Over The Cable Car In The Sun
I haven’t been over the Emirates Air Line for some time, but I’m glad I did today.
The visibility was pretty good, although hopefully, I’ll find another cold and sunny day when it is better.
Given the right day, it surely is one of the best camera platforms in a city.
It also helped that I caught the cable car at a quiet Sunday morning. This could have been, because many were expecting bad weather and just didn’t go! But remember it opens early in the morning and even starts at 09:00 on a Sunday. So on the right day weatherwise, get there early and choose your time. I got a cabin to myself by being lucky!
Custom House Station Gets Ready For The Flat Pack Station
There’s been a lot of preparation at Custom House station for the arrival of the flat pack Crossrail station.
The most striking feature is a bridge over the site to allow pedestrians to get round it. It looks like it has a temporary lift. That is really something, as many stations don’t have any lifts at all.
Does Everybody Cook With Teaspoons?
On the wall of my kitchen, I have one of those IKEA pots attached to my spice rack. It is full of teaspoons, that are used for all of those little actions, you do whilst cooking, like measuring, stirring and raking out tins.
Does every cook have a quickly accessible source of teaspoons?
Many years ago, I was told by someone, who worked for a cutlery manufacturer in Sheffield, that the number of teaspoons they make and sell was much larger and totally out of line with the number of knives, forks and spoons.
Miliband Has Another Crazy Idea!
After his idea of freezing energy prices, which I think, anybody with any knowledge of how the energy markets work, will think is a non-starter, he’s now had another idea, which although on the face of it looks good, will have far reaching negative consequences if it is implemented. It’s all reported here on the BBC and it is well summed up by the first paragraphs.
Firms would not be able to undercut wages by paying agency staff less than permanent staff under a Labour government, Ed Miliband has said.
Writing in the Independent on Sunday, the Labour leader said the party would close a loophole in the law that allowed for differing rates of pay.
Mr Miliband said he wanted to tighten the rules to “stop a race to the bottom with workers coming here from abroad”.
If you take an industry like farming, which relies heavily on bringing in agency workers to harvest fruit and vegetables, the resulting increase in price of the food, would probably mean we’d import more food from places like Kenya. Farmers would probably only grow food that could be harvested totally by machine.
Other industries would probably be similarly affected and their costs would go up, meaning more higher prices for consumers.
One point that he seems to ignore, is what happens in a company if agency workers and permanent staff are paid the same. A company would adjust the workforce to have the best one to meet its needs. So permanent staff might come under other pressures to perform as well as agency staff, be they from the UK or abroad.
It’ll be interesting to see how this argument develops. I’d love to see a breakdown of where these agency workers are employed by industry and region. I suspect that we’ll find some important public services wouldn’t run without them.
You can’t bring in these sort of policies immediately. You have to phase them in gradually over a period of time. It’s like trying to ride a bicycle slowly, by only turning hard left and hard right, instead of by small movements on the handlebars.
My only worry about these unworkable pronouncements from Ed Miliband, is that enough people might believe him and vote for him in 2010. His deputy may be called Balls, but Miliband talks it in spades!
Dave Allen
I have just watched a documentary on Dave Allen, who to me was perhaps the best comedian of his generation.
His robust attitude to religion, described here in Wikipedia is summed up by the first statement.
He was a religious sceptic (according to Allen himself, “what you might call a practising atheist”, and often joked, “I’m an atheist, thank God”)
My views on religion, run on similar lines, although I had virtually no religious education., compared to Allen.
My father had the same attitude to religion as I do, but his most passionate conviction was probably as an anti-fascist, although some might find that strange, as he had been a lifelong supporter of the Conservative Party.
I seem to remember that he liked Dave Allen, but I can’t be sure.
Although, he used to get me out of bed to watch That Was The Week That Was, as he was very much a lover of provocative comedy and a hater of the pompous and self-important!
A Contribution To The Danny Baker Show
This morning Danny Baker on his BBC Radio 5 show, asked for contributions about decorating the smallest room in the house.
In the 1960s, my parents were thinking about moving. They saw this nice house in Palmers Green, which had a totally black toilet, with black walls, floor and even a black suite.
They didn’t buy the house! I should say that even with my father’s excellent decorating skills, he was totally daunted at the prospect of removing all that paint. I even heard him talk about the house, years later.
I was invited to discuss this on air with Danny and he said, he’d once used the same colour for a kitchen.
He said, it was a disaster! especially, as the gloss paint he used wouldn’t dry and he’d even painted the lino.
There could be use though, for this crime against good taste.
If say your partner is keen to move and you are totally against it, what better way of putting off buyers, than to paint the toilet black.
It would also be a good way to get even with your ex-spouse in an acrimonious divorce, especially, if they got the house!
An Unusual Cold War Story
I’ve just read this story on the BBC, about the personal relationship between Nikita Krushchev and John F. Kennedy and especially about a puppy given to the Kennedys by Krushchev.
You can draw a lot of interesting conclusions.
The Cost Of Tunnelling
I, like probably many others, have often thought that parts of city infrastructure can be improved by the odd strategic pedestrian tunnel or perhaps an inclined one for some escalators. Underground stations, like Oxford Circus and Highbury and Islington are stations, that could probably be improved in this way.
But an interesting insight into the cost of these connections is given in this article in Construction Enquirer about the contract for a pedestrian tunnel to connect Crossrail to the Bakerloo line at Paddington station. Here’s the start of the article.
London Underground has shortlisted three bid teams for a £55m underground tunnel link at Paddington Station.
The 100m long passenger tunnel will link the new Crossrail station to the London Underground Bakerloo Line station at Paddington.
So this hundred metre tunnel is not cheap.
East Tilbury Level Crossing
After hearing about this level crossing a couple of weeks ago, I just had to visit.
East Tilbury may be loved by some, but it was all I had expected. I didn’t get a demonstration about how it is a real problem for emergency vehicles, but that was probably just as well.
The Anonymous Widower 