Sloane

We hopped onto an Uber-Boat along the Thames and sprinted towards Westminster, where the vessel decided to turn around. No service to Battersea? We'd have to make alternative arrangements.

Westminster. Quiet. Parliament. Deserted. London was playing hard to fill.

Then on towards Sloane Square where suddenly everything became normal.

People. Cafes. Bustle. We decided to have a late breakfast at Colbert. "We can only give you the table for an hour," explained the waiter. At least somewhere was busy.

Similar along the King's Road and in Peter Jones. I looked at the carried carrier bag count. Shoppers were out in force.

Zedel's

Zedel's is a good seceret place around Piccadilly - and busy with Londoners. 'How was it yesterday?' I asked as the waiter explained it had picked up that very Tuesday evening. Then the jazz band kicked in. Afterwards, we sauntered along to the Bar Americain.

After a few cocktails and in my case reckless absinthe we burst back into the night of Piccadilly.

It was after midnight, but no-one around. We were witnessing empty streets like it was 4am.

Yayoi Kusama

The next day we were along to Tate Modern for Yayoi Kusama. Note the polkadots.

    It was also quiet. I can remember other shows where the line snakes all around the outside of the Blavatnik building, but for this it was a simple walk down the ramp, with our pre-booked tickets.

The infinity rooms are special and it was a joy to be Filled with the Brilliance of Life and to be whisked reflectively into Kusama's Chandelier of Grief. It's a selfie, by the way.

That evening we visited one of my regular haunts/work canteens at Zedel's in Piccadilly. It's an underground palace of mirrors and light and was reassuringly rammed with people getting back into London living. 

Testing the un- lockdown

Posted after the events, but in the interests of completeness...

The nail-biting continued as we wondered whether the Hitachi locomotives would be back in service after the mysterious cracks were discovered. Fortunately, they were repaired and our train to London did the trip comfortably in 2h14. Then from quiet Paddington across to the sedate South Bank. 

We were staying in a ritzy hotel, but it was like we were the only guests. We'd booked a casual supper along the Thames but needn't have worried. The usually difficult-to-get-into Italian was almost empty. Useful to know, but still necessary to book for most places.

Yet, on the news channels we were seeing reports of everywhere being busy again with outside and inside drinking and general revelry. Not our experience.

Debt of Gratitude

Not sure if there is a scale for this. And anyway, nobody seems to care. He's got a likeable haircut.

•  £0 = no debt of gratitide 
• £535 = Irksome small fry - not even worth answering the CCJ s about this one - probably only a round in any case. Make it 'of no merit'. Bullingdon fodder. 
• £15000 = Family(sic) holiday to Mustique, kindly donated via an intermediary who happened to have a friend's 2-week let of a property standing empty, valued at £15k. Those telco boys know their way around the taxation frameworks. 
• £50,000 = Okay, a game of tennis, but that's your lot.
• £??,??? = Nanny fees, except the target for this one had higher principles than our man.
• £85,000 = A meaningful comma amount for this flat refurb, which would've stayed quiet except that the Press found out. Still, a backdated cheque should cover it nicely.
• £126,000 = Debatable benefit bestowed upon an erstwhile girlfriend with a a pole in her office. 
• £2,600,000 = Curious donation to a Russian firm of stage set builders, who re-rigged a room in Downing Street with perhaps £600,000 worth of equipment

After that, we start to get into the realm of friends needing friends.

I didn't think of any of these in my novel Corrupt, but it would have been considered fanciful fiction if I had.

Corrupt, by ed adams

JUMP - some kind of future

Yes, it's time to reveal the story of Juliette Häberli and Matt Nicholson. Matt was first featured in my novel Coin, where he helped invent the cyber currency which introduced him to Amanda Miller from SI6. Matt eventually moved to Geneva, to work for Brant/Biotree and that's where he met Juliette. 

They were working together on Artificial Intelligence projects intended to augment Human Intelligence. HCCH - Human to Computer to Computer to Human in the jargon.

Some parts worked but others failed spectacularly, although rival labs were most interested in the project and sent people to recover it in An Unstable System.

Fast forward to Norway and there's an entirely different proposition in play, although Matt's friends in the lab are intent on keeping it under wraps.

Part of the RightMind collection. 

Fixing a QNAP when the App Center disappears

It has been a curious week for disk drives. Chatting to friends, they suggested it was almost as economical to keep things in the cloud now, as to to have them stored on local file servers.

I explained that I'd donated a few ex-file RAID5 server disks to the local museum recently. Not as exhibits, but so that hey could set up their own file server with cloud access.

This  is on a Synology system and I can access it over the internet for routine tasks such as maintenance. 

Then there's my own QNAP server, which I really only set up as an experiment. Weirdly, it lost most of its control panel recently, in an automatic systems update and I had to change all of the DNS server from 8.8.8.8. to 1.1.1.1 and back again to rescue it.

 It's working fine now, but has almost too many options for the device that sits in the cupboard underneath the TV.

Then there's my Drobos. Data Robotics. So simple to use, and yet the company has been acquired and the product line almost stopped.

I reckon they were so fault-free that people would just buy the number they needed and then be content. 

Except in my case, I recently moved one. And groan, a disk in it stopped working. At least the drives fail at different times. 

in a flat spin from the money tree

We can see the No 11 flat refurbishment being packaged into a couple of neat transactions. 

First, the £58k which was donated by tory donor Lord Brownlow but later squirmingky paid back by Boris once others had spotted the sleaze potential. Add to that the £30k allowance that he could take, and Bada-Bing £88k. 

Of course, that is just to replace Theresa May's furnishings, and there is still the other £200k for general refurbishments as well. If Bozza forgot about the £58k donation, it begs the question bout what else he has overlooked. 

Still, £88k is a bigger budget than Angela Scanlon usually gets on the TV makeover programme 'Your Home Made Perfect', but I guess Carrie must have such demanding standards. 

The Electoral Commission have said it would mounting a formal investigation by Lord Geidt, but smoke and fire and bolts and horses phrases spring to mind. He's going to advise on any further registration of interests that might be needed. Oh, that's all right then.

I'd have thought a quick peek into the property would be one way to tell if there had been suspicious spending, but come to think of it, that new Russian-built £2.6m recording studio inside Number 10 looks reassuringly tawdry. 

And we have Michael Gove's journo wife Sarah Vine implying that a John Lewis furnished flat is now living in a skip. Well, Bozza and fiancée Carrie Symonds are reported to have felt the decor they inherited from Theresa May was “a John Lewis nightmare” - and Gove is still trying to take over from The Bozz.

I don't really care about the flat and its content, except that it is another microcosm of the elitist chumocratic operation of our system.

Look behind you. The callous pantomime continues.

So sad to see the dangerous clown on his new stage. The backdrop, which we all assumed had been made that blue colour so that it could be used for chroma-keying, clearly isn't suitable. And the way the serial blusterer has to sit right on the edge of the raised stage where someone could push him off can't have escaped the eyes of one or two cabinet members.

I can remember when I was part of a local Community Committee and we needed a new stage and some lights, I think we did a better job than this and for less than a couple of thousand quid. But we were a charity and maybe didn't have to pay VAT. If the new room and stage is a metaphor of how things are getting done around here then it is not a particularly comfortable one.

I can't help thinking about a whole string of other situations now, every time I see this pinnacle of our government:

• £200k Flat refurb
• Mystery £58k payment to Downing Street Trust
• 'Let it Rip'
• 'Pile em high'
• £2.6m Briefing room 
• Jennifer Arcuri free access
• Pole dance flat payment
• Hands under the table
• Chumocracys all round
• Fast lane unaccountable procurements
• Use of long grass for enquiries
• Long-term old personal phone use

When Michelle Obama and Samatha Cameron sat in the "Cameron" £30,000 refurbishment of Number 11, it didn't look too bad, but I maybe blustering Boris has wreaked havoc since those days?

And he knows we'll never know what is really going on.

invisible democracy

We've got the elections in a few days. London has that fancy booklet for the Mayoral decision, but most places are bereft of information. My ward is a case in point. We have four candidates. Three of them don't show a face at all on the whocanivotefor.co.uk page. The other one shows a Conservative man who looks convincingly startled that a dark wig has just been dropped onto his head. 

If we drill further, then the only candidate with comprehensive coverage is the Conservative, from whom we also received a leaflet and a shabbily reproduced letter. At least there is a different picture on the leaflet, and probably it was taken in the last decade.

The Labour candidate also has some blurb, and it reads as if he is from around here. The other two don't seem to have anything. No blurb, no links. 

It makes voting in a democracy quite difficult when the information isn't available. I guess we can conclude that:

a) They don't think they will win so why put up the information?

b) They don't have sufficient money to mount a case?

c) They don't have sufficient organisation to mount their case?

My conclusion is that most people will simply vote tribally, and probably be slightly influenced by whose Parliamentary representative is the best at getting thrown out of pubs or concealing sleaze.

Invasive methods and integrity vacuums

So Labour are trotting out the old accusation towards the the government of “fighting each other like rats in a sack”. I don't think it is as good as the Conservative's Dominic Grieve's own one of (roughly) the PM being like a vacuum of integrity. Far more racey.

Meanwhile Boris has apparently chopped new kindling to create a smokescreen around his dodgy doings. Dominic Cummings (for it is he) said the prime minister had behaved in a way he considered “mad and totally unethical”, and warned that he would happily give evidence under oath to an inquiry.

The pantomime leadership continues. Boris tries to hoover up his text messages to Mr Dyson, many of which apparently are from Boris's alternate phone. Normally this would be called a burner, but Boris has kept the same number for more that ten years. His hotties line, perhaps? 

And Boris is doing a Trump and calling out 'the chatty rat' who provided the leaks, except it seems (allegedly) to be one of Carrie (his girlfriend's) chums. If it is Henry Newman, then Boris could be accused of clowning around with the investigation too, although Nr 10 has bothered to issue a statement that Boris has never interfered in a government leak enquiry.

Of course, the lockdown leak was at the centre of what must be an entirely embarrassing situation for BoJo, apparently causing him to authorise the cabinet secretary to use more invasive methods than are usually applied to leak inquiries because of the seriousness of the leak. 

But I remember that Boris doesn't get embarrassed about anything, and seems to weasel his way out of any tight spot, Name of South West Mayor Candidate? Loan for fixing up the No 10 flat? £350 million a week to NHS? Cover-ups, sleaze and corruption. The way ahead.

Electricity

I've been out driving along motorways again. 

First of all, they are 'lightly loaded' with traffic. Secondly, there seem to be many more electric cars around. I noticed this mainly by the number of Tesla cars zooming along the outside lane. In prior years it would have been Audis, or before that Vauxhalls. Each with one company representative in them.

I decided to take a quick peek and can see that Tesla drivers do get some advantages.

All Tesla cars have zero emissions and may be eligible for financial incentives that encourage clean energy use in the UK.

Benefits for All Tesla Drivers:

• Exempt from London Congestion Charge
• Access to clean air zones, including the London Ultra Low Emission Zone
• Up to £28,000 interest-free loan (Scotland only)
• Vehicle Excise Duty

Benefits of Tesla for Business:

• 1% Benefit in Kind (BiK) (compared with the normal 20%-37% BiK)
• 100% First Year Allowance deduction
• No car fuel benefit charge
• Reduced National Insurance contributions
• Eligible for salary sacrifice schemes (like bicycles and gym membership)

I was reminded of driving around in Norway a few years ago, when the Teslas were being trialled there and had massive benefits to their users. It looks as if a company car scheme is yielding similar benefits in the UK now.