Why, oh why...(no 7 in this surely-it-can't-still-be-running series?)

...do Microsoft (yes them again) think I have the intelligence of a one year old? I have deleted all the messages in my Hotmail account and emptied the Junk folder. "Wow, you have a very clean inbox" says the new pop-up message at the top of the screen. Yes. Yes, I do. Yes, I have a clean inbox. Because I checked each message and clicked on Delete.  It's nothing to "wow" about. It's something I, as the owner of this mailbox, did.

And at the top of my junk folder it says "You don't have junk here (hooray!)".  I kid you not. It actually has the word "hooray" with an exclamation mark perched coyly inside a pair of complementary brackets, entirely free of charge.  Yes, I know there isn't any junk mail. I deleted it all not five seconds hitherto.

If only this worked in reverse and every time I loaded (say) Excel a smug self-congratulatory email popped up on the desktop of the Head of Customer Websites in Redmond which she/he had to read whether he/she wished to or not. It could go something like this:

"Hey!!  (two exclamation marks, it's that important)
We got one of our Office products to open on a customer's PC. Aren't we the best?
Yup, working hard to make products do what they are supposed to to but sometimes don't and you know we feel real bad when that happens, it hurts us here, you know that? We feel the pain. But not today. Today a copy of Excel opened correctly. Hooray!!! (three? yeah, why not, let's push the boat out, they're worth it).

A few million of those and maybe they might design their websites for adults. 

Boris in prospect

Shock-haired Conservative politician and Latin-quoter Boris Johnson (currently employed as Mayor of London) has announced his intention to return to Parliament as an MP at the 2015 General Election. Commentators assume he then intends to position himself as the next leader of the party and will bide his time before knifing D. Cameron in the back in the traditional way.

This cunning plan to spend more time with the Queen requires his selection as candidate for a suitable seat. This in turn needs a seat with an upcoming vacancy. What could be better than the very seat in which your correspondent has the honour to reside, namely Uxbridge and South Ruislip? Safe Tory, lots of golf courses and easy access via the M40 to Oxford and beyond where the current generation of politicos and obscenely wealthy supporters like to live. Sir John Randall, the incumbent, is to stand down. Boris looks likely to be a shoe-in. [I believe the expression employed here is better stated as "shoo-in": Ed]

Representing this area would present a few interesting challenges. Round here we quite like Heathrow Airport, where loads of residents work and we are very unhappy at having HS2 bulldozed through our town and across many beautiful miles of Bucks. Mr Johnson, I believe, does not approve of Heathrow and rather likes HS2. Perhaps he can remind us what Cicero said, when asked to approve the Appian Way extension scheme.

But now a heavier shadow has cast its, er, shadow. A man who is paid to put records on a gramophone and woffle meaninglessly about them by the BBC (and who I will not name because I don't like him and see no reason to give him an iota of publicity), has opined that nobody knows where Uxbridge is.  I can well understand that the aforesaid tosser doesn't know. But anyone familiar with the London Underground surely will, because Uxbridge is one of the termini on the Metropolitan Railway. It was at Uxbridge that crucial negotiations for peace during the English Civil War were attempted.  Here in Uxbridge you can shop at a real old-fashioned department store, Randalls, owned by the very man whose departure from parliamentary service has sparked this whole debate [What debate? Ed]. And anyway, what about South Ruislip, the other half of the partnership? Geographically I actually live in North Ruislip but the vagiaries of the Boundary Commission led to my ward being squeezed south of the border, so to speak. And therefore I can speak for South Ruislip. And that surely is enough to put it securely onto the political map.

Sorry, Mr. Beckham, What is it again?

I was surprised when, on opening this morning's paper, (one of the broadsheets), pages 2 and 3 were entirely taken up with a colour advertisement for...well, I don't know what it is, actually. A bottle of something on one page and a full head/body shot of Mr. D Beckham on the other. [Didn't he used to be a footballer, or something?: Ed]. I was bemused to find the same Mr.B and his little bottle together in another full page ad on the back page.

The ad doesn't say what the little bottle contains but the strapline identifies our hero is no uncertain terms. He stares in a menacing way as if defying you to mock his scruffy, unshaven look [Very fashionable, I believe: Ed]. I suppose it is a perfume (or parfum pour homme) or some such.  I struggle with the image because the same bloke is on TV all the time smiling gormlessly and fronting a ludicrous ad on behalf of Sky which features a computer generated audience apparently cheering every time the world's greatest expert on digital communications points his little stick [er, is this a euphemism? Let's keep it clean, eh: Ed].

So which is the real Beckham? Moronic grinner or sickly-smelling hard man? And which of these two products am I going to rush to buy? Would you believe, neither of them? I thought you would. [I can't afford Sky anyway: Ed]

Return of the floods

It's been a terrific summer, at least for the last month or so. Temperatures up in the high 20s for day after day. Last week Mrs. Commuter and I were touring round the wonderful scenery of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire, visiting ancient manor houses and well-preserved medieval towns. We came back to a sun-drenched London. But it all changed this morning.

The weather forecasts had been hinting at rain for today but it was always going to be "light showers". Well, what we got this morning was another deluge reminiscent of the scenes at the start of this year and all the lower lying regions of beautiful Ruislip flooded. How much rain exactly? The Evening Standard reported 42mm in Northolt (a mile south), whilst a local website based in Pinner ( a mile east) only reported 4mm. So it was amazingly localised. I therefore estimate that about 25mm (or an inch, in old money) fell around here, in an hour. There are some amazing pictures on the local online newspaper and the BBC. This one says it all - that water-filled gully, looking uncannily like the storm drains in Los Angeles - is the six lane highway we call the A40 - the main road between London and Oxford - and the same route that we took a few days ago on our little westward jaunt.

And whilst the roads were in chaos (our cleaner drove in as usual from Hayes, a 20 minute journey, that took her 2 hours today) it was worse for rail commuters. The Met is in any case running special services for the next couple of weeks, with nothing between Ruislip and Uxbridge while they do maintenance but the section around Eastcote had water above the level of the rails so there was no train service at all in our part of the world during the rush hour commute. Trains are now running, fortunately for Mrs. Commuter who needs to get into inner London later.

As I write the clouds are gathering again and there are some ominous cumulo-nimbuses lining up overhead. Now where did I put my trusty old raincoat...

Summer Lightning

The English summer has arrived with a heatwave, the traditional English batting collapses in Test Matches and a furious thunderstorm that woke up Mrs. Commuter and myself at 2:00 am. Although a centimetre of rain fell (lit by intense electrical discharges that made our darkened bedroom resemble a photographer's studio) today has been hotter still and will probably be the warmest of the year. Once upon a time it would have been my melancholy lot to spend all day in a hot airless office, at the end of the day to trudge up the baking canyons of the London office blocks to a station and wonder if my stifling and sweaty train would arrive on schedule and, when it finally did arrive, whether it would make it all the way or be diverted (due to an "incident" twenty miles away).  But not any more. Today your correspondent was sprawled out at home watching the Tour de France (and reading e-books during the interminable ad breaks). So I am unable to report what it was like at the front line of commuting today. I could easily invent a few lurid details, I suppose, but you only have to browse through some of the back issues of this column and you could do just as well by yourselves.


Written a little later from the above, at 18:30.
You really couldn't make it up.  Here is the TFL service status for right now.

Yup.  On the very route on which I used to travel each day (until that great day in 2006 when my office moved to Waterloo) there is currently no service. Just think, I would have left my office say at 18:10, reached Barons Court and found a seat, with luck, on an Rayners Lane bound service at, say, 18:25 and just after we pulled out of Hammersmith (last chance to switch to another line) our train would have been diverted to Northfields. And there I would be, sweltering and abandoned at Acton and not knowing whether to go back into Central London or hang around on the platform. Happy days, what?