Bike shed

Bike shed, originally uploaded by Obi Wan Yacobi.

This bike was in my Mum's bike shed. Is it mine? I can't remember.

From the beginning of August, and for the first time since 1996, I will be doing nine to five work. And frankly the prospect is scarier than a trip on the underground.

But logically it's a mixed blessing. I relish the return of that Friday feeling - my weekends will be fulfilling once more. I dread the daily commute through London's rush hour. No longer can I point to people sardining themselves into train carriages and say "suckers!" as my arms will be too squashed against my sides to be able to perform such an action. However I am pleased that the odd life-reducing night shift will be behind me.

Red eyes begone...



Where am I going? I'm going to be scheduling all the bits in between the programmes during BBC1's daytime schedule.

Yes I know. I'm sorry. Yes promotions are necessary - programmes cannot be magically created to fit the exact necessary durations required you fools.

Meanwhile in the land of South London I have discovered that this side of the river appears to have virtually no large music or book shops. And the small ones are a bit shit.

What sort of people live here?

I Am Fucking Terrified.com

Guitar solo

Guitar solo, originally uploaded by Blogmeister.

Ah, thought I'd try the 'Blog This' option from my flickr site.

Which worked quite nicely thankyouverymuch.

That piccie is from a thank you gig put on my my friend Dan (whom you see here) and his band The Feeling after they finally accepted one of the very many offers of a record contract - and it was Island Records who proffered the deal. And now Dan has large amounts of money. And there's still the publishing deal to come...

My friend James - desperate to reflect the glory - is currently working on the website. Well actually so am I; I've been eagerly taking pictures hence the one you see above. My photo site has similar fare for you to peruse and more.

Fox "News" has always disgusted me. No news channel pushing an agenda of any political leaning is to be respected. Murdoch's media outlets are particularly nauseous as they are especially self-serving and poisonous.

These are some of the "highlights". I defy any Londoner - or for that matter any normal human being - to view this and not feel disgusted.

The Nation reports on Fox's coverage.

read this brief comparison of US and British reporting of the event.

And I will now point you to the best comment by a Londoner following last week's bombs: A Letter To The Terrorists. Good mtf point...

What the fuck do you think you're doing?

This is London. We've dealt with your sort before. You don't try and pull this on us.

Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you're trying to do, it's not going to work.

All you've done is end some of our lives, and ruin some more. How is that going to help you? You don't get rewarded for this kind of crap.

And if, as your MO indicates, you're an al-Qaida group, then you're out of your tiny minds.

Because if this is a message to Tony Blair, we've got news for you. We don't much like our government ourselves, or what they do in our name. But, listen very clearly. We'll deal with that ourselves. We're London, and we've got our own way of doing things, and it doesn't involve tossing bombs around where innocent people are going about their lives.

And that's because we're better than you. Everyone is better than you. Our city works. We rather like it. And we're going to go about our lives. We're going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we're going to work. And we're going down the pub.

So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your arseholes, and get the fuck out of our city.

Five things changed London last week. The first was the awarding of the Olympic Games in 2012, the other four were the explosions that have affected almost every Londoner.

Now I'm not going to sprout off about not being changed by terrorism and all that guff. I was back on the underground at 7am the next morning and didn't give a second thought to being blown up because, unlike muscle-bound machismo actors like Sylvester Stallone who refused to fly across the Atlantic after the World Trade Center attacks, I have an ability to assess simple risks and their likelihood of occurring to me. Which fortunately isn't much.

Having said all that, the section of the Piccadilly Line where the most horrific of the attacks took place is one which I used to pass through daily for many years and most of my friends still do. And it's a mightily tight fit for the train. The tunnel is a pathetic twelve inches wider than the trains that pass through it. So the explosion was particularly deadly and the attempt to clear up particularly challenging.



But we'll go on because we always do. On my times on the Underground since Thursday - and I have taken several trips - I have seen no sign of nervousness or hesitancy. Funnily enough I saw more of a change in people's behaviour after 9/11 than I have after Thursday. We are used to bombings here and everyone considered this to have been an inevitability. And some feel here that now we've been bombed, we are over the uncertainty of "how will it come?", "how big will it be?". This thinking is wrong. The Madrid bombers intended the train bomb to be the start of a campaign against Spanish targets - that was until they blew themselves up once cornered by the police.

To our credit I have felt no negativity on the streets towards Muslims or Asians; we are a multi cultural city and, wonderfully, people's reaction to Thursday seems to be to embrace that rather than shun it.

And now we prepare for the Olympic Games. Perhaps it will always be associated (in Londoners minds at least) with last week's bombings. Our response should be a determination to put on the best games possible for all the countries of the world.