The Last of the Bendy Buses
The 73 bus route is one of the last to run the bendy buses, that seem so unloved except by fare dodgers.
An Unloved Bendy Bus at the Angel
The 73s are scheduled to be replaced by mainly hybrid double-deck buses by the end of the year.
Nine Recycling Bins
Newcastle-under-Lyme Council must take the award for the world’s most complicated and wasteful recycling system. Nine bins is just too much!
I now live in Hackney, where the system is fairly simple. On Monday they collect household waste and on Thursday the recyclables like paper, bottles and cans go out in green boxes. It works well, except that if I leave my green box outside on my front patio, it collects all sorts of non-recyclables, which I have to remove. Someone also puts an empty can of Stella in there too every night. I hope my doctor doesn’t see it, as he’ll think my gluten-free diet has slipped. The men actually sort the recyclables on the truck, which would seem to be inefficient, but it seems to work well.
In St. Edmundsbury, I had two bins; one for general waste and the other for dry recyclables. They were collected on alternate weeks. There is a great deal of opposition to fortnightly collection, but I never found it a problem.
Surely, we need a national system or perhaps two or three systems that councils would have to use. This would stop confusion and might mean that equipment for a particular scheme would be cheaper. It would also mean that lunatic nine-bin schemes were illegal.
I did try to find a national table of recycling performance on the web, but couldn’t. So if anybody can please tell me!
Is Now the Time to Get a Zopa Loan?
One of the advantages of a Zopa is that you get the loan at a fixed-rate for three or five years. With interest rates, likely to rise in the next few months according to many, such as the Telegraph, if you have a good credit rating, could Zopa be the place to get a loan now?
After all, the great advantage is that if you cash a Zopa loan in, you don’t pay any penalties. And you can even change the repayment day, if your salary date should change say.
A Coeliac’s Questions About Warfarin
My cardiologist, reckons that if I can keep to the Warfarin regime, then I won’t have another stroke and his advice is also reflected by other doctors.
I also asked my stroke doctor about the new drugs coming in, more out of curiosity than anything else, and it seemed he was not in favour of them, because we’re still uncertain about the long-term effects of the new drugs.
Of late though, I’ve been feeling wretched a lot of the time, with what is best described as flu-like symptoms and a very itchy skin, a rash and bad dandruff in my beard, just like I used to have before I went gluten-free. My toenails are bad and brittle although my fingernails have improved since Christmas.
I had put it all down to North London’s version of man-flu and the general cold and bad weather. Athough on some trips out of London, like the one to Barnsley, I seemed to feel better.
So I looked up the Mayo Clinic’s web site on Warfarin side effects. I’m not a great one for some health web sites, but this one is generally fairly reliable.
But it did seem that some of my problems could be down to the Warfarin. On the other hand they may not be.
But I think I might make one or two modifications to my lifestyle and go and see my doctor and my dentist, as some of my pain may be down to a tooth, I broke thirty years ago. It hadn’t given me much trouble until the stroke.
One modification I have made is to make the house cooler. This seems to have improved the flu-like symptoms, but my feet are now colder. And I’ve never ever worn slippers and won’t start now!
So it’ll be interesting to see how things work out.
One question though, is what is the best time to take Warfarin? I ask this as I normally take it about six in the evening and the itch seemed to get bad after I took it yesterday.
Return to The Talbot
I ate in The Talbot at 109 Mortimer Road in de Beauvoir Town, Hackney N1 4DY for the second time last night. They remembered from my first visit that I was a coeliac, although I had said when I booked earlier in the day. The waitress, who is Italian and has a pregnant coeliac friend back home, then checked the menu with the chef. She came back and told me that only one dish from about twenty or so contained gluten and that was the vegetarian option.
In the end, I had a polenta and potato cake with mushrooms, followed by baked hake on mashed potato and greens.
If you don’t know the area, it’s just a few minutes walk from the new Dalston Junction station. Parking is easy. It’s also on the 76 bus route out of the City.
If you are or are not a coeliac, it’s definitely worth a visit.
The Anonymous Widower 