Sunday, February 26, 2006

You meet the strangest people on public transport

Good day faithful readers. One of the first things that I noticed about the trains when I first moved to London was the fact that there are no bins at the train stations, which was strange since it's a place where there are so many people just standing there eating/drinking. In Australia there are so many that even if you tried to throw your rubbish on the ground it would probably accidentally go in the bin anyway! Here you go searching for bins before you finally give up and leave your rubbish sitting somewhere for the army of cleaners.

I initially thought that it might have something to do with the recent bombings in the Tube, but apparently there haven't been any bins here for a long time. This dates back to when London was being routinely bombed by the IRA.

As much as native Londoners seem to complain about the public transport in this city, I think that it is fantastic, especially when compared with the joke that is public transport in Australia. You'd think that with 90% (or some other large percentage) of the population living in the major cities that if public transport was going to make sense anywhere, it would be in Australia! But anyway, enough complaining, back to the train system here.

To get right into the centre of London takes me on average about 40mins, or an hour if you include walking to the station. The trains run every hour from 0500 to about 2330, and every half hour during the busy periods. If you're taking the tube around central London, then you can arrive pretty much any time that you like and expect a huge wait of about 3-4 mins max to catch the train that you want. Even with this frequency, if you try and catch either type of train during rush hour you can expect to be stuffed in like sardines, which isn't much fun.

On the other hand, if you go at any other time of the day you'll most likely be able to get yourself a seat. If you catch a train into the city late at night like I did the other day you may even have a carriage to yourself. The reason that I was catching the train so late was that I was going in to meet one of my friends for dinner and I couldn't leave until I knocked off. As a result I turned up a the station still in my work clothes. When I found out that I had a carriage to myself I thought that I would take the chance to change into my normal clothes. It just so happened that just as I was pulling my pants up some other guy decided that he would like to be in my carriage too. I'm not sure what he thought that I was doing, but he quickly moved through to the next one!

I can't say that I regularly see this sort of activity going on thankfully, so I'm very happy to use the train as my main method of transport at the moment. It's a bit of a bugger if I have a large shopping load or if I need to go to the airport early in the morning, but even if I did have a car I'd still take the train into the city. I think the real test will come when I get a more regular job that pays me a bit more and gives me the weekends to do a little bit of touring.

Sunday, February 19, 2006

The king on his throne

Good day faithful reader. Here's a question for you all... do you like it when it comes from over the top or from underneath? What am I talking about? Toilet paper of course! I was sitting there on the throne the other day pondering the day's events, as I often do, when I looked across and noticed that it was coming from underneath. Being the borderline obsessive compulsive that I am it was absolutely necessary that I changed it immediately (if I'm in someone else's house I'm always considerate enough to change it back again before I leave). Yes, that's right, I prefer it when it comes from over the top. Personally I don't see how you could like it any other way! If it comes from over the top I find it to be far more user friendly as it hangs down right there waiting for you to grab it. This compares to coming from underneath where it quite often hangs up against the wall and you have to grapple with it to get it off, like trying to pick a pin up off the floor!

Anyways, after I had made the appropriate adjustments there was still some work to do, so this gave me opportunity to think about how the eternal battle between those who prefer over the top and those who prefer underneath could be brought to a peaceful conclusion. The solution that I came up with was this. As we all know, most roll holders are simple and held on the wall be two screws. What we need is for the while roll holder to be mounted on a pivot so that roll itself is able to flipped end over end, thereby allowing either type of user easily put the roll in their preferred position without having all the complications of removing the roll and risking dropping it on the floor. I see this as the first step to introducing toilets similar to seats in expensive cars, where you sit down, enter your code and everything changes to your pre-set preferences. In this case however, instead of the steering wheel moving up, seat moving back, the toilet roll will change, the seat will warm up, the height will change. What a wonderful new world it will be.

I should be in sales

Good day faithful reader. At the world famous Blue Anchor Pub, as with most other places that I've ever worked there seems to be a constant shortage of pens. We've placed a pen holder centrally so that any pens that we find can go in there, but it seems that no matter what strategies we put in place to keep the pens together in a specific location, whenever you're looking for one there are none to be found. What's more, even if we do manage to maintain a certain level of pens for a certain amount of time, it's never the same ones. One day you may have 2 Bics, a multicolour and something else and the next day the only remaining will be one of the Bics, while the other three have disappear to be replaced by three others that have miraculously appeared out of nowhere! Just to increase your frustration, one day you'll be wandering around and there will be multicolour sitting right there on the bench, likes he's been there the whole time just waiting to be noticed!

On the topic of lost pens, its always amazes how much stress builds up inside me, and presumably this happens to other people, when I can't find a pen. I run around lifting up random objects in the vain hope that there will be a pen hiding under there. Pens are just one of those items that are so common that you feel like you could hacking your way through the Amazon, need a pen, and look and find one wedged between the fork of a tree. It's probably because of this that we get so concerned when we can't find one. So concerned that we'll sell our souls to get our hands on one. It's surprising therefore that stationery stores don't sell pens at a much higher price than they do. Think about it, when it the only time you actually go out to buy a pen other than when you're absolutely desperate and every other option has been tried. Of course anyone who has any idea about economics would realise that the reason for this is that pens are relatively cheap to make (I would imagine anyway) and if a single company tried to raise it price/profits that much then someone else would simple come in and undercut them. If only Bic and the other pen companies could collude then I'm sure that they could take control of the world very quickly!

On the subject of pens, what's up with blue pens? If you follow the writing history of mankind from the earliest texts right up until now, what colour is everything written in? That's right, black. Try your hardest and you'll struggle to find "official" texts written in anything other than black. However, when it comes to jotting down a note blue is as popular if not more so than black! I seem to remember when I was learning to write in school we were forced to use blue pens! I don't have any answers to this conundrum, I just thought that it was interesting.

Sunday, February 05, 2006

It's a wonder they're not ALL dead!

Good day faithful readers. It may or may not be true, but one of the strongest arguments that the Australian police use for not raising the speed limit in Australia is that it is higher in Europe and there is a significantly higher road toll. Now, of course I don't have the statistics in front of me, but after my week in France I would imagine that the road toll has nothing to do with the speed limit on the motorways, but rather the nature of the backroads. It's not that they're in poor condition, all the ones that I drove on seem to have been kept in reasonably good shape, it's that they're all tight, twisty and largely unused. Of course if you're anything like me, then being provided with this sort of road is basically like being given your own personal race track and of course driving everywhere like a maniac is always going to result in an extra casualty or two!

Now, while I was in France I wasn't exactly lucky enough to have a Ferrari 430 or similar to enjoy these roads with. On this occasion I was put behind the wheel of a Renault Twingo, which is hardly a sports car and could fairly be described as 'lacking' when it comes to highway driving. Get it high in the rev range and put it on some narrow, twisty roads however and it performs quite admirably... Europecar would have been horrified!

Since my time in France was purely for relaxation I decided that whenever I had time I would take backroads to my destinations. Sometimes this had me heading down roads that at first glance appear to be someone's driveway (god help anyone trying to find one of these roads in the dark!). I'm sure that the only people besides me to have used some of the roads in the last few months had been the farmers who own the adjacent land in their tractors!

Nevertheless, this only made it all the more exciting... especially when you came across someone heading in the opposite direction while you're going around a corner on a road that is only one car width. The other benefit is that it is not unusual to come across little villages and countryside as beautiful as you're likely to see anywhere and the type of which France is famous for.

On one of the days that I was in France I decided that I would head up to the Pyrenees, and particularly to the Col de Tourmalet, one of the most famous climbs to regularly appear in the Tour de France. I wasn't able to get all the way to the summit thanks to the fact that it is currently winter and the road was snowed over. However I did get a significant portion of the way up and certainly far enough to whet my appetite for when I bring my bike over in July this year.

I actually enjoyed my daily drives so much that after each day's touring I marked off in my map book the exact routes that I took, so that when I go back next time I might be able to ride around on some of the same roads. I was actually amazed at the number of cyclists that I saw out riding, particularly given that I nearly froze to death every time that I stepped out of my air conditioned car! This is in stark contrast to here in London, where I've probably seen 3 cyclists the entire time that I've been here. Of course I'm comparing the world's cycling Mecca with, well some place that obviously isn't!

Anyways, at the end of my time in France I had to say a fond farewell to Mr Twingo, who had treated me so well all the time I was treating him so badly. Given that I had only been in a car twice and not driven at all in the previous three months, and then it was on the left hand side of the road, I thought that I did rather well to come out the end of my trip with only a single displaced hubcap thanks to a close encounter with a curb coming into Condom... no pun intended!