The London Underground

District Dave is a tube driver with an extensive web site.

Going Underground has a blog which is great, and much more up-to-date. Annie Mole is responsible for these, you may have seen her on the BBC's tube night (great links here!), in which we saw the caring folk of the Lost Property Office. If you did, you'll be pleased to know that the family who left the ashes of a relative on a train have been tracked down: Underground Urnie found.

Book: Roberts, M.J. (2005). Underground Maps after Beck. Harrow Weald: Capital Transport Publishing.

London Underground Railway Society.

Tubeprune is not updated any more, but has lots of information on the London Underground railway system.

Still here!

My fourth encounter with a terrorist bomb in London was yesterday morning at 08:49.

I wasn't sure whether it was a bomb at first, despite my experience of them. I realize now that the bomb in the tunnel near Aldgate tube station that shook our building was right under us, and the airborne shockwave that came out the station entrance hit our windows at the same time as the bang.

For a while I thought a Metropolitan Line train had hit the buffers. Reports came through of power surges causing explosions or a train collision, then that there had been an explosion.

We had to evacuate. As my company followed its disaster recovery plans and we walked across London, we could see the police invoking their emergency procedures. Roads were quickly taped off and traffic was being directed around affected areas; paramedics were driving along the pavements and other pedestrian areas where the road was clogged with traffic; police commandeered red double-decker busses to carry the walking wounded to various hospitals.

I'm in a DR site the other side of the Thames. I got to stay in a posh hotel last night. By next morning, everyone who works in my company was accounted for.

Click on the photo to see a set of pictures of Aldgate and people nearby, now expanded to include some of the tributes left at the scene.

Update: In September I visited an academic at the LSE who is researching bloggers for his PhD thesis. He asked me what I was trying to convey in this posting. I said I just wanted to show how Londoners are getting on with things and not killing other people in revenge. (However, I posted the above before the death of Jean Charles de Menezes.)

Read all about it

London has a new free newspaper, The London Line (beta) at tube stations on Thursdays. It's jolly good. Some of it reads as if it is made up, especially the real stories. I love it.

Meaning of Life

My To Do List is a thick wad of folded papers, this week in my bag, last week in my jacket pocket. In my mind the tatters are strewn in a line along the remote corridor of an abandoned asylum.

Most of the sheets contain really important things I have to do, like: clear two rooms of clutter, dig a pond, cancel my contact lens supply and even more paperwork like changing mortgage repayments, among interesting links for this weblog. The links' currency is devalued monthly -- but they will soon disgorge into your browser as three large posts I am working on -- and the physical clutter in the two rooms has a depressing effect because I heard from feng shui adherents that that is the effect it is supposed to have, whereas, in fact, fifteen-year-old copies of New Scientist are a joy for many reasons even if I do have thousands of similar items to wade through: to clip some art for Flickr or some future design; to read about the dreams we had before the latest bunch of politicians bollocksed it all up again -- I call this 'perspective'; most importantly just reading outside the narrow agenda of 2005.

But clearing the decks at my level of discrimination and information gathering and organization will take years and is frankly not worth it, even though a clever and balanced John Keogh may emerge who could clear the room at parties. Doing important things like getting the roof fixed or converting the attic (all happening next week!) is worth it and so is learning Dreamweaver even though I prefer to use a text editor, so I can be a webmaster if I grow up because that is what the industry demands. Unfortunately prevarication and procrastination are the order of the day here: did I really need to spend a whole day (last Wednesday) downloading large pictures of obscure 1970s album covers to merge with my music files in anticipation of getting an iPod photo? Well, I enjoyed it!

I've started reading again, unknowingly prompted by my old mate Fresco who has a third book published -- as editor this time -- which made me realize I hadn't finished his last book which was elevating my alarm clock. I really ought to review it now: damn, another item for the list. Oh yes, and I ought to start writing again, I used to be quite good at that.

Anyways, before I knew it I, last month I also polished off a Poul Anderson, a Mat Coward (Hi, Mac Howard!!) and I am now reading a Stephen Laws.

I made three mistakes with the Laws: firstly when I bought it from New Worlds (downstairs at Murder One in the Charing Cross Road) it wasn't as cheap as I thought it would be given that they are closing down the sf department when they move to new premises over the road (yes, another blow to literacy, only the fifty-ninth in my lifetime, but what is Maxim Jakubowski up to? There remain two other shops in London where you can buy new sf hardbacks but I won't tell you where they are in case they get closed down too. Any road up) but I bought it anyway. Secondly, the book wasn't in the 'Used Sale' although you could see that some lunatic had scored the back cover with hundreds of lines by using it as a base for some craft project or perhaps ritual pentagram drawing. (Craft - that'll keep'em off the streets. Nice one, John Lewis. They've got a whole department for that sort of thing, you see.) Yes, a horror novel handed down from some authentic nutter! But when the clerk queried whether the book was used, I said no, solely because I found it in a rack of new books. I'm too honest, me. Mad, more like. Thirdly, I had noticed two Stephen Laws books there and I selected the one called Spectre, even though the other volume looked newer and more collectible, albeit slimmer. Now I am a few chapters in, I find that I did not buy a new work: I have this title at home in a different edition and I read it in 1986. What am I about.

About 12 stone, that's what, the heaviest I have ever been. I'm eating healthy food but too much of it probably, not drinking enough water and not exercising enough. Python's Meaning of Life ended like this. I ought to phone my Mum more too.

Scientist Schtick: Lullaby to a Lab Coat

Hawkwind at the Astoria.

There was a riot on the previous night in the Astoria when Baby Shambles did not turn up and the audience smashed up the venue, so it must have been a bit fraught today for Hawkwind, setting up for tonight's gig. In the end it was a big success and I bet most people would not have known. 

Hawkwind fans are an anarchic bunch of malcontents now spanning three generations and I had no trouble picking them out from the ordinary public in Totty Court tube and along Charing Cross Road, even though very few of the fans dressed as aliens, clones or scientists which we were supposed to for tonight. 

Support groups often have a hard time with the Hawkwind audience so all credit to The Vs, an all-girl band who held the crowd with some solid guitar work, followed by Dumpy's Spacenutz which was him doing an extended solo to a driving backing. Hawkwind did an apocalyptic version of Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear in Smoke) and the usual old favourites like Brainbox Pollution, Spirit of the Age and - speaking of sex - new numbers Angela Android and Loving the Machine interpreted very well by the dancers: he gives her a flower and she responds, confused, with various programmed actions, eventually letting him fix the flower in her hair. Alan Davey presented a treatment of a newly-discovered Calvert tape with live music over Bob intoning his poem Ode to a Time Flower. Someone came on and did a very good reading of Bob's Ten Seconds of Forever. Hammering versions of Brainstorm, Angels of Death... all good stuff. Mini mosh pits opened at intervals. Dave Brock was enjoying himself, mostly playing guitar at the front of the stage and not hidden behind banks of synthesisers like he was in the 90s. Richard Chadwick on drums. Someone else on synthesisers. 35 years on, still great. I hope this gig was recorded! (flyer)