Thursday Thirteen V50 - back to work?

I'm back around London this week, so the September First Thursday Thirteen V50 can have more of a street theme.

1) September is Spider month Except the spiders arrived early. I think it was the disruption I caused when I was clearing space in the garage. The biggest so far have been house spiders. We've had two or three stomping around. I can tell they are all different ones as I help them leave the building.

2) September also means work: Following my adaptation of my working model, I'd set September to start wearing a suit again. Actually, I was a couple of days early with the first tie being sported on Tuesday.

3) Back in the business zones: Wearing a tie also means I'm back in the London business zones although I've been holding out until we are really into the new month before getting too busy.

4) London Cycle : Zipping around London can be quite mixed mode: walk/car/bus/tube/bike/taxi. My bike pass stopped working sometime in late August. It was a credit card change that meant it didn't auto renew. I finally discovered it after 2 or 3 racks didn't work. Fixed now so I was using the system again today (Cycle Superhighway 8 amongst others).

5) London Cycle Day: The London Skyride day is this Sunday, although I will use my own bike for that. Probably the Brompton folding bike. Of course all styles of bike will be present on Sunday.

6) And more Bicycles: Tomorrow I plan to whizz around on my 'road bike'. It's bigger than the Brompton but I suspect it weighs less.

7) Page Eight and Spooks: To encourage us all to be out in the Summer months, the television programmes are usually rather poor. I expect there's good stuff somewhere in the 400+ channels but it can be a challenge. I managed to find a couple of good spy films to watch though; one was the old "Spy who came in from the cold" - a le Carre classic filmed in great Monochrome.

And a recent production called Page Eight, with Bill Nighy and Rachel Weisz. I enjoyed both, even if the latter was quite slowly paced and understated in many scenes. It also moved around quite a few familiar places, Chelsea Bridge, Battersea Embankment, Princes Drive.

Others watching it with me were calling out the places. I also found an old series link of Spooks on Sky+ and have been working through them. There were 19 in all and I've watched 3 so far. All good.

8) Places I recognise: Sad but true that I also sometimes call out 'been there' when somewhere 'foreign' that I've visited shows up on telly. A couple of recent obscure ones were Mykonos harbour at the end of Bourne 1 (where they meet when she is running a taverna) and the US 91/US 1 intersection in Marina Del Rey, which I recognised in an end of the world movie called 2012 a few days ago.

9) A different type of leaf smell: Last week I commented about the early smell of leaves, heralding Autumn. This week its a different type of leaf as I see the story about the charity sponsored research into child smoking data has been requested by hardball lawyers from Philip Morris. Their only reason for this can be to use it to argue a contrary position. Outrageous.

10) Event season approaches: Summer is more about outdoor events. I notice I'm getting emailed about theatre style gigs again now ready for the dark evenings!

11) Helping buy scarce tickets : I was asked to help get some scarce tickets for an upcoming music event. It had a 0900 start time for ticketing and I was online by 0845. It was a pre-sales arrangement but I am suspicious that the tickets being pre-sold were the edges and back of the theatre. Mission successfully accomplished but I'm suspicious of the way this works. Update: Another request to help for a different band on Friday morning. All the 'Standing' tickets went in the first 2-3 minutes.

12) Hollywood Project : I agreed today to let my novel get represented for the Hollywood treatment. If nothing else it will make an interesting serialisation of what happens!

13) Trashed Organ project : The isn't my project but I did say I'd write about it, not least because a short poem I wrote ended up in the first issue of the magazine. I'll post about it properly when the 'shop' is open.

Mykonos windmills - 'been there'