A gross over-generalisation follows

I have the feeling that services on the Underground are better than they used to be. You can get a rough idea just by looking at the service status page. Most of the time the tubes run without delays (although what they mean by delays is not always what you and I understand by this term) and the two lines that I use daily, the Metropolitan and the Bakerloo, rarely let me down. The trains may be crowded and much of the technology is so out of date it hurts (literally, when a Met comes into a station with its brakes squealing like young ladies of a certain impressionable age at a performance given by a popular beat combo) but somehow the system grinds on. I have no faith in its ability to cope with the Olympics or with a heatwave but these aside, there is a confidence that one can go on relying on the Tube to get around London.

This page will be heavily edited if from tonight onward the service deteriorates, and will instead say that I think things are getting worse. Always right, that's me.

Happy New Year

It is April 6th and I wish you all a very happy new year. Tax year, that is. The United Kingdom is still stuck with a medieval calendar that used to finish on March 25, but was adjusted by 11 days when the Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1752. Anyway, it seems a more appropriate time of year to celebrate a new year. The days are lightening and the cold of winter is behind us. Or is it? This was the scene that greeted us this morning.



Still, it is a Sunday so no need to go to work and endure the usual litany of extensive delays caused by snow falling down the back of the signalman's neck, or whatever they come up with these days

The sounds of spring

Commuters on the London Underground are used to the noise of the system, from the rumble and squeal of the trains to the barrage of announcements. How pleasant then to be able to record a different kind of sound, the tweeting and chirruping of the birds in the trees around Ruislip Manor station as they went about their business this morning. The sparrow has all but vanished from many gardens but I think I saw a few today, together with the regular pigeons, magpies, blackbirds and one or two others I cannot identify. The singing was at a high volume, perhaps indicating that the annual competition for nest-space and mates is well under way.

Many trees were cut down when the station was rebuilt a couple of years ago, and others were heavily pruned, forcing both birds and squirrels who had frequented the station borders to move elsewhere. At least some of the birds are back - the squirrels have not yet reappeared.

A hole in the garden

This is a picture of the Acer that used to adorn our back garden. At this time of the year the leaves would be forming as shiny buds at the tips of the branches, ready to burst open all at once on the first warm day. Alas, the tree is no more. We had to take it down to satisfy the requirements of our insurance company, following a subsidence claim.

We have yet to place something to fill the hole - it gives me something to think about during the daily commute

A pleasant surprise

Well what do you know. I've had a rough couple of commuting days and moaned about it in public. Today all was sweetness and (quite apt, given the time of year) light. This morning I had to speed up a trifle to get straight on a London bound Metropolitan (probably several minutes late but I should care?). The Bakerloo was on its usual good form. Arrived at work early. Coming home, straight on a Bakerloo at Waterloo and at Baker Street the raw pleasure of finding that the next three departures were for Uxbridge. I let the first one go as it was crowded and settled comfortably into the second no more than two minutes later.

I also had the esoteric, one might almost say eldritch (and I don't find many opportunities to employ that particular word) experience of listening to an audiobook, Edgar Allan Poe's grisly Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. I love that wholly unnecessary suffix. Did Mr. Poe fear that his readers might confuse his obsessive tale of dirty doings on a whaling ship in 1827 with the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Ruislip*, an obsessive tale of dirtier doings in the rear carriage of a stalled Piccadilly train at West Ruislip Sidings in 2007? Probably not.

*I suppose I had better make it abundantly clear that I am not the author of this tale, nor have any plans so to be. Further, to the best of my knowledge and belief, it does not exist, and has never existed, and for the sanity of the world, it never will.