not so speedy

It was supposed to be a quick hop from Greenwich to Upminster, but the tunnels were blocked.

It all started with some emergency anti-flooding work at the Dartford Tunnel, which caused the traffic to spread back to the Rotherhithe tunnel.

A resultant 3 hours to do 13 miles, including taking various avoidance measures. A terrible mpg statistic. Then, another one and a half hours to finally reach the destination. The route showed 19 miles, although we did finally take the 25 mile route via Dartford, once the tunnel reopened.

wiring in a revenue earner

The red car had a sequence of faults recently. The rear wiper stopped working. Then the tailgate wouldn't open. Now one of the rear lights has conked out.

It's had repairs from the friendly small garage, but it is obvious that the wires to the tailgate have frayed and are failing sequentially.

I can remember visiting car production lines and seeing that wiring was one of the more labour intensive tasks in a largely automated process. Each custom assembled car had a few crates contains relevant wiring harnesses delivered and then threaded by individuals working along the skeleton vehicle.

So now it is time for a dealership repair, although they've (gulp) quoted for a new wiring harness.

We're getting it done although I'm irritated that a new modern car would have this kind of fault, which is apparently quite common across several makes of very well-known cars.

A case of deliberate revenue generation?

buying the last fan in east London

It was like a task from The Apprentice. Find a large electric fan in autumnal London.

At the start, it didn't even seem like a challenge. Local shops. Bound to have one.

Or not.

Then try online. Yes Amazon Prime showed them, but we needed it same day. Even Prime was too slow and we'd have to use a tricky address. Never mind, one of the stores in nearby Canary Wharf was showing that they had them.

We made our way along, although my misgivings that the shop would be filled with mobile phone accessories was accurate. Fan? They had one Dyson for about £400 but none of the ones in their online catalogue. Try Barking, they said.

Woof.

Then a couple more stops in Canary Wharf. All the usual suspects, but its a seasonal thing. I do get it. Fans are large and take up floor space. They impact the retail sales per square foot metric.

I briefly remembered seeing a whole pile of fans somewhere a few weeks ago, but wait. That was in Exeter.

On to our third search area and our last chance. We took the tube to Westfield in Stratford. Surely someone would have a fan?

In Apprentice terms we could have phoned around, but the reality was that listed products were not always immediately available. The fan in Canning Town (in Stock) was actually on a five day delivery.

Then we thought of healthcare. Surely some people would be hot and need cooling down? Hot and weary, we needed that treatment ourselves now.

Into Boots.

And yes. One fan remaining. The last fan in London.

Now it was ours and totally worth it.

At least we had something until we could recover the big one from Newcastle.

tweet boxes : it's a London thing

Tonight, the show is on the road in Doncaster, but then a night move south to that London Town.

First London gig is at Canada Water tomorrow, so I've been quietly looking at the SE16 and related twitter feeds as part of generating some local interest.

Some will recall that rashbre central has also been based on the South Bank, notably at Chelsea Bridge Wharf, so it was almost nostalgic to look at a few of the local activities in the adjacent Southwark.

My favourite new London phenomenon, I decided, was the repurposing of estate agent signs.

It's yet to spread, but after so many months the estate agents are supposed to move the signs but sometimes forget.

The one at the top of this post, a bright yellow number, didn't get moved and has had some minor adaptation to turn it into a nesting box.

I suppose the yellow colour will also act as a speed camera style deterrent, so a double positive from this particular endeavour. Tweet, tweet.

wordless wooooooday

Scary, but not too scary.

on wide time's cusp of now

The new Doctor Who series poses an interesting question around 'returning to now'.

No longer the monochrome 'now' of Hartnell's era. After 37 series spanning 55 (!) years and 13 Doctors, we now have an altogether more anamorphic 4k version of 'now' with early 21st century Whittaker.

I'll also credit the good story telling and proper humour in the new episodes. Personally I prefer a bit of zaniness in this type of show, so the occasional throwaway quip adds to the fun.

Another fairly recently made show also tips that 'now' point. After Doctor Who episodes there have been BBC adverts for an impending series of Luther (played by Idris Elba) as well as suggestions to watch the original box-sets on iPlayer.

I decided to have a go and was intrigued to see that it is operating on that 'now' cusp, teetering into 'I remember'.

It was only filmed in around 2003. but it's long enough ago to mean that people mainly still use phones as - well - phones.

One of the policemen turns up in a big saloon car, which I initially though was some kind of Mercedes. No, it was a Ford Granada, which must have been just about to be discontinued.

There's some of those bendy buses in the London street scenes. Some of the computer screens aren't flat.

The London skyline features the Gherkin, but there's so much space around it. A few cranes maybe. That old building where the Cheesegrater now stands was still at that stalled stage whilst they figured out how to demolish its old vaults.

There's plenty of police procedural too, but with investigators stomping over crime scenes without those all-in-one zipper suits and shoe covers.

I know John Luther is supposed to be edgy, but some of the storyline is closer to old episodes of the Sweeney in terms of coppers' licence. Raid the stolen property cupboard for some items to help another case? Sure, the boss can look the other way, and so on.

It's still fun to rewatch and suits Halloween-week with some gruesome plot-lines as well as that delightfully unhinged Alice character, played brilliantly by Ruth Maddock. Then there's that sumptuous background music. Spot the Massive Attack chord sequences throughout the show.

another county

This time we're in the harbour. Across the county into Cornwall. It's a scene that might be quite well known to that deadpan television doctor, Doc Martin.

We even made our way around to his television house, which overlooks this harbour and is on another one of those steep roads which hardly has room for cars.

Then back towards the middle, where we could watch the seasons change.

One minute sunshine, but soon afterwards a sudden darkening sky, a mighty wind and the waves turned serious enough to be caught on my iPhone.

Then comedy sideways sleet as we looked out across a mixed weather system, sun, rain and small hailstones, punctuated with a piece of rainbow.

a spot of local colour around #Topsham

These pictures are somewhat chocolate-boxy, and are 'spares' from a test run to take pictures for a local project.

It happened to be another very sunny day and mid afternoon the shadows being cast were very long and very dark. I'll visit again when the difference between in and out of shade is more muted.

These pictures are around the waterfront near little winding streets, some of which are too narrow for a modern car.

By the river, many of the boats are back out of the water until the spring and the next scheduled sailing across to the pub on the other side isn't until Easter, although I suspect there will be a few special cruises in the interim.

Outdoor life at some of the pubs is still in full swing although all of the hostelry are gently adjusting for the chillier season ahead.

package roadrunner, baby

I can't help wondering whether this will change next year. A package is on its way to me from Germany. Nothing exciting, but 3.5kg of box with contents. It left the warehouse yesterday afternoon at 15:03CET. Here's the progress so far:

By the end of yesterday it had travelled at faster miles an hour for around 500 km. Slower than Google's estimate (as always), but it had also cleared the German export scanning system.

Then, onto a plane to East Midland Airport, which is the second busiest UK freight airport after Heathrow.

Because of the time difference with Germany, the package arrived in the UK only a few minutes after it left Germany. It was whisked through import scanning and onto a truck resulting in it being close to me by 7 o'clock this morning.

Now it's on a local delivery truck and will end up here before close of play. An example of crossing borders, paying taxes, handling export and import all in a very time efficient manner. Roadrunner, baby.

So will it be the high speed Boston video of that Modern Lovers/Richman single, or saxaphonically this, instead?


Gotta go, a big brown truck has just pulled up outside.

automata, but not for the people

Mrs May has robotically dissed the Peoples' Vote protests and continues to rattle on about completing the withdrawal agreement by the end of March. "All your base are belong to us," as the cats might say.

She computes that we are at 95% complete, which is a phrase well recognised by project managers.

What's the old saying? Oh yes, "The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time available. The last 10% takes the other 90%."

Incredibly, it is already a year since those Maybot characters appeared around Westminster. It's so long that I've read and redistributed that John Crace Maybot book. I've decided it is time to take a look at investment exposure, because of the upsets coming over the next few months.

First some baselining with data from the Office of National Statistics. We'll start with exports and imports to the UK.

First, the UK imports around £580 billion of goods and services, of which about 54% comes from the EU, 41% from the Rest of the World and 4% from EFTA.

Understandably, trade between countries is driven by physical distance and size. The size of a partner economy matters, which is why we trade more with the US and China than smaller, closer economies.

Let's drill into the ONS numbers. Here's the EU imports to UK:

And here's the Rest of the World imports to UK:

Putting all the £4.5bn and above results into a pie chart, we can see the top 10 countries account for around 75% of the total.

Approximate top of the pops are Germany, USA, Netherlands, China, France, Spain, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, Poland, Japan.

Students of automata might venture that: "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's probably a duck."

Whether Mrs May has been programmed for Vaucanson could be a moot point? Selective reality could be a variant of virtual reality. Her cohort certainly know how to practice reality distortion, without even needing special screwdrivers.

Maybe the other trading direction is different? According to the ONS Pink book 2017, UK exports are around £548bn:

That's Rest of World 52% : EU 43%: EFTA 5%.

Notice the switch in the numbers, with Rest of World showing as a greater proportion?

UK already sells more by percentage to the Rest of World than to the EU, emphasised by UK's trade with the USA.

Skipping to the exports by country pie chart, it is something like this:

This time the top influences are USA, Germany, France, Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Residual Gulf states, China, Belgium, Spain, Japan, Sweden. My chart below illustrates:

We know that the USA wants to do a trade deal with the UK after Brexit. Another truism: "If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is too good to be true." I think robots have to be taught these things.

UK needs to be careful not to get a trumped-up deal from the USA, which could notice that UK exports 50% more to the USA than it imports. As for the other top few countries, several of them are EU-based. Germany, France, Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Sweden.

But current Brexit talks are about withdrawal, not about the new deals which will need to be struck and which, by Eurocrat definition, cannot be better than the deals UK currently has with the countries involved. Computer says no, as Dominic Raab might say.

It means that the plan that's 95% complete is only really for the first bit.

Yikes.

A fast idiot computer might react that the nice thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. But wait, the computer can neither worry nor be depressed.

My look at the numbers is to attempt to fathom the next market effects. Some will probably be right at the last moment just like they were after the referendum result.

On of the prior effects was the sudden dip in the GBP compared with other currencies, such as the US dollar values.

It settled at a 12.5% drop in the value of the GBP vs USD and Euro (i.e. pricing Brexit into exchange rates)

It's like a £64bn question. That's about the amount that the foreign exchange variation represents on a year's exports. Way more than a year's EU contribution from the UK. Of course, this change has worked through the economy now although, at least until recently, the stock markets have continued to move upward.

Today, the FTSE 100 is back into the 69xxs. Maybe it's also the loose talk of the conflicting end of austerity and new ways to raise tax.

I can understand that, for Brexit, investing in the FTSE 250 isn't such a bright idea because the companies in it are largely serving the British marketplace, with maximum exposure and potential for volatility. There's a rub in that too, with lower investment creating a self fulfilling prophesy of decline. It does not compute, as an automat may say.

The FTSE100, on the other hand, has the bigger more international companies within it. They should tough out a UK specific issue. But as even the FTSE 100 is now dropping it would seem to signal a wider malaise. The markets are usually separate from the politics, but the 95% project has become such a basket case that it is almost impossible for the markets to ignore the erratic behaviour.

Another one to teach the computer: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

These numbers are also where there's plenty of upscale vested interest. Onshore/offshore? Plenty of the big equity bets have already been placed. The Etonian moneyed won't want normal folks voices outside Westminster to interfere with their shed loads of money making schemes.

** Computer - find me a recent picture of a man with a shed **

don't shred

With today's protest, it is good to look out for the best slogans.

I thought Jacob's Crackers was quite good, but now the Banksy-inspired "Don't shred the UK" has become my favourite. It fits with my last few posts quite nicely too.

The government and cabinet have presumably been asked to stay quiet/ignore the protests until it is all over and then to issue some revisionary spin.

Yes. The whole situation is crackers.

fishing in the rivers of life

My last post includes a picture ostensibly of Banksy's maid, although I'm pretty sure the picture was taken in Shoreditch rather than Chalk Farm. Here's the Chalk Farm version, which does look different.

Now it could be that I did see one in Shoreditch, perhaps a copy, like the nearby cheeky Mona Lisa that lurked in the arches by the old Canvas club?

Perhaps the picture didn't last long, like Banksy's girl with balloon picture auctioned and shredded at Sotheby's for somewhere around £1m.

Was the triggered destruction a case of art in the making? Or maybe a KLF bonfire of the vanities moment? Time and valuations will tell. Art as a streamlined way to store unexplained money becomes an interesting element for a novel, perhaps?

But I suppose I could have used a different Banksy illustration for my prior post. The house with stars on it, that will soon have one less.

Although I can't help notice a cartoony skull shape emerging in the chipped away star?

And here's the director's cut (geddit) of that Sotheby's auction.