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Transport Museum

For a long time I have wanted to visit the London Transport Museum, and today I have.

a sign at the london transport museumThe first omnibus service arrived in London in 1829, prior to that people had to walk around London. Can you imagine the change that the bus has made to people’s lives? Although back then they were only for the wealthy, transport soon became an important part in the growth and prosperity of London. From the horse-drawn trams to today’s bendy buses, life for people around the capital would never be quite the same again. The arrival of mass transit allowed people to move out of the centre of the city and it permitted people to travel, both for employment and leisure.

London has had trams, trolley buses and the world’s first underground system. The last tram ran from Woolwich to New Cross on 5 July 1952 when trolley buses took over. Trolley buses were fairly short-lived and buses, as we know them today, were introduced to the capital in about 1910. The Routemaster bus has become a symbol of London and, as I previously noted, was introduced in the mid-fifties. It was the last bus to be specially designed for travel in London.

picture of buses at the london transport museumToday I visited the London Transport Museum that is housed in an old flower market in Covent Garden. Sadly, it’s not the world’s biggest building so the collection is a little limited. It is, however, fascinating and I loved every minute of the time we spent there. I love the trams (I think this comes from a fascination with Blackpool trams when I was a child) and the operation of the underground is really quite interesting, as it the development of the familiar tube map that Henry Beck designed in 1959.

Sadly, the future of London transportation exhibit is a bit dated and, therefore, a disappointment. Luckily for me it’s the history that appeals so much more.

There are a couple more pictures in the gallery.

Shop ‘Til You Drop

Since Christmas British retailers have been telling us what a bad year it was. But it’s not all doom and gloom. The Times today tells us about Tesco and this rampant success. Apparently, in the year to February 2003, ‘Out of every £8 spent with British retailers, one went to Tesco’. [Tesco: The profits of doom?, Times Online]. And it would seem that this is not enough – they are going for more. Seems that the rise of the mighty retailers will not be stopped, while the little ones who try to compete are blocked with threats of legal action. I don’t really see how the case of BPI vs CD WOW is that much different from me popping to Hong Kong and buying the CDs myself. They’re legal copies. Ah well, I imagine the legal people were also taking a good chunk out of every pound I spent on CDs last year. It all makes me sound so anti-big business when, really, I am not.

Unexpected Movie Gems

Despite the fact that you can be critical of television over Christmas 2003, I really think that it served me some unexpected movie gems.

There was something of an 80s flashback over the Christmas period which set me thinking about my teenage years – although I am not suggesting you should now read my regurgitated teenage angst. The flashbacks came in the form of three films on free-to-air television that I caught by accident (by which I mean I didn’t know there were on until I flicked past them).

picture of kevin bacon in footlooseFirstly, we had the excellent Footloose (Kevin Bacon, dancing) which is a film I must have seen several hundred times and never get bored. It’s those standing up for you rights and proving your responsibility moments that resonated with people of a certain age when it was released. It’s helped by the fact that the 80s electro-pop soundtrack was pretty good (for the time) and Kevin Bacon is moody and supports a tight fitting vest at one point!

Then, on New Years Day, we had another teen angst film in the shape of The Breakfast Club. From the John Hughes stable (he made one of my all time favourite movies, Some Kind of Wonderful) this was a teen film with a difference. The film is – almost entirely – dialogue driven and there is very limited action. It’s set in the detention room on a Saturday where a small group of students (of all the stereotypes) must spend the day together as punishment for various misdemeanours.

Again, we are treated to the teen isolation, the misfits and the stupidity of the adult world. And, it also features a soundtrack that instantly brings to mind the mid-Eighties including Don’t You by Simple Minds – which is possibly the only Simple Minds track that I can listen to again and again.

Sandwiched in between Footloose and The Breakfast Club and shown sometime in that almost-dead period between Christmas and New Year was the first Back To The Future movie (which again has a soundtrack of it’s time featuring Huey Lewis and The News, Eric Clapton and Lindsey Buckingham). What struck me about it (apart from the now dated effects) was how good a film it really was. There are some superb performances in it (Christopher Lloyd and Crispin Glover) and it was a real combination of teen and sci-fi movies. It was also the first film I can recall going to the cinema more than once to see – it must really have inspired me as a 15 year-old. Superb stuff.

So, despite the fact that you can be critical of television over this past Christmas period, I really think that it served me some unexpected movie gems. And for that, I am grateful.

2003 In Summary

Like Jerry, my final thoughts on 2003.

If I can be allowed to be more self-centred – or inward-looking – than usual, I have found the process of re-reading the year’s worth of entries to be very interesting. Not only have I surprised myself with some of the pieces that I have written, but when viewing them all together, it seems that the site is a lot more coherent than I imagined. There are some key groupings of themes that have emerged – it’s clear I have a fascination with transport – and there are considerably fewer trivial pieces.

Many of the words I have written are, of course, about my life and might be considered to be trivial to some, but I feel I have gained an insight into myself with some of the longer pieces. And, it is those longer pieces which have most startled me on the re-reading: I must make a conscious effort to write more discussion works. Perhaps I should open the comments on the main body of the site to stimulate further thinking.

Of all the other sites I have read across the year, I still come back to my old faithfuls. So, this is the point where I should wish Tom, Jase, Jason, Bart, Meg, Phil, Eric, Chris, Bravo, Nick and Luke a very Happy New Year. Oh, and those are just the top-listed ones in my Bloglines subscriptions.

Bloglines is to be nominated as my tool of the year for 2003, it’s made the whole business of reading other sites so much easier (if only Blogger users would provide nice RSS feeds). Of course, I shouldn’t forget Six Apart who, via Movable Type, make all this possible.

Writing is one of the few creative outlets I have, and I am happy to have it as a hobby – it seems more useful than making a model of St Paul’s Cathedral from matchsticks.

Best wishes for 2004 to all who come across this page.

Love Actually

This is really an inoffensive, somewhat amusing, light-hearted, feel-good British comedy.

Love Actually
Love Actually is not the film I imagined it to be. I guess you can call it a romantic comedy and it seemed like a sensible film to watch on New Year’s Day. The cinema was packed which suggests we wen’t the only ones with that idea.
I should say from the beginning, it’s sentimental and feel-good. If those words put you off then you shouldn’t really see this film. I do think, however, that if you have ever (even once) got a little lovey-dovey then could go and see this movie and get something out of it.

It’s weaves a whole stack of separate stories together about people in love or finding love (and even out of love) with the backdrop of Christmas in London. Richard Curtis (of Four Weddings And A Funeral fame) makes his directorial debut and provides a very well-shot image of 21st Century London at Christmas. There are some really well-done sequences around the city which gives somebody like me – who thinks he’s seen all he wants to of London – something to smile at.

Having said it’s well-shot it is not without problems. Too many stories are intertwined leaving too many questions unanswered. When you leave a cinema questioning some of your understanding about who was who and where things were set you know that at some point this film failed. Why have the whole Wisconsin sequence, for example? And what happened to the Laura Linney parts – I suspect there is something on a cutting room floor that explains all that somewhere.

But don’t let that put you off. Liam Neeson’s storyline is great (even if it stretched believability a little), Emma Thompson is superb (and you will feel for her as she opens a Christmas present) as Alan Rickman‘s wife (he too stands out with a great, typical Rickman performance). Even Hugh Grant is believable as a Prime Minister who falls for his tea lady (Martine McCutcheon).

What I liked, although I have no idea if they will translate to the US, are the really British touches. Ant and Dec are the kid’s TV presenters; Jo Wiley is a DJ and Wes Butters does the chart run down for the Christmas Number One. And there wasn’t an over abundance of red London busses – which must be a first for British films.

This is really an inoffensive, somewhat amusing, light-hearted, feel-good British comedy and I hope it does well. If you read the message boards over at the Internet Movie Database you’ll read about people walking out in shock and disgust – which, if you’ve seen the film, is just as amusing.

It Was A Good Read

While I will miss the disappearances, they are – of course, just blips in the workings of the web. What I find sad is that, in time, it is likely that all this content will disappear from servers as the owners stop paying for the space that houses the sites. It would be like burning every copy of a book you had read – vanished. It’s part of a shared history that disappears.

I always feel it’s a little sad when a blog dies – particularly when all trace of it is removed. If it’s a blog I have been reading for some time then it feels as if a part of my history disappears. It is one of the strange things about the online experience – it’s very easy for things to disappear; things that were once inspirational, useful or entertaining.

One of my earliest online inspirations was Jase Wells. Although I’d been trying out building web pages for the company I worked for, Jase was the inspiration for my first home page (sadly long gone from the servers on which it resided and a great example of what I am talking about). Jase is still alive and well but the focus of his site has changed and, while it’s updated much more often now, the coming out story that was such a useful resource has gone (although it’s still available via archive.org).

Another Jase, now Snoboardr of OutEverywhere, had some personal pages once that were also fairly important in my use of the web.

Then there are the blogs that disappear. Mike of Troubled Diva fame (who I was introduced to via the excellent 40in40) put the blog on indefinite hold at the beginning of December. 8Legs went the same way a few weeks later. And now Chris has packed up. I don’t know Chris nor have I ever mailed or commented his site but I read it almost religiously. Why? Well, he has a talent for writing to the extent that almost everything he wrote was compelling. It was his writing style which was an inspiration because, by the time I discovered his site, I had been writing this blog for a while.

At least Daniel’s said it’s unlikely that he will give up completely.

While I will miss the disappearances, they are – of course, just blips in the workings of the web. What I find sad is that, in time, it is likely that all this content will disappear from servers as the owners stop paying for the space that houses the sites. It would be like burning every copy of a book you had read – vanished. It’s part of a shared history that disappears.

Diary writers perform an unintentional function as social historians. If you go all the way back to Pepys or think more recently of somebody like Kenneth Williams, their diaries are read today and give us an insight into what the world was like. If Mike or Chris has written their blogs as paper-based diaries there may very well have been something for historians to use in the future. If they don’t keep some kind of record of what they wrote in an accessible form then it will be lost to the future and people trying to understand life in the 21st Century will be poorer.

So, to those who wrote content I enjoyed reading, a plea. Archive your content for future generations. Regardless of how you do it, keep it.

Oh, and thanks for sharing your thoughts. I enjoyed them all.

Hi We’re Your Weather Girls

Humidity is rising – Barometer’s getting low, According to all sources, the street’s the place to go.

The Weather Girls,
The Weather Girls said “It’s Raining Men”

I have been recovering from my trip to the USA by spending a great deal of today asleep and generally caching up on the mail, the christmas cards, the washing and all the other things you need to do when you’ve been away for a week. It’s almost Saturday night and I am going supermarket shopping (you see, dear reader, I have a very exciting life).

While I managed to listen to the radio and some CDs I did, eventually, resort to music television so that there were some pictures to provide an alternative visual while I drank my tea (real tea, not a USA-style tea, is one of the greater comforters in my life).

The Hits is showing some so-called classics this afternoon. The video for It’s Raining Men (The Weather Girls) looked so dated that it made me wonder what those brought-up entirely on the sophistication of the modern day music video would make of these dated images.

Interestingly, it occurred to me to that it’s the video that looks a lot older than the music sounds. Allowing for the fact that It’s Raining Men is part of the soundtrack to my youth, I still think it’s the video technology that has made the noticeable leaps in the last 20 years.

And it’s 20 years next March since It’s Raining Men was a hit for The Weather Girls. Originally charting in the UK in August 1983 it eventually made number 2 in March 1984. It’s one of those songs that I would have sworn topped the charts but, apparently, not. I would imagine that a combination of Nena’s ‘99 Red Ballons‘, Lionel Richie’s ‘Hello‘ and Duran Duran’s ‘The Reflex‘ kept it from the number 1 slot.

Three Hundred Million

Figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and pricewaterhouseCoopers, regarded as the industry’s official count, show that advertisers spent £151.6m on Internet advertising in the first half of this year.

According to New Media Zero, UK online ad spend in 2003 could be as high as £350m which is very promising news indeed for those of us involved in the industry. The article doesn’t break down the money and I would be interested to know where it is being spent – I just hope it’s not on more pop-ups!

Snow is Oslo?

I am in Oslo and I am certain I saw snow.

It may be Thanksgiving Day for some of my colleagues but some of us are still working. I am, however, lucky enough to be in Oslo. I flew in last night. It was dark when I arrived but there was an unmistakable hint of snow on the ground at the airport. Considering all the trips I make to this part of the world, I have been a little disappointed that I have never seen a great deal of snow here. I was particularly saddened that there was no snow in Helsinki recently. Alas, by the time I made the centre of Oslo there was nothing to be seen.

Happy Thanksgiving

In some parts of the world, today is a holiday.

I’ve worked for American companies for a few years and never really grasped what the thanksgiving holiday was all about (apart from some very obvious things). This year I actually started to look it up:

The first Thanksgiving was celebrated between the Pilgrims and the Indians in 1621. That first feast was a three day affair. Life for the early settlers was difficult. The fall harvest was time for celebration. It was also a time of prayer, thanking God for a good crop. The Pilgrims and the Indians created a huge feast including a wide variety of animals and fowl, as well as fruits and vegetables from the fall harvest. This early celebration was the start of today’s holiday celebration. Like then, we celebrate with a huge feast. [Source: holidayinsights.com]

I would like to wish anybody passing by a very happy holiday.

Of course there is always an alternative view.

Movable Type Pro, Soon?

Luckily, I don’t get any spam on the pages that I have allowed comments on this site.

Luckily, I don’t get any spam on the pages that I have allowed comments on this site although Six Log has a nice piece on them. However, buried in that piece is the line, “Movable Type Pro (which we’ll be talking about in more detail very soon)”. Now I am excited indeed. A little sad, huh?

Thoughts on Helsinki

There are six things that I learnt on this trip to Helsinki. Well, six that I want to note right here. And Robbie Williams is one of them!

Thoughts on an November in Helsinki:

  • They recycle everywhere
  • The people are gorgeous
  • It’s not as cold as you would have expected
  • I missed the snow – it was a couple of weeks ago
  • I’ve just had the best pasta meal I’ve had outside of Italy
  • And Robbie Williams in appearing in town. You hear his name “Robbbbbbbbeeeeeeeee” everywhere

Flight Time Thinking

The Finair flight is usually very good except for their inability to give me any kind of e-ticket on the London/Helsinki route and, in one easy move, reduce my stress about losing tickets. The flight is about three hours long and gives me the chance to stop and think. I generally travel alone and fellow passengers are not always the greatest conversationalists so I am able to enjoy the relative silence.

I have written before of my business travels to Helsinki but this is the first time I am going in the winter. I am writing this on board the Finair flight. I expect darkness and a cold air but it’s going to be interesting to me. I imagine that any photographs will be of limited use (given that I will be in offices during daylight hours).

The Finair flight is usually very good except for their inability to give me any kind of e-ticket on the London/Helsinki route and, in one easy move, reduce my stress about losing tickets. The flight is about three hours long and gives me the chance to stop and think. I generally travel alone and fellow passengers are not always the greatest conversationalists so I am able to enjoy the relative silence. I tend not to listen to music on flights and so I read. I read work papers and things I printed from the web; I read books and newspapers but, above all, I read them and think for a while.

Today, however, is the first time that I think I have been able to appreciate that time. I’m not sure why I have not noticed this feeling before. My brain suddenly seems uncluttered: there is none of the normal chaos to distract me. No television, no radio and no web-access to stimulate my thoughts in a hundred million directions. No commuters or people to annoy, frustrate or distract me. No, for this brief period, my brain has wandered in the directions it has wanted to and it is a strangely liberating experience.

Earlier this year I also mentioned that I find flying a strange experience. I have done it so much for work (and much, much less for pleasure) that it should be like taking a bus. I do not lie awake at night worrying about a journey and have discovered that the art to staying relaxed in airports is to give yourself time. I don’t really mind where they sit me – as long as I can stow my bag – and I am used to many of the strange noises a plane makes. Yet this exterior of calm hides an absolute fear every time we hit the tiniest pocket of turbulence. Regardless of how many stray air-pockets I have flown through I know my blood pressure must rise alarmingly when the plane shakes.

And so, despite the relative freedom my mind has to wander and wonder on today’s flight, it is regularly brought back to reality at every minor shake of a plane.