d determined that I needed to get a 276 to Stoke Newington, but as that shared a stop with the 25, it would not have been a sensible proposition, so I walked back down West Ham Lane to the previous stop of the bus. Eventually, I got on a small single-decker bus after about a quarter of an hour, as that is the Sunday frequency. It then drove back through Stratford and the overcrowded stops and was probably carrying twice its legal capacity by Bow Church, where it started its meander towards Hackney.
It was then, that I got a text saying that the match at Ipswich had been called off due to a frozen pitch. So at least I was saved a long journey, even if my shorter one wasn’t much fun!
In the end I abandoned the 276 when it got to Mare Street in Hackney and went to look for another to get me back home.
I shall be interested to see how this story develops. ASLEF have seriously managed to annoy all of the shops in London, Transport for London and I suspect several million Londoners. At times, at Stratford, I felt some were going to seriously explode and that was one of the reasons, I walked away to look for a bus. I saw mothers with children getting distraught, as youths refused them access to buses with buggies, drivers and other staff were getting abuse and no-one was offering the disabled and the elderly the priority seats.
Still it was all good fun and practice for a man with dodgy eyesight and only one 100% hand. But the idea is to see if I can improve the parts of my body that don’t woek too well, by using them!
An Original Painting by M. Levett
I’ve finally got around to putting some paintings on the wall.
An Original Oil Painting by M. Levett
This painting is the first to go up and is an original oil by a barrister called Levett, who once came on holiday with us at our house in France. This is the story of the painting from the original post.
One holiday stands out. C and I took, one of her barrister colleagues, away to the house for a few days. He was and hopefully still is very outspoken. He would lie on that beach and say in a loud upper-class English voice, ‘Look at that lump of lard over there’ at some lady who’d been eating for two. Luckily, no-one understood his English or perhaps most were laughing with him.
That holiday too we went to a Michelin starred restaurant in Antibes, where the wine waiter was the spitting image of Stephen Fry, doing an impression of Lord Melchett from Blackadder, doing a cariacature of a wine waiter complete with tastevin. He never understood why we kept laughing at him.
The painting was a contribution to his lodging and very much a surprise to both of us. Especially in its quality. Note the label on the bottle says Chateau Melchett.
Solving the Problem of Watching Sky or ITV Pictures and Getting Radio 5 Sound
As you may know from this blog, I’m allergic to two things; gluten and adverts. I don’t like having to continually switch whilst watching sport on Sky or ITV to BBC Radio 5, to avoid the annoying adverts and get a continuous commentary. In many cases too, the ITV coverage is not up to scratch and vital parts like goals are missed. To be fair to Sky, there’s nothing wrong with their coverage in general, it’s just the adverts, often for products that contain gluten. So they are a double irritant.
Virgin cable gets around this problem in some ways, because it has a Back button, so you can constantly use it to flip between, your preferred video and audio channels.
For Christmas I was given a pair of wireless headphones by Sennheiser, that plug into the headphone socket of a television or radio and give a good sound quality within range.
So I have plugged them into my Roberts DAB radio for good Radio 5 sound and just put the television on the corresponding video channel.
There are some other advantages.
- I can get good commentary all over my house and even in the road outside.
- The range also solves the tea and toilet break problems, as never do I have to miss any of the action. This works well with sport, but you’d probably need to pause the television for a break, whilst watching a serious drama.
- I’d also be interested to know to, how serious music lovers would find the quality of the sound through the headphones.
- I now adjust the volume on the headphones, so that if say I was watching something very loud, then I’m the only one gets the loud noise.
- Obviously, if you are watching with someone else, you just unplug the headphones and watch normally.
It strikes me that various families would find different ways to use one or more of these devices to avoid problems amongst themselves or with the neighbours.
To be fair, I know that the headphones are a good deal cheaper, than the cost of using a solicitor to fight an ASBO caused by a loud television. And not everybody likes Abba!
But whatever, they made a very good Christmas present for me!
Gressingham Slow Cooked Duck
My son cooked this for me for Christmas yesterday and it was very nice. It was also gluten-free, in that none of the ingredients could by any means be made with gluten.
the strange thing was that their offices now are in Debach, a small village in East Suffolk, where we all lived for nearly twenty years. I was also nearly killed there, when the chimney went through my office in the Great Storm.
Geoffrey Boycott is Distraught
Poor Geoffrey Boycott is distraught for Australia, after the first day in Melbourne. He has just said that it couldn’t have happened to nicer people.
The English Bowling Wasn’t That Good!
Looking at the wreakage of the first Australian innings in Melbourne this morning, as a statistician it is strange that every wicket was caught and there were no lbws or bowled. So perhaps, England weren’t bowling that straight and the Aussies just gave catches away.
Was it just a ploy to give England a false sense of security?
Going Back to Bed as a Happy Bunny
It’s now approaching 4:30 and I’ve just watched an interesting ninety minutes of cricket as Australia decided to give England a lot of catching practice and became all out for just 98 runs.
So I’ve just made myself a LemSip and after I’ve drunk that and listened to the news, I’ll go back to bed and see if I can get back to sleep again. I suppose though I did get about six hours sleep overnight.
The LemSip is an odd flavour; Wild Berry and Hot Orange. If I need to buy some more, I’ll buy the traditional.
Hopefully, it will be alright when I get up in the morning, but England did look a bit collapsible in the last Test and I’ve got Ipswich today, tubes permitting. Town will have to try to play as well as they did in the snow eight days ago.
The Anonymous Widower 