i'm with you, hitler

i have nothing to say

Sorry.  You might find diversion somewhere else on the internet.  I hear there is now to be found a great variety of entertaining treats out there to be explored within your browser.

Why not try one of the many websites dedicated to the art of puppetry?  Or, in a pinch, bonsai?  I, personally, find the large number of sites dedicated to the naming and categorisation of the nation's monkey puzzle trees to be uproariously interesting.  My favourite is Steve Palmer, a monkey puzzle tree in Leicestershire: Class 4 silencer, mildly puzzling.

Have fun!

A vision of the future

As you may or may not know, our new Mayor has instituted a dumbass law banning the drinking of alcohol on tubes, buses, trams, overground trains, stations... basically anything that is operated by Transport for London.  How this will help I'm not sure.  Are we intimidated by open containers, I wonder?  Perhaps there is evidence of "second-hand drinking" we've yet to see?

Anyway, I was standing in the sun outside Liverpool Street Station the other day in a haze of cigarette smoke (I don't smoke, btw, nor do I, for that matter, drink on public transport.  But even I think that is a stupidly restrictive policy  - I don't care if you're having a drink on my bus!  The only person you're harming is you!  If you were going to get loaded and cause trouble, you'd be drunk before you got on..) and I realised how this was going to go.

You can't smoke inside so there's a large community of smokers who hang out around buildings.  They're in place.  It's a new social network, you know.  The pavements around pubs are much chattier than the tables inside and the smoking areas outside offices (well-established by now) are where departments connect in a way they don't when they're on different floors.

Soon the crowd outside stations will be joined by those who are having to finish their drink before they go inside.  The smokers and the drinkers will both have outcast mentalities and points upon which to bond ("Politicians, eh?  Cuh, what'll they ban next?") so they'll be chatting away to each other quite happily.  It'll be a buzzy place, much more sociable than the inside of the station.

This will be fine when the drinking ban starts, in June, but as the year draws on there will be a distinct sense of discomfort which the smokers are used to but the drinkers are not.  As there are small awnings on some office buildings to keep smokers from the worst of the weather, so small shelters will probably start popping up around stations for the drinkers.

Some enterprising soul, seeing a large, untapped, captive market will no doubt move in on these shelters and start selling cans, bottles and cigarettes.  This will obviously be illegal to start with but after a while there will probably be some sort of regulation (if only so they can be taxed!) and they'll be somewhat more legit.  Maybe the shelters will be built to include a stand for the vendor of such things.

Eventually, the shelter, the stall, the smokers, the drinkers... it will all be so settled and stationary that the shelter may as well become a building.

I suggest a name for such a building.  A "pub".

But why?

It's not the first time, but I got comment spam today.  Two points - 1) I don't like it because it makes me go "Oooh, comments", then it's a real disappointment when I see it's spam. 2) What's the point?  If I'm lucky this blog is read by, like, 10 people.  In all honesty it'd be easier to take names and just copy you in on my emails but I like the format. So where's the audience?  I know they don't know that, but really.  I don't like having the futility of this pointed out to me so clearly.

bankside

All right, a bit down the road from Bankside, but the pun sort of works. Doesn't it? No, okay, fine, it doesn't. Leave me alone, you meanies. Anyway, this intimidating fellow here was from the Leake Street Cans Exhibition, curated, I guess you'd say, by the ubiquitous and elusive Banksy.

It was good. The day was pleasant and sunny, the crowd was happy and enthusiatic, no-one called anyone a retard, I think we can say it was a success. I have a whole photoset here which will enthrall and amaze the whole family!

Oh

Fuck.

London holds its breath.

They're still counting the votes.  Boris is ahead as I type, but they're not onto 2nd votes and I genuinely think Ken could still win it on 2nd votes.  Because you might vote Brian or Sian with Ken as a back-up "better than Boris" option.  You wouldn't vote Brian or Sian and put Boris second, you just wouldn't.  No-one is that stretched across the political spectrum.

There are also no right-wing equivalents of Brian or Sian for Boris to scoop up the second votes of.  Sure, crazy-assed BNP-types, but they're not in the same likely-to-come-3rd-and-4th league.

I remain, ever, optimistic.