In the grand old days of British Rail, a single train ticket was at least the same price as a return, often more, which was silly. In fact it was so silly that many people claimed it proved public ownership led to barmy management.

Well the modest lamp pictured here is something of a status symbol. It means I’m sitting in First Class, with the nice people. I’m enjoying free tea, coffee, water and biscuits in a nice wide seat within a three-quarter empty carriage.

It’s a madhouse in Standard! Noisy, cramped and crowded.

So what’s a guy who stays at Wake Up! London doing in First Class? I was looking for the cheapest seats. That’s right. It would’ve cost £20 more to sit with the plebs and I’d have to pay for my coffee.
This posted via mobile via Flickr and so not so closely proofread. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large).

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We’ve got fairly simple requirements for city break accomodation, including London. A double room with it’s own bathroom that’s clean and centrally located. The thing is, London hotels struggle to offer that at a reasonable price without descending into total dives. So you’re often better off going out a couple of tube stops to somewhere like Finsbury Park.

Anyway. Some innovators are finally entering the market. Highest profile is easyHotel which offers a small windowless room with a bed made-up with disposable linen for around £50 a night. Nice. We’d have gone for that, but along came Wake Up! London, an Australian youth hostel. They’re geared up for large groups (something like ten to a room) and long stayers working their way around, but they offer what we’re after too for less than £50 a night. Best of all they’re just behind Paddington Station.

The room was a fair size, clean but slightly battered. We didn’t try the TV (an extra at easyHotel) and they’ve plenty of other facilities we didn’t try like a TV room, laundry, internet access, a bar et cetera. It was a bloody cold weekend, but the place was warm. The only gripes were a blown bulb in the bathroom and young people’s habit of running around late at might shouting et cetera. But hey, they’re on an adventure!

We reported the bulb. They wrote that down. We went out. We came back to find no promised repair.

‘It’s in the book,’ said reception. ‘But it’s not crossed off, so it’s not been done.’

Of course I knew that and now maintenance had gone home and locked the light bulbs away (bizarre, but probably true). So we showered by the shaving light. Never mind. We’ll still be coming back.
AD: Book Wake Up! London here.
This posted via mobile via Flickr and so not so closely proofread. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large). Updated: 23 Novermber 2005.

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While there’s a lot more to Edvard Munch than The Scream (here in lithograth), it remains the work that best explains him. The figure, Munch himself of course, is not screaming, but feeling ‘the scream in nature’. Or so we’re told by Munch. Yet the solution to the artist’s turmoil is found not by changing nature, but himself.

Here at the Royal Academy of Arts we learn that Munch welcomed illness (physical as well as mental) into his life thanks to an idea that’s become a cliche: creativity comes out of suffering. And for much of the work this idea holds. The misogyny of early works is a symptom of his own immaturity and the sexual repression of the age.

Fortunately, Munch does mature before us in this exhibition.
AD: Buy Edvard Munch by Himself, Royal Academy of Arts tickets.
This posted via mobile via Flickr and so not so closely proofread. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large). Updated: 24 November 2005.

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I’m afraid that Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment (stacked white cubes) has left me cold. Not just because it is cold and they obviously remind you of snow, but because they simply don’t seem all that clever. It’s just boxes stacked and glued together (you can see spilt glue, but no gruby fingerprints) which are a bit like sugar cubes (we are at the Tate).

Others are making the most of it. Some pretend they’re in a maze (that would have been fun), some play hide and seek (but that won’t last long) and plenty are simply smiling (which is nice). But I’m still left cold.
This posted via mobile via Flickr and so not so closely proofread. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large). Updated 23 November 2005.

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Nearly missed the train to London following a mad dash through town, only catching it thanks to a five minute delay due to signal problems. We happened to stop in Macclesfied, long a ‘care in the community’ dumping ground, when I went for a coffee. Sure enough a confused soul got on. He can only walk through the train backwards and when asked if he’s okay he sits on the floor. I’ve witnessed this sort of thing on most visits to Macclesfield.

It may be infectious. On return I noticed that everything has something to say — ‘keep it clean,’ ‘fancy a cuppa,’ ‘take me away’ — and Katharine said, ‘and everything has it’s own voice’. Last night I said aloud, ‘what now?’ and my French printer replied in it’s macho American accent, ‘the paper has jammed’. And it had. The things are alive.
This posted via mobile via Flickr and so not so closely proofread. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large).

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It seems that all of a sudden the EU parliament’s view of chemicals policy, REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals), is big news with Google News tracking 656 articles, but add ‘animal testing’ to the search and it comes down to just nine, which is rather odd because the new regulations will result in 30,000 chemicals currently in everyday use being safety tested and those tests will lead to a million additional animal experiments.

There is a consensus that many of the chemicals we all come in contact with may be far more dangerous than we realise and should be tested. But the question is how we go about that. That cost estimates vary between £1.5bn and £8.6bn, shows just how vague all this is. The saving in healthcare costs is put at ‘billions’, but we don’t really know they’ll be any such savings.

The British Green Party had proposed amendments in support of non-animal testing. I’ve nine MEPs and the amendments were already supported by a Liberal Democrat (who also happens to be on the right committee), a Labour member and even a Tory (see if any of yours were good guys), all of whom were on the losing side.

Late last week I took the time to write to all my other MEPs (i.e. those that weren’t already supporting these amendments) asking them to do so. The replies I got were so vague I’m not sure how they voted, if at all. (The UKIP member failed to respond, probably because this isn’t the sort of thing a party with their narrow brief thinks on.) Dan Lyons, director of Uncaged Campaigns emailed me to explain that Den Dover MEP is out of step with other Tories who had tabled amendments that undermined efforts to reduce animal suffering for fear that that might undermine profit (which is, of course, a traditional Conservative position), that Labour is vague, but German socialists have supported the Tories and that the Lib Dems tend to make the right noises, but are generally incoherent.

What’s clear is that most people who have heard of REACH (and that will only be broadsheet newspaper readers) will only have heard about it on the day the parliament voted and that the animal testing implications will not have been explained. Consequently, there has been no meaningful debate (and so no meaningful political party policy development) anywhere. Yet the chemicals REACH is clumsily trying to protect us from may (but then only may) have real health implications for all of us.

What we do know is that the few MEPs – Labour, Tory and Lib Dem – who actively considered non-animal alternatives were supportive of them, but that at least a million animals will suffer as a result of legislation passed a majority of others who gave it very little thought.
Update: REACH & animal testing: I was wrong#4

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Any thoughts that a third series of Little Britain would be pushing things were quickly dispelled this evening thanks to the rapid deployment of a couple of spot on new characters and what may turn out to be a classic Vicky Pollard sketch. And who’ll ever forget the sight of Rob Brydon getting off on Bubbles wrestling Desiree?
(Oh yeah, you can buy Little Britain dolls here.)

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Whenever I travel to London, it feels like going home. I went to a school, now deceased, just behind Euston Station and as soon as I step off the train from Manchester, I revert to London mode. Impatient and rushing around, perhaps unnecessarily, but with a sense of purpose all the same. Once I’m on the tube (and regardless of 7/7) I feel incredibly safe. So adapted am I to that environment, my first over ground train ride was not a happy experience. It was on the tube, but heading to the city’s outskirts when we suddenly popped out of a tunnel into daylight. I thought we were going to fall off the tracks and panicked. Had I not been wrenched out of London in my mid-teens I’d almost certainly have turned into one of those Londoners who can’t see the point of anywhere in Britain that falls outside of the M25 (to be honest, though, most places outside of great cities fail to deliver on the cultural front).

Yet I’ve chosen Manchester and spurred on by a rather light ‘feature’ on the ‘Manchester Media Maze’ that’s obviously the product of a few short phone calls from London, I’ve found myself participating in the them Vs us relationship that the provinces have with the capital. (Bizarrely, Cornerhouse gets more press in Berlin, Paris, Venice and New York, than London.) And I’ve said a Manchester public relations consultant is best.

However, the real reason I’m mentioning that blog entry on this blog is that exactly a year ago I was blogging the death of a once great regional TV industry and today I’m blogging in celebration of it’s promised revival. See how quickly the wheel of fortune turns.
Ad: Hire a public relations consultant & copywriter.

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My chuckle at the Primark fire got an interesting response. An employee comment that it wasn’t funny, followed by an email with pics attached (including this one) from someone compiling a photo album and finally a comment that I’d missed out on the whole Pradamark thing. That last observation stung.

Nobody was hurt and with hindsight it’s the Primark moneymen who are laughing hardest. Insured for the loss and any interruption to business, shares rose on the news as they won’t have to discount the tat should the high street get depressed. And they’ll be lots of new jobs rebuilding the warehouse and replacing the stock.

As for the Pradamark thing, that only works if you really can afford a few designer pieces. If you wear Primark neat or in combination with some other affordable high street name, you can’t make any claim to be with it. The same goes if you buy your clothes from the Oxfam Shop (worthy though that is). The addition of some cheap pieces adds a touch of irony to the designer look and shows you’re passionate about fashion: you just had to have that piece even though it blew your budget and reduced you to filling the gaps in your wardrobe with clothes that are clearly beneath you.

But no, I’m not doing swapsies on the pics.

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‘Suddenly there is poker at your fingertips. Your opponents are strangers: no guilt about winning… or shame in losing’
– Observer Magazine

Online poker is getting an awful lot of press lately. It appears the growth in the internet is driven by private vices: first pornography and now gambling. Perhaps smoking will be next (I’m not sure how that would work, but everyonedoesit.com is already making a pitch).

In some ways it’s not so surprising. After all, as the Observer points out, the thrill of beating your friends in poker can be offset by the guilt of seeing them made poor and the thought they might hate you for it. Online poker overcomes all that guilt, in much the same way that internet porn saves the embarrassment of revealing your kink to a shop assistant. (Hell, I even blush at the thought of approaching the counter with a mid-shelf men’s magazine.)

Internet prospectors have been flocking to poker, but it hasn’t all been plain sailing with the market coming close to another dotcom bust (or is that a busted flush?), but now 888.com Pacific Poker seems to be leading a poker recovery. Fancy fleecing some strangers: why not give 888.com Pacific Poker a go?

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