Conkers

Piles of conkers in the street today, shells broken up and shiny seeds all over. A week or two later than usual I think. They used to be something I associated with the first week back at school in September.

The idea of this blog was to write down various rambling nature notes and rants about building and design in and around London and link to my photos. I was going to follow the seasons through spring and summer, I never quite managed to do it. I took the photos alright – It took 2 CDs to make a copy of the ones I like best – but never really got into the habit of doing the log from college, which is where most of my computer dingoing goes on.

But now I have a shiny new laptop computer at home. Well, its not shiny at all, its a sort of matt white colour. Whith plasticky keys and a little glowing picture of an apple on it. And I have a cable modem and wireless whatsits. And I need to stop going to the pub so much in order to not spend the money I need to repay the loan I used to buy all these techy toys. So, as there is nothing good on telly any more…

The Curse of the Lewisham Head-End

Last night I enjoyed the exotic experience of sitting in my own front room drinking a cup of tea while watching my own telly and using my own computer online.

Wow. It finally all works.

Well, almost all – I still haven’t managed to get Firefox to be able to logon here to update this wiblog! When I do I’ll perhaps at last be able to get on and do all the things I was going to do here…

Of course I don’t know if it will carry on working. My faith-level in the contiuing operation of human-designed systems is getting lower all the time. If you don’t trust the floor you walk on, things get hairy.

And NTL seem to have inherited the Curse of the Lewisham Head-End from Cable and Wireless, who got it from the late unlamented Videotron. Maybe the Lewisham Bowling Alley (which is where their kit is) was built on top of an ancient burial ground full of Unmentionably Icky Dead Things that Walk in the Night.

This time round the isntallation worked, but NTL buggered up the billing.

I was nervous about using them because of The Curse (I rant and whinge about a previous brush with it at Incapable and Witless) so I didn’t ordere broadband from them till they’d fied my phone line. Bloke came roudn when expected, waved his magic wand, anounced that my line was disconnected in the cabinebt at the street corner (why?), reconnected it, it worked. Fine. Except that while he was doing it he said that his paperwork had my phone number as X, when it is in fact Y. X being the number that my ex-wife took with her when she left the flat, something like seven years ago.

Anyway that was put straight and I orderd the broadband. They said they’d install it on the 11th September. Then they sent the details to my ex-wife at her new address. She hasn’t lived in the same house as me for 12 years, and isn’t an NTL customer any more. So she phoned them to say that she hadn’t ordered broadband or cable and they never installed it. I had to call again and make a new order.

They installed that yesterday. She phoned me and said that she’d now recieved a direct debit form from NTL. So had I. Maybe they are trying to bill twice for the same service. And how do they even know her address?

So this is still posted from the office… I hope it will all still be working when I get back home!

The Thames running with much ink.

Walking to Euston the other day (to get the Northern line to the Cathedral for the Reader’s course) I bumped into a full-scale war. Blood on the streets. Well, ink.

I haven’t been paying much attention to the papers for the last few weeks. Partly because I spend half my life on the Net, partly because I mainline on Radio Four at home, partly because I’ve been reading the book Press Gang by Roy Greenslade, which is a history of British newspapers since the War. (well, English newspapers to be honest – he skimps on the Scottish press, which is just as bad).

Anyway, between UCL and Euston at least three people tried to give me a copy of a new freebie paper called London Lite and another two tried to give me another one called The London Paper. Yesterday and today, for the first time in years, I saw no copies of the Metro on the train in the morning

Even if I hadn’t been reading the Greenslade book (which is bloody brilliant, especially the first part) I’d have recognised what was going on. A fullscale circulation war, as newspapers attempt to persuade advertisers that more people read them than the other one. The British press has a long tradition of this, and News International (AKA Murdoch & the Poodles) and Associated (the Daily Mail and its clones) are the worst offenders. Whenever someone launches a new paper, someone else launches a spoiler (or relaunches their own paper, or invents a totally imaginary paper that they never intend to print (Murdoch once went as far as appointing an editor, hiring journalists, and fitting our office space for a fake paper) or in the case of the old Evening News exhumes its stinking corpse from the grave. Bingo and tits.

As far as I could tell from the one copy of London Lite I looked at on a train a few days ago, its basically the pictures and celebrity interviews from the EveningStandard with the news articles in between taken away. The London Paper looks even skimpier. They both have a vaguely similar purplish look to their front pages.

I’ve no real idea which (if either) of them is the “real” paper and which the spoiler. Perhaps they both are. The obvious target is Murdoch trying to knock out the Standard but the paper that’s vanished from the streets is the Metro. Maybe they are using the same printers or distributors for it. They’ve been recycling copy between the Metro, Standard, and Mail for years, so adding another one probably doesn’t stretch their intellects too much.

But it certainly isn’t stretching their readers intellects. From what little I’ve seen there is almost nothing in either new paper to make them worth picking up off the floor, which is where most of them ended up at Euston last night. But that’s the British tabloid press for you. Like Roy Thomson said decades ago, the news is the stuff that keeps the adverts apart. Of course he was Canadian. Like most British Press Barons. In Canada they couldn’t get away with what they get away with over here.