LONDON Life

It’s going mad out there. No-one knows the rules of the road or no-one cares at least. Speed limits are utterly flouted, everyone jumps lights unless there are cameras, sometime even then. Right turns - pass to the rear of the car on the other opposite side of the road- forget it! Why do that? It would make everything a bit easier and safer and quicker. Parking? Why park, it just gets you hooted at for inconveniencing the poor drivers who may have to wait or worse pull out to pass you and prevent you from parking whilst they force their way by. There are so many Ubers on the road that you cannot ever escape them and the appalling standard of driving they exhibit. Stopping in front of you to let a passenger out without pulling over, coming out of side streets and turning the wrong way down a one way road and then getting angry when told by a taxi driver.

Since I last wrote anything the world has bone completely mad. AL Qaeda has morphed into ISIS or ISIL, thousands of refugees stream into Europe every day and are herded into cold damp miserable camps, a referendum to leave the EU is actually taking place, a completely bombastic self satisfied, smug, bigoted nutter is the front runner for RepublicAn presidential candidate and the traffic in London is mad. There are no visible police on our streets and unless there is a camera visible the rules of the road, and the law, have gone walkabout. We have witch hunts about rich tax avoiders in the media and Parliament and I have had to listen to more uninformed claptrap about tax in the last three months than I have had to for many many years. Ad hominem attacks have replaced informed debate. The Leave campaigns have produced no coherent arguments in favour of leaving The EU but no-ne seems especially concerned about that. ir reminds me of the campaign for Scottish Independence. Use the pound as currency following independence? HM Treasury says no. SNP says they're wrong we can use it. REjoin EU at once? EU leaders say no, you will have to reapply in usual way which could take 12 years, SNP says you are wrong we can rejoin at once. And so on and so on... Like I say the world has gone completely mad.

2014 and J S Bach

I have been rather slow to follow up my last post! So many things to write about that a state of fugue set in and nothing actually emerged in print. I am trying to catch up on myself now.I am currently writing this listening to the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle performing Bach's St John's Passion, a wonderful piece which I love to bits. The amazing thing is not that I am listening to it but that I am also watching the performance on my iPad through the Berlin Philharmonic's digital concert hall. The subscription to this amazing app was my birthday present from Rebecca and Henry. The performance is brilliant both musically and visually. The choir start off lying on their backs on the ground and gradually rise to seated and then to standing. You have to see it to appreciate the effect this has. It's surprisingly gripping. It's actually semi staged but is far more powerful to watch than those words suggest. The photography is in full HD, beautifully lit, filmed and edited. It is really quite distracting from my work but I can't really get too worried about as the improvement in my mood brought about by the beautiful Bach far outweighs the distraction! If only I didn't have to work.....

2012 has come and gone

What more can I add? I meant to post more and failed.Doing better wasn't even one of my new year resolutions. Maybe it should have been. Why start again now though? Well, it's a grim, wet and grey day out there so I decided to edit my blog and make the layout a little fresher. That turned out to be relatively easy. Writing something interesting is perhaps a little harder. SO, that follows over the weekend.

Catching up

Well, my excuse is a second knee operation and lots of physio. Two operations like that in a year makes for poor blogging. I am going to try to rectify that from now on. So much has happened that makes me incensed that I have to put fingers to keys somewhere and grumble about it all.

Where to start? Suggestions on a postcard please...

Kicking Horse Canada

Well it's nearly 4000 feet up. The roads are interesting, up hill and down Dale(well mountain) and there is still snow on the verges and fast moving meltwater in the streams. It's 20c outside but the breeze has a sharply cold edge to it and in the shade the temperature drops 15c instantly. Wildlife on the roads round here includes 2 young black bears grazing oblivious to the cars roaring by and to the row of cameras held by mesmerised photographers scarcely able to believe their luck. It's amazingly quiet everywhere. Parked cars are all unlocked and bikers roar up on their Harleys, take off their helmets and leathers, leave them perched on their bikes and, revealed as normal late middle aged couples, walk to the supermarket. I suspect they are buying gin and tonic....

More of the same

Well, the accident in Japan has been upgraded to a 7, the same as Chernobyl. More and more people are being moved away from their homes but despite the 7, all we hear is a comforting gush of PR saying that things are under control and its just a matter of time. Time before what?

Well, I suspect most mean before it falls out of the journalistic target zone for good stories and becomes a once in a while "whatever happened to..." update. After that I suspect the nuclear brigade are hoping that we will all forget that the most basic rule of big engineering has been broken once again.

What do I mean? Well, in the Challenger disaster, the Columbia disaster, Texas CIty, Macondo and now Fukushima, the engineers were not quite as confident as management, didn't want to jeopardise their positions or weren't consulted and the unthinkable happened.

Key ingredients:

No assessment of the impact of very high impact, very low probability events

No Plan B

A corporate culture lacking focus on process safety

Poor management information and weak reporting structures

Unnecessary corporate complexity

Arrogant management used to getting their own way or politically influenced decision makers

Who next?

How fast things change.

Just a week ago the word Tsunami was linked in the public mind with the Boxing day disaster. Now it is far more likely to be remembered as the word that led to a wholesale rethink of energy policy. Yet another unplanned for high impact ultra low probability occurrence has done just that, occurred. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Macondo, and Fukushima. It seems that we don't want to learn. It's hard to have a plan B for a 9.0 magnitude earthquake offshore and a massive tsunami wiping out reactor backup systems, so we didn't. So, 3 reactors are probably melting, one is hot and all three will never work again.

By the way the Chinese are still going to build their planned 155 reactors....

New computer, new post

After 5 years of use my old macbook pro has finally reached the point of no return on a cost benefit basis as its screen has gone walkabout again.

So, greetings to the new macbook pro. 17" screen again and not all pretty and shiny but matt and ready to go for photo editing after only a smidgeon of colour correction. After the 17" screen and the similar size, almost everything else is different. Quad core processor, heaps of ram, and a video processor that once would have graced a laptop as the main processor and been feted in the nerdy magazines, probably not that many years ago. But, the piece de resistance is the the thunderbolt port. mega-times faster than USB 2.0 and multiple times faster than firewire 800.Finally, HD video editing may be a real time activity rather than a ho-hum I wonder how long it will take to render that - shall I have supper, a drink, a bath, go to bed and have breakfast the next day before checking or is that premature?

I just love techno toys....

Longish gap

Well, despite best resolutions I have slipped. It's now Op+29 I think. Claire the physio has been doing her polite soft spoken and minimal movement maximum pain muscle stretching and knee straightening for over two weeks now. I keep telling myself it's worthwhile and I know it is but when the muscles ache it's tempting to say "oh sod it...". Walking is better and the knee is bending again now the swelling is going down.

It's oddly frustrating now being housebound still for long periods of time, impatience is getting the better of me now...

Day 3

Well, it is actually Day three. I have had quite an interesting couple of days. The recording program is having some difficulty with my speech at the moment as I have had an almost tiny stroke. I have got a slight difficulty with my speech which won't get to go away for a couple more weeks. We have made some progress with the hospital food, and we've talked to the catering manager and the dietician and they are supplying just about okay omelettes.

I do have to have some more investigations next week. I have learnt just how claustrophobic and MR I scanner can be as I had to spend that they had to spend quite a lot of time inside one the day before yesterday.

I have made progress with my walking which is very positive. I have also found that the hospital TV system is a proponent of Chinese water torture, as it allows you to watch quite good films only in part, and then it generally fails to allow you to finish them! It also has no useful fast forward button when you try to restart the film.

New knee day one

Well new knee Day one. About one hours sleep overnight. I guess that was predictable given the pain level, the difficulty of finding anywhere comfortable to position myself and the fact that even small movements still hurt!

I have decided to use this blog for the time being to record how things are progressing rather than send out loads of e-mails. I will get Jean to send a link to those who may be interested. I have just had my dressing changed for the first time, for those are squeamish, you can't look at these things because there was still a lot of blood.

Another interesting thing is how difficult it was to relieve myself after the operation. I think I spent half the night stressing about that, certainly nothing happens until 4 AM! That despite 3 saline drip bags. I am also becoming addicted to pressing the pain relief button on the machine that gives me regular infusions of the magic pain relief.

The food last night was classic rubber chicken in dry over spiced tomato sauce and instant long grain rice. Not surprisingly, I didn't manage to eat very much of it.

They have now got an ice pack on my knee which, surprisingly, I can't actually feel at the moment. I'm not quite sure what that mean as the intentin is, I think, to reduce the swelling.

Later this morning the physiotherapist is going to come to make me get up and start moving around. Although I'm sure it's necessary, I have to say I'm not especially looking forward to it.

More anon.

New knee tomorrow

Strangely enough, I am quite looking forward to going into hospital tomorrow. At least, when I get out in a week or two, I should have a new and hopefully working right knee. With a bit of luck it will also be substantially pain-free.

I don't quite think I shall ever be able to gambol around like a spring lamb but maybe spring mutton would do.

There are all sorts of strange things happening in the world at the moment. Most of them are man-made or human induced in some form but the floods in Queensland seem to be of the order of those that made Noah famous. It is hard to imagine so much rain falling in so short a period of time that an area the size of a large part of Europe is under many metres of water. My worst nightmare consists of having to wade through large large areas of water containing snakes. People in Queensland are being warned about snakes in the water. If i was there, I think even if the water around my house was only a few inches deep I would probably not risk putting my toes into it. I know that that is almost the least of most people's problems in the flood areas but I would find it very hard personally to focus on anything else.

I am following with some interest how Sarah Palin will deal with the massive Morton's Fork on which she finds herself impaled. The dilemma runs as follows, Sarah together with her followers are supporters, vocal and active, of the right of all American citizens to carry firearms, but following the recent shooting of a Congresswoman and a number of people around her by a gunman, it will be very hard for her to continue to argue her position. On the other hand much of her credibility seems to have depended on her credentials as a wielder of significant near military firepower - it is hard to describe some of the pieces with which she has been photographed shooting wildlife as mere guns!

More anon...

Happy 2011

This year I am more determined to make regular posts, even if there is no one actually reading them at the moment. Since my last post a lot has happened and Gordon Brown has finally departed, quite unlamented. We now have a coalition government, which on the face of it seems to be somewhat more stable publicly than the last New Labour government.

I do not have many airport stories at the moment, my knees making it very difficult actually to fly without major problems. I am quite glad of this given the mess Heathrow airport was in during the snow at the end of last year. It just shows that allowing acquisitions of capital hungry companies by highly geared entities which will require all of the cash generated by the target to pay off the debt is not a good idea.

BP has also had a very poor year, the Macondo well disaster being the culmination of a fairly predictable series of corporate behaviours. Although the deaths were clearly quite tragic, I have to say I am interested in the outputs of the various enquiries - these should make a major contribution to the learnings on process safety, in particular the management of very low probability, high impact disasters.

More soon.

My,how time passes

Well, I'm back. I've won the battle with Google over my password, which changed at random, without help from me and I couldn't remember where I had told them to send helpful information such as how to reset it when you can't access the account. Furthermore, they wouldn't tell me. So, I could access gmail on my iphone which remembers the password and which miraculously had it right, but not any other way. I still don't know how that happened. In the end they told mw what to do to reset the password. I've done that and hey presto......

So, no more Gordon Brown

The GB of TB/GB is gone. Well overdue. It's funny how some people fancy themselves as great leaders and don't know that they are actually great number 2s. GB was one of those. They almost never make good leaders. There's a book in that somewhere.....

How much happens in a few months

They say a week is a long time in politics. So it is, but the months since I last posted here have been a near lifetime of changes. We have all got used to the fact that Gordon Brown won't go away of his own accord, almost used to the fact that he is the Western leader with the least legitimate mandate, clinging to power by his fingernails and the inability of the opposition to land a knock out blow.

What a horrible country he and Tony Blair have created. And yes, they have been in power for long enough to be held accountable for what is happening as a result of their policies. Economic disaster, a health service which is a disgrace to the remaining loyal people who work within it - GPs work 9 to 5 Monday to Friday and then whole counties "are looked after" from 5 pm to 9 am by one or two (yes one or two) overworked locums who have no idea about the medical histories of their patients.

One new criminal offence a day since Blair won the first time. 25% of the world's CCTV cameras. Corrupt politicians. Unions resurgent, penal taxes, more in the offing. Spin, spin and more spin. Even the Prime Minister seems to be unable to get his facts right. Two apparently unpopular and unwinnable wars killing our soldiers with tragic regularity, at least one of them having been started illegally.

The education system is now being given overall more resources, ie, cut. It's bad enough already but overall literacy and numeracy levels are bound to fall yet more.

Why then can our loyal opposition not land anything like a conclusive uppercut to this bunch of pious hypocrites and clingers to power? I don't really know but their failure makes me wonder if they are any better.....

Tomorrow back to food, a much nicer subject.

This week in London

Well, it's raining. Drizzle and wind and grey skies. It brings out the worst in the variegated road users and brings a whole new breed of suicidally inclined drivers onto the roads who are only there to avoid the rain.

Behaviour on our great, largely unpoliced highways and byways through London continues to worsen. "The rules don't apply to me I'm a cyclist" infection has spread to scooter riders, motor cyclists and battery car drivers. The rules are of course the Highway Code and the Road Traffic Acts. A modest confection of homilies and laws.

What does the "Look at me I'm a cyclist" infection do to its victims? |Well, they think that they are immortal and unchallengeable by anyone. A red light is an invitation not to slow down, let alone stop. A one-way street is an invitation to ride up the middle the wrong way, a roundabout where one should go round to the left is an invitation to go round to the right. Pavements are convenient shortcuts. Pedestrians need to get out of the way as they are impeding the brave cyclists at work. Do not venture onto a pedestrian crossing if you are nervous - near misses by cyclists abound. Hooting at a cyclist even if he or she is about to become a whole lot thinner involuntarily and messily, inevitably leads to a tirade of abuse, violent gesticulations, various obscene gestures and, increasingly, hammering of fists on the car's bonnet.

What is this all about? I have to confess I am not entirely sure. I know cyclists are vulnerable but they do seem more and more to go out of their way to get themselves seriously injured or killed and I don't really think you can blame the poor motorist for that kind of behaviour.

Even more worryingly, why should one section of society be above the law? That's maybe why so many more road users are trying to find the limits. With the police obsessed with the so-called fight against terrorism, an activity which results in most of them being missing from our roads most of the time, I come back to where I began. No-one polices the highway any longer. Observing the law is optional. It just goes to show that without effective policing, things do deteriorate towards a lowest common denominator.

Back from Turkey

It's not all that easy coming back from three weeks on a boat. I am shocked by how unstable London has become, seemingly waving around in all directions and bouncing up and down. Dealing with traffic after three weeks where everything happens in relative slow motion has been unpleasant. Dealing with the surly attitude of everyone I don't know brings home how friendly, gentle and helpful the Southern Turks really are.

Laundry left at a Marina laundry service by accident (we sailed off without collecting it) was recovered for us by the wife of one of the little restauranters whose place we like to eat at without fuss and accompanied by a refusal to accept any form of payment except reimbursement of the costs of the laundry service. The charterers engineer drove 4 hours each way to where the boat was to sort an oil leak without complaint and without fuss about half an hour after we called to say there was a problem. Beat that in the UK. I don't think so really.....

And the food, oh, the food. That's for another post.

Next stop Cowes IOW

No more planes this week. From the sublime (Istanbul, Port Camargue, Estoi in Portugal) to the maybe slightly less so, firmly set in the 1950s and clinging resolutely onto those halcyon years of architecture, design and cuisine. The architecture is unremittingly Bungalow and buildings that exhibit an unfulfilled yearning to be Nissan huts but somehow sadly lost out when the planning genes were randomly distributed.

We are off to Cowes for Cowes week. Being based in East Cowes, you soon learn the vagaries of the timings of the chain ferry from East to West Cowes, of the effect of the tides and whether you may just as well give in and drive all the way round via Newport. Yup, no tunnel, no bridge. One ferry, very old, inclined to get cranky.

Fish and chips is haute cuisine here. You see lots of holiday makers in great locations like Ryde beach eating chips for lunch with eggs and sausages and chips for their evening meal with fish and mushy peas and the odd saveloy.

Ah yes, the saveloy: "A saveloy is a type of highly seasoned pork sausage, usually bright red in colour, which is served in English fish and chip shops,"^[1] sometimes fried in batter. The word comes from the French cervelas, a pork sausage, at one time sometimes made from pigs' brains" (Wikipedia).

By contrast, in West Cowes in the early morning the twenty somethings who are crew on the bigger racing boats all fall into the high street sandwich shops to buy expresso and hot bacon baguettes and nurofen for the hangover they worked on for most of the evening and night in the beer tent. Then in their colour-coordinated and logo bearing outfits they fall into the hot showers and onto the boat to head out to the Black group start, praying there is enough wind - no, not for the racing but to blow the cobwebs of the hangover away and get them thirsty again.

More California

It's been a while since I last posted. Too taken up with the joy of finding some fresh air (almost anywhere in the UK, after LA) and the delightful schadenfreude of the MPs' expenses saga. To say nothing of cheese free food.

I'm off again on Sunday. Better prepared for the psychological onslaught. Better equipped with local knowledge, who does cheese, where you can avoid it. Familiar if complex freeway routes (pronounced routs as in row and rowt not root), knowledge that LAX is still a building site.

Wondering if any of the State's recently issued IOU's will be floating around, thrown away in despair by those who would prefer hard cash from the world's 5th largest economy (that's California btw).

Happy days are here again...