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Tuesday, 16 September 2008 - Brake!

This is what happens to your brake pads when you slipstream too many trucks and buses on your bike - they wear out fast!				£60 for a two new pairs of these - ouch!

Friday, 19 September 2008 - What side of the road?

Few shots of London by night. This is looking west along the filthy River Thames from London Bridge.		East along the Thames towards Tower Bridge and the huge HMS Belfast on the left.
London Bridge is falling down...		...and so is the standard of driving in London!
Last week there was a huge and fatal smash in south London involving a bus, a tram, and a whole lot of shop fronts for which the bus driver was found to be at fault (more info here), so when I found this last night I thought it was round two except the bus driver clearly wasn't at fault this time. The grey car stuck on the front of the bus was facing the wrong way down the road, so unless the bus had somehow flipped him round (which it hadn't) it looks like the driver of the car simply got confused at what is a real bastard of an intersection with roads and lanes going all over the place in front of King's Cross train station - one of London's busiest.
The cops drove the car away to reveal not a single scratch on the bus hehe. Strange, but then again I'm in France next week and will be driving on the wrong side of the road so this could well be me getting all confused. Watch this space ;)

Saturday, 20 September 2008 - Richmond

Wow - Saturday and it's sunny. Really sunny! The deck chairs were out...		The boats were out...

Man's best friend was out...		But not everybody was out to work on their tan though ;)		Any humped pelicans reading this?

This is somewhere in Hyde Park. I had come here looking to get shots of a 20,000-person peace march led by friends and family of teenagers killed by knives in London (of which there are a lot - close to 30 this year so far). As it turned out I couldn't find anything resembling a peace march, but instead I found a gathering of the Mouth Cancer Foundation.				After a few sombre speeches it all started to get a little weird.

Tom Jones started blaring out of speakers with Sex Bomb, and they all got their aerobics on! I left them to it.
Richmond Park is a massive 1000-hectare chunk of land in ... Richmond, about 15kms southwest of central London. At almost three times the size of Central Park in New York it is Britain's largest urban walled park. It has some pretty interesting wildlife including deer, many of which are apparently infected with a type of bacteria that can be transmitted to humans and cause Lyme disease hehe - good to know.

In the middle of the park is Pen Pond.		Good spot to chill out in the sun, and for dogs to terrorise the bird life.

Richmond is a really nice area (one of the few in London) plonked right on the River Thames. This is looking west along the Thames, with Twickenham Stadium in the distance to the right - the largest rugby union stadium in the UK.

Nice! :)

Sunday, 21 September 2008 - On your bike mate!

London Freewheel is an annual event in which a central London route is closed to all vehicular traffic for a day and 50,000 cyclists of all ages and abilities are let loose!

Obviously it causes traffic chaos outside of the route, but stiff shit.		Everybody in this shot came out the end deaf after I let the air horn rip in here - nice!

The route takes in some of London's most famous roads and landmarks, including The Mall and Buckingham Palace above (I'm sure the Queen was impressed!).				This chick was scaring all the little kids.

Events like this never fail to draw an interesting crowd: several unicyclists...		Museum fodder (the dude on the left is totally checking her ass out)...		Whatever the hell this is...

The bride...		The bees...		And the fatties.

My favourites were the boom boxes hehe. This guy was pumping out some awesome reggae!		These guys were pumping out some even better drum and bass - hell yeah, I stayed with them for ages!

There were paramedics all over the place, and this one came screaming past me with sirens blaring. Evidently riding a bike is not as easy as it looks for everybody ;)		On my way back to the train station I came across a bloody massive Islamic gathering at Marble Arch.		Fascinating.

I'm not sure what this was all about, apart from a lot of singing. All the males seemed to congregate together...		...whereas the chicks had clearly been allocated their own area off to the side. After a while they all marched off (males first).

It at least gave the tourists something to snap at, and I was handed some paraphernalia to take away with me (after checking it for explosives).

Monday, 22 September 2008 - Oh man I love carnage!

What happens when a car sideswipes a bus at 50km/h in the middle of London? 1) A traffic jam. 2) Curious bystanders. 3) Debris hehe.		4) A car requiring a new side mirror, a new indicator, a paint job, and some panel work.		5) A bus with very little wrong with it hahaha. Lesson over :)

Tuesday, 23 September 2008 - France road trip - HOORAY!

Fuck yeah, we're outta here! More info here. Back in a fortnight! :)

Sunday, 5 October 2008 - ...and back again

From this - sun, surf, and ass...		...back to this - rain, concrete, and fat ass. Returning to Britain never gets easier.

Tuesday, 7 October 2008
For anyone else wondering where the France photos are see the page comments below. In the meantime, keep yourself amused with these weekly gems :)

Thursday, 9 October 2008 - Time, meridians, and knives

Sunny (for a change) autumn day today so I got on the bike for the first time in three weeks and rode out to Greenwich in London's south east.		Good views of the London skyline from Greenwich Park, but what I came here to see is...

...this (sort of). This is the Royal Observatory within Greenwich Park, and that weird-looking chrome thing is planted bang on the 'Prime Meridian', or the meridian (line of longitude) at which longitude is defined to be 0° as per my GPS (I assume most of you understand what longitude and latitude is?). In a nutshell, the Prime Meridian and the opposite 180th meridian (at 180° longitude, just east of New Zealand), which the International Date Line generally follows, form a great circle that divides the Earth into the Eastern and Western Hemispheres.

Greenwich Park has a 'line' of one form or another passing through it to indicate the Prime Meridian.				I also assume most of you have heard of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)? This is the Shepard Gate Clock at the Royal Observatory displaying GMT to an accuracy 0.5 of seconds (so they say). Spot the 24-hour analogue display - first time I've seen one of those! Beneath the clock are a couple of standard British measurements: the foot and the yard; I think they ought to get with the times and switch to metric!

On my way back into central London I came across this and initially thought yet another bus had clouted something (which they always seem to be doing).		Turns out that bus was just doing a U-turn because of this. I've just put the France photos up and made a couple of jibes in there about London's knife culture, and this is exactly why. At first no one would tell me what was going on other than a "serious incident", but I eventually learned that just three hours earlier this was the scene of yet another stabbing murder. This is Camberwell in south-east London - an area best avoided, and while looking around I quickly realised I was in the wrong neighbourhood; even one of the cops asked what the hell I was doing here (she then went on to recommend I check out south-west London, far nicer and safer apparently hahaha!)

Thurday, 9 October 2008 - Southern France (and surrounds)!

Right, finally (I gotta tell you it takes a bloody long time to sort through 1,300 photos, cull them, storyboard them, edit them, and caption them!). All the photos and stories and whatnot from Katie and my two weeks gallivanting around southern France are here - enjoy! :)

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