Up and Down the Stairs at Hackney Downs
I went for supper to Walthamstow tonight.
The easiest way is to get a bus to Hackney Downs station and then take a Chingford train. It works well if you just catch a train.
But I just got to the top at Platform 2 to see the train disappearing out of the station. It looks like I’d have to wait for twenty minutes, but a stationman said there was another train in ten minutes on Platform 4. So it was down the dreaded staircase again and then up another one.
Surely for passenger convenience, all Chingford trains should leave Hackney Downs from the same platform. Or if for operational reasons they can’t then perhaps there should be a display at the bottom of the stairs, that lists all departures in order together with the platform. The Overground has such a display at both Highbury and Islington and Dalston Junction stations. Even the bus stop outside Hackney Downs has a display showing the details of the next few buses.
How Not To Put Up A Towel Rail
Jerry was, and hopefully now isn’t a very bad builder. I am reorganising my spare bathroom, so I’ve taken down his disgusting wooden fittings, the like of which I’ve never seen anything so bad and putting up quality Miller ones from my previous home.
My Towel Rail and Hooks and Jerry’s Holes
Note the holes drilled everywhere, where he made so many mistakes. I can count eight holes and three he’s crudely filled and that doesn’t count the three I reused.
Does anybody have a good way to fill holes in tiles?
The I Wouldn’t Do That Party!
Peter Allen on BBC Radio 5, used that nickname for the Labour Party.
But it is true! After all, Prudence got so much of our policies into a mess to buy votes generally or in Scotland. If they were in power they’d still be digging the hole in the budget like maniacs. After all in their view it’s better for the country if Labour is in power, rather than we’re all broke.
Luckily, most of the good people of the United Kingdom, have more sense than Prudence and his ilk.
I’ve Now Got a Buy-to-Let by the Winner of the Carbuncle Cup.
I own a buy-to-let flat close to MediaCityUK. I suspect that I can now advertise it as close to the winner of the Carbuncle Cup, which is the award for the ugliest building of the year.
I have a feeling that we’ll see the BBC gradually relocate back to London to save money anyway.
Who’d want to live in Manchester? Not even Manchester United supporters, as they seem to live in Surrey!
Closing A Zopa Account
Someone likes the idea of a Zopa account, but is worried about, how he could get access to the money in an emergency. I have been researching this and find that although it may not be the best financially in the long term to close a Zopa account, there are ways that will get most of the money out fairly quickly.
Let’s say you have £10,000 invested in Zopa and it is lent out on a three year basis. If you do nothing then over three years the money will be returned with the appropriate interest, subject to any losses from bad debts. There is only one way to assess these and that is by looking at the past performance of your loans and the proportion of bad debts that Zopa discloses. I have always adjusted the interest rate I charge to be not too greedy on the one hand and not too low on the other to get the money lent out quickly. I also make sure, I don’t lend over large sums to any borrower.
Analysing my borrowers, shows that only a small proportion have missed a payment and only five out of over 2300 loans have gone bad. Ask anybody who has run a finance company about that rate and they will say it is very small.
If we look at our notional £10,000 it will earn about seven percent a year, which is £2,100 over the three years. I’m assuming here that you reinvest the money in Zopa. Looking at Zopa performance it would appear that about two percent of loans fail. So if we look at the our £10,000 then expect to pour something like two hundred pounds down the drain.
It’s not quite as simple as that and I’ll be putting together an Excel spreadsheet that is properly calculated.
But the point is that you will still get 98% of the original money back, plus a bit of interest.
But supposing you want the money quicker. Only a small proportion of my loans are not available for Rapid Return, which is Zopa’s get out quickly method. This will cash out most of the money in a couple of months.
But I wouldn’t do that!
The notional £10,000 will give you a cash flow of about three hundred pounds or so for the three years, but if reinvested in Zopa it could be longer. This may in fact be what you want to do.
The trouble is if you have cash-in-hand you always want to spend it.
After Ruining Horse Racing and Cricket Coverage, are Channel 4 Now Doing It With Athletics?
I have not watched any of Channel 4’s coverage of the World Athletics Championships in Daegu, and it seems according to this article in the Guardian, I’m not missing much, by listening on the radio.
They try too hard to make sure they get the advertisers, that they ruin the product. They did this with horseracing and now it has been dumbed down so much I don’t watch.
In the end, there is only two ways to show quality sport; either-free-to-air without advertising or by subscription. I know Sky has adverts and they can be irritating, but their presenters are generally professional. Comparing Sky coverage of the Champions League, with that of ITV, is much more than a matter of chalk and cheese.
We won’t have to worry for long though, as events like the Athletics World Championship will be available on a quality basis over the Internet in the near future for a fee. And hopefully for a fee that has two levels; one with advertising and one without.
Do We Need To Close More Hospitals?
I’ve believed that we have too many hospitals for a long time. Often politics mean that the needs of getting votes come before the needs of good healthcare. No-one would ever get elected, if they were in favour of closing their local hospital.
When I lived near Newmarket, we had two hospitals at the same distance away, Addenbrooke’s and Bury St. Edmunds. The first is a world-class facility and the second is a typical general hospital on a cramped site with bad transport links.
No-one ever chose to go to Bury St. Edmunds and I always remember once turning up at A & E there in the middle of the night to find no-one waiting, but it still took me three hours to be seen. The whole hospital should have been down-graded years ago. This is unlikely to happen, as the powers that be in Bury still resent the fact that Ipswich became the county town, when West and East Suffolk were merged. So we all pay extra through our taxes for local vanity.
So should we close more hospitals? Lord Cross who used to run the NHS, apparently thinks so according to this report on the BBC.
The Anonymous Widower 