The Closed Kingsland Fire Station
I walked past the closed Kingsland Fire Station a couple of days ago.
The Closed Kingsland Fire Station
I’m not going to enter into the rights and wrongs of the closure, but I once had a dinner with a senior fire officer in Suffolk. Many of the things he suggested to cut fire deaths from many years of experience, have still not been generally implemented.
One example of something he wanted was battery-less smoke alarms in all buildings. Twenty years later that still isn’t the norm.
As the fire station and several others have now been closed for a few days, I’m surprised we haven’t seen a few stories about how wrong the decision was.
Has The Rain Stopped For A Bit?
I took this picture from the Emirates Air-Line this morning.
Has The Rain Stopped For A Bit?
Let’s hope we’re getting a break from this awful rain!
Not Pure Genius
I needed a snack this afternoon and thought some Genius toast with some strawberry jam would do nicely!
Not Pure Genius
These were the first two slices I got from the packet! So they were discarded.
On the subject of holes, I’m always reminded of a story about a former MP, who died some months ago.
A friend of a close friend of my late wife’s was at a party when she was chatted up by the MP. He thought he had struck lucky and escorted the lady up to a bedroom.
Everything went fine, until he took off his shirt to reveal a grey vest with large holes in it.
The Invisible Busway
I used to see the odd local news story about the Luton Dunstable Busway, when I lived in Suffolk, but it does seem to be rather invisible on the web. It does have a rather poor website, which doesn’t seem to be updated regularly, but information in Wikipedia is very limited. It’s just a section in Transport in Luton, under Current Developments. It does say that it opened in September 2013.
The only news story I can find is this one about low usage on the BBC.
Passenger numbers for the first month of the Luton and Dunstable guided busway were just 43% of those predicted for the £91m scheme.
Perhaps the busway hasn’t been given a high enough profile? The successful Cambridge busway, had a lot of publicity, although much of it proved the old adage, that no publicity is bad publicity.
Perhaps I should go for a look, but there is very little to draw me to Luton or Dunstable.
An Inadvertent Inuendo
Caitlin Moran in The Times on Friday does her Celebrity Watch, which I generally read, as it lets me find out who the inconsequential idiots, like Justin Bieber, that constantly pollute news bulletins, actually are.
Today, she marks David Cameron down, because of an interview about his musical taste. She reveals that despite his profile, he still manages to sneak into gigs, like that of Swedish act; First Aid Kit at the O2 Shepherds Bush.
Caitlin has now got the phrase. “Cameron’s back entrance to the Bush” stuck in her mind.
My IKEA Furniture Now Has Some Brass Knobs!
My house has a theme of dark black-brown steel beams fitted together with brass fittings.
Dark Steel And Brass Bolts
When I bought the house, it still had Jerry’s gold-painted steel bolts, which I have replaced with real brass ones. Even if some might be just be real bolts glued into Jerry’s crude holes.
So when I bought some of IKEA’s Expedit boxes, which are just the right colour for the beams, I was disappointed that they only come with natural aluminium knobs.
IKEA’s Aluminium Knobs
So it was off to Birmingham by train to visit Honeyglen Anodising in Sparkbrook to see what they could do. I’ve now got the trial batch and here’s one in place.
Expedit With Brass Knobs
I’ve now got to get all the others together and send them off to Birmingham. I am getting them in a pretty standard brass colour, but there are more details here of the colours available.
Does She Use Twitter?
They’ve just had the Reverend Jane Twitty 0n BBC Breakfast.
Does she use Twitter?
What Can The Banks Do For Us?
After writing the previous post about Mark Carney’s thoughts on the pound and Scottish independence, I got to thinking about the nature of different currencies and how I feel about them.
On my travels to Budapest, Stockholm, Palermo and Bilbao, I’ve used Hungarian forint, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian krone and Swiss francs in addition to euro and pounds. Train journeys across Europe could be a nightmare, as like the trip back from Stockholm, each country could be a different currency and you end up with enough change to tear holes in all your pockets, but impossible to understand.
The personal preference, that I like to use cash makes it worse in a non-euro and non-pound country, like Hungary, where I don’t have any natural feel for notes and coins.
I just think that the banks are making it easy for us to handle all these currencies, but some have made a start.
I have a credit card from Nationwide, that just converts the transaction into pounds on my statement and doesn’t charge me any commission, when I use it abroad.
As a customer I like that and I’ve heard one savings expert recommend this credit card for just this reason.
So shouldn’t all credit cards be like this?
But i used to be a world-class computer programmer. Probably to say I used to be is totally wrong, as my mind is still reasonably sharp and it certainly knows what computers can do.
So why when I use my credit card in say Ruritania and I pay for a delicious gluten-free meal with my credit card, does the terminal not show me the cost in both Ruritanian wotsits and English pounds? If I was say a Frenchman and my bank account was in euros, then I would want euros instead of pounds.
All it needs is a bit of clever software.
Come on you bankers!
A Stupid Football Supporter
Is this message for the most stupid and bone-headed football supporter, who happened to be at Leeds United on Tuesday night?
He had parked his Chevroler Spark, LT12 FNE, in the wrong place and despite umpteen public address calls to move it, he obviously ignored them, as they put this message on the big screen.
A Stupid Football Supporter
The message stayed there for quite a time, so draw your own conclusions.
The fact that Leeds United could program the screen like this, is impressive. I wouldn’t have been so polite.
This Will Be Great Fun!
I’ve just seen this Panono camera ball demonstrated on the Click segment of BBC Breakfast for today. You can probably find it on this page.
At the moment, it’s only a prototype, but my devious mind has already thought of several useful applications of the technology. At the moment the price looks to be several hundred euros, but one that was the size of a cricket ball, that is say just £200 would be wonderful toy for people of all ages.
The Anonymous Widower 