Why Not?
I found this telephone cable cabinet behind Waitrose in the Barbican.
A Painted Telephone Cable Cabinet
Perhaps all of these cabinets, which are always getting damaged by metal thieves should be painted in other designs. After all, it would make them very traceable, if they were stolen.
A Recce to Barnet
Barnet is a surprisingly difficult club, as it lies between Aston Villa and Barnsley. So it’ll have to be done quickly on a trip between Euston and St. Pancras. In other words it’ll be two trips on the Northern line to High Barnet. I’d only ever been once before, when I was about seven to see Enfield play them with my father, but C as a child used to go regularly with her father, on their bicycles.
So to see how difficult it was, I took a trip from Euston to High Barnet and then back to St. Pancras. The times were as follows.
18:22 Left Euston
19:00 Arrived High Barnet
19:25 Left High Barnet
20:10 Arrived St. Pancras
So that short trip took just 12 minutes short of two hours.
It could be a bit quicker if soomeone was with me to hold the lights on Barnet Hill and get the platform right there. I got the wrong train out of High Barnet and had to wait for one at Camden Town, which probably cost 15 minutes.
At least the ground is well-signposted and easy to find, as these pictures show.
At least though the walk isn’t too difficult.
92 Clubs – A Recce to Ipswich
I had to go to Ipswich to have some pictures taken for the 92 Clubs challenge.
Here’s a few I took from Ipswich Station to the ground.
As the pictures were all taken from a similar position, it just shows how close the station and the ground are.
The Garage Where I Parked My Bike For Spurs
This is a better picture of where I used to park my bike to for Spurs in the early 1960s.
The Garage Where I Parked My Bike For Spurs
Salubrious isn’t it! Obviously, the two shops either side have seen a makeover, but the garage certainly hasn’t. They have removed the sign that said “Slow Down to 50 mph. Through This Gateway” and added a litter bin.
Such is progress!
Sunday Times On Strokes
They have a series of articles on strokes today. One in particular talks about the new drugs to replace Warfarin. Information for the article was provided by Boehringer Ingelheim.
So who makes one of the new drugs?
You got it in one!
Am I changing?
No! All the doctors I’ve seen from the stars that appear on TV, to the newly qualified have advised me against them.
The reason is that it took us many years to know all the Warfarin problems. The biggest is actually people getting rather mixed up, as to what is the dose.
Solving that is a managememt problem and doesn’t require a new drug with unknown side-effects.
In the article, it says that with the new drugs, the great advantage is that you take one a day. I have taken the same dose of Warfarin for over a year now and the dose is 5 mg (pink) most days and 4 mg (1 blue and 1 brown) on Saturday and Monday.
What could be simpler?
Christopher Hitchens
Read his article in the Sunday Times today. Superb!
A previous version of the article is here.
The Obesity League Table
The Sunday Times publishes a list of the fattest boroughs in England. Here’s an extract.
A Department of Health survey, however, shows four local authority areas are far ahead of other parts of the country.
The areas affected are Swale, covering the north Kent towns of Sittingbourne, Sheerness and Faversham; Medway, also in Kent; Gateshead, in the northeast; and Tamworth, in the West Midlands.
Danny Dorling from Sheffield University has this to say.
Places such as Swale and Gateshead are “obesogenic environments”. This means they suffer from a complex mix of factors such as rising numbers of fast-food shops, few open spaces where people can exercise and road layouts that make it hard to walk or cycle.
I think he’s right. It would be interesting to see how levels compare in the various London boroughs.
Do 50% Tax Rates Work?
I don’t think so, except for financial advisors and accountants.
When the rate gets too high, people see an increasing amount of their money going in taxes and do something about it.
I remember, an accountant once told me of a client, who asked him to cut the amount he paid in tax. The client by the way had a small but successful manufacturing company. He told the client to leave some of the money he didn’t need in the business and invest it to make the business grow. The tax bill went down, but the wealth of the client’s company grew. I just looked it up on the Internet and its even bigger. Sadly the accountant carried on smoking like a chimney and died of lung cancer.
So I’m in favour of reducing the tax rate and removing the loopholes. This incidentally, is what Mrs. Thatcher did and the tax take rose. It also made a lot of accountants and financial advisors unemployed.
You could argue that we need a very simple tax system, that everybody on the Dalston Omnibus could understand.
But no government would ever do this, as they’d have to deal with large numbers of irate civil servants.
Formula One to Iran
I never thought I hear these words together, but then some of those who work in Formula One have a different set of morals to those that I do!
I doubt it will happen, but read this piece in the Telegraph. Here is the update at the end.
UPDATE on 08/09: Bernie Ecclestone, F1’s chief executive, has now played down the possibility of a race in Tehran. “It’s not a question of politics,” Ecclestone said. “I’m not political. If a country is peaceful and safe then that is fine with me. But we have three or four countries waiting their turn. I don’t think Iran is top of our list at the moment.” Of course, Bernie has never been known to perform a U-turn.
If you could read Bernie’s mind, you’d make a fortune.
The Anonymous Widower 