It was a weird day. In some ways easier being in London than not, from a fear point of view. I rang a friend of mine in the Lakes at the end of the day to let him know I was safe and he was more spooked than I was.

There definitely was a stoic reaction in London – we all stayed in work (Victoria) till we were told it was safe to go home, trains and tubes were all down so it was a combination of walking, buses and a lift from a friend. Next day, almost everyone was back in work. I cycled in so I was out of the public transport system but by the end of the week it was back to normal. We knew the terrorists would win if we changed our lives.

It was a relief in some ways, we all expected to be attacked at some point after 9/11 and the reality of it was far fewer people died than did in New York. Not that there was anything good about that, just that relatively speaking it wasn’t as bad as we feared. Personally I was more spooked by the attempts two weeks later, after 7/7 we thought that was it… Jean Charles de Menezes being shot was shocking too, not least because he was innocent

Interesting reading the comments on ft.com about who’ll pay for the humanitarian aid if the greeks refuse the bailout, the banks then run out of money and then so do the people who won’t be able to feed themselves. I don’t think our personal ideologies about freedom really help things much… it could lead to pretty serious and real consequences…

They are kept behind the bacon.

along with the fresh milk, white slice bread and marmite

Driving in flip flops seems to me to be a typical over-confidence/inability to properly assess risk issue which represents a lot of people’s driving.

On related note, if you’re overweight (therefore can’t move quickly) and wearing flipflops, don’t walk out in front of a car coming down the hill 30+mph… I really thought he has going to get hit, trying to speed-shuffle across as he realised he’d misjudged the speed of the car 😯

Think about how you’d feel if you were hard up,lost some cash and someone made the effort to get it back to you…
Be the change you want to see in the world…

Nick Davies in Hack Attack suggests The Guardian was quite isolated at times, coming under pressure from other members of the UK press as they tried to show there had been a cover up…

Hack Attack

Read this. The author hasn’t been sued by Rupert Murdoch as far as I know so you can assume it’s probably true.

It’s an eye-opener. In some ways not a good idea to read it, it can leave you rather cynical about how much really nasty behaviour people can get away with it if they’re manipulative enough. The photos of Coulson and Wade above show you how close these people get to the very top in order to give themselves protection…
If the general public read that book and decided to stop paying any of Murdoch’s businesses as a matter of principle, he’s lose his power overnight but I don’t think people are aware enough or care enough to do this – which he knows of course…

I recall Neds being particularly good quality ones. Unlike my Cardiacs one which lasted one gig and fell apart!
Got KYTV on Spotify now – better than I remembered it being…

I think Neds made more money from t-shirts than from selling music didn’t they? Bit like James?

It’s unclear what the referendum will be about next week – the offer from the Troika has been withdrawn…

I have a friend on holiday there at the moment. She’s not massively into economics and current affairs so I doubt she’ll have been expecting this! She’s posting holiday photos on Facebook but as yet no-one’s commented that the ATMs are being turned off… this is when ‘economics’ and real life collide

Normal people won’t bother posting – stuff like that is just a moron magnet – the sensible, tolerant people stay away. Same as cycling stories

I don’t think you should criticise yourself at all – his licence was given to him on the basis he would drive sensibly… we need, as a population, to pick people up on this kind of stuff every time – it’s the near misses that are keeping people off bikes and meanwhile we have an obesity crisis costing us tens of billions of pounds.
The pub we were in last night refused to serve a bunch of kids who pulled into the car park in a cloud of smoke pulling a half-donut on the basis they were driving like morons. Quite rightly too… we need to make anti-social driving socially unacceptable

Motorhead still rocking 🙂 Looking a bit aged though… it should be a day of national mourning when Lemmy goes

No-one else has done this so I will….

FIRST WORLD PROBLEM 😀

Also worth reading the commments on a lot of news stories – like some of the comments on STW, you get some really useful alternative perspectives which help you realise the ‘news’ article was utter bobbins or just a piece of propaganda from a vested interest…

Breathtaking…
I used to work with a guy who was this slippery – it’s a real art doing it with a straight face, quite fascinating to watch in action 😯

Pick your sources v carefully is my advice.

Some news channels are overwhelmingly negative, manipulative, sentimental, political and sensational – e.g. Metro, tabloids, daytime TV

I get most of my news these days from Radio 4, The Economist and FT – they’re not perfect but they’re much more measured in the way they present the news and noticeably more fact-based and balanced… both the topics they choose and the way they present them.

My mum seems to be getting more negative as she gets older and when I read The Telegraph that she reads daily, I can see why – it’s like a Mail for the middle classes – really skews your view on life.

Best tip I ever heard (and the internet enables this massively) is to read one source that has the same biases as you e.g if you’re right wing, read The Times; and read one source that you intuitively disagree with, so in this instance, also The Guardian.

It’s a right eye-opener – a) it challenges your own preconceptions and biases and b) you realise just how biased your ‘preferred’ paper is… Worst thing you can do IMO is just pick a source which reinforces your own limited view – makes people more hardline and more stupid IMO…

I had a mate who was in Bahrain, had to leg it when it all kicked off in 2010/11. Had a hell of a time getting out of the country. Brought one of his sons back to UK and then went back for his wife and the other kids. His youngest had been born the previous November and at that point had no passport – was very difficult getting her out – limited help from the Embassy too! Not fun and more than a little bit stressful.
Also bear in mind that suicide attacks have been increasing in Saudi and as the partnership ‘protection/peacekeeping for oil’ deal between US and Saudi is coming to an end, I wouldn’t expect Middle East to be a peaceful place anytime soon – but you’ll know more than me about that!
Plus your wife will have no kind of life out there.
For a 30% increase on current salary I’d say there’s no way that’s a worthwhile premium…

Always ask yourself why a job pays well – would they need to if it was desirable in and of itself?

Not a lot to say except good luck. It does sound like both you and your son need some help from outside parties in getting to the bottom of this so hopefully social services will be able to provide some route through.

FWIW everyone I’ve known who’s used drugs heavily was using them for self medication at some level so if you really have no idea where this destructive behaviour is coming from maybe he’d benefit from some counselling or therapy. or maybe you’d all benefit from some family therapy to uncover any underlying issues?

UK needs to have a proper debate with itself about risk. We’re peculiarly stupid about understanding it IMO. Media only reporting when things going wrong is a massive part of the general public misunderstanding the risks of activities like hillwalking, cycling etc

People won’t ride a bike because ‘it’s risky’. Instead they eat bad food and live a sedentary lifestyle and kill themselves that way instead… in far higher numbers and at far greater cost to the taxpayer…

You don’t achieve anything in life without taking risks at some level. First of all you have to accept that risk exists, rather than this idea that anything which involves risk must be avoided at all costs.

Then, the secret is to make an assessment of that risk, work out how you can minimise it and have a contingency plan for dealing with the situation if it goes wrong.

Skydiving is an interesting example. Somewhere between 500 and 1,000 jumps will take place every week in summer at every UK dropzone of which there are 30. The training and the procedures in place to manage the risk are rigorous, very rigorous and the culture is such that anyone who doesn’t adhere to them is spoken to, or banned.

BPA stats show “Once a skydiver is fully trained, the average injury rate is 0.3 injuries/1000 jumps and the fatality rate is about 1/100,000” yet you ask anyone who’s never jumped about skydiving and they think you’re mental and have a deathwish. This, in my experience is because there’s never anything in the media pointing out that thousand of people skydived safely last month, just the occasional story of a death… so you get the mad misperception of risk and danger based on totally skewed reporting in the media, with a lack of critical thinking to balance this out with an awareness that only deaths make the news…

Meanwhile “A survey by road safety charity Brake and Direct Line found three in 10 drivers send or read texts while driving, and one in eight using apps”…

Protest at Bank 8am tomorrow morning

On the Crossrail site I can see from the office window there’s a massive banner which says ‘all harm is preventable”

This philosophy and legal culpability needs to be extended offsite as well as onsite…

On a positive note, I had a little chat with a tipper truck driver this morning coming up from Brixton at Oval. I was to his right-hand side, intending to filter past and carry straight on. I looked up at him and said “you go”, he said “no, you go” and let me go ahead, and took it very steady through the traffic. Got the feeling he was very aware of the risks and was taking care to manage them. That said, everyone makes mistakes so it seems daft to rely on the skill of the drivers in the randomness which is London rush hour… you’ll never eliminate deaths if that’s all we’re relying on.

It’d be interesting to hear the views of tipper truck drivers on whether they like driving in rush hour or not, and what they find most challenging… I suspect it’s a bloody nightmare!

Bearskin is so prehistoric darling 🙂

people who apparently just don’t want their right to get away with being a shit driver infringed..

this +1

Having realised there’s no traffic Police around anymore, people now enjoy driving however they like, until along comes a cyclist with a camera and does what the Police would have done if they’d been there themselves.

Result, sulky motorist who realises they can’t get away with bad behaviour any more.

Bus driver runs red light and attacks pedestrian for filming her

I wonder if ITV also included this in their bulletin this morning?

Girls killed as car ploughs into them…

Not been the warmest year so far here in London Village but my cyclist’s tan is coming on very nicely 🙂

+1 for Bez’s tweet. You should form a tag team with Chris Boardman!

+1 for deliberately characterising cyclists as ‘bad’ and ‘morally unacceptable’.

Same deliberate use of negative language as ‘lycra louts’

British attitudes to the recent increase in cycling have opened my eyes right up to:
a) how badly some people cope with change
b) how downright manipulative people can be when they want to persecute a minority they feel threatened by…

The other 5% of the time, they have an HGV in them – personally I reckon that I can normally tell those occasions, because, well, there’s a dirty great HGV in front of me.

What seems bleeding obvious to you and me, isn’t for newbie cyclists. Which is where training comes in. Commonsense isn’t that common unfortunately.

they get excited when they get an alert telling them it will rain soon – like no-one had thought about checking the weather on their mobile before :-/

Or looking up at the sky to see gathering stormclouds/or checking to see if the cows are standing up or sitting down 🙂

B) the number of cyclists who I see taking crazy risks as well as having absolutely no intention at all of following any of the basic rules (red lights, one way systems, cycling on pavements etc) are, well, certainly the majority if not pretty much all of them.
Don’t know where in London you cycle, but I don’t see that at all. Same proportion of rule breakers on bikes as anything else. Cars might be RLJing on “only just red” rather than mid-cycle, but 90%+ of the cyclists I see will wait for the green light.

+1 – sounds like you live in a different London to me. Or suffer from confirmation bias or are simply jaded… it’s also an incredibly subjective view and thus is unhelpful in finding any kind of solution.

My preference would be to accept that roads are dangerous for cyclists – mainly from a combination of lousy infrastructure and lousy attitude towards cyclists and provide more training so cyclists can minimise that risk.
And let’s be clear, bad attitudes towards cyclists CAN be changed – other European countries have far most positive attitudes than UK.

Evidence at the moment appears to be that both infrastructure and culture are improving, but very slowly…

In the meantime, I cycle c100 miles a week in London and on club runs and as yet, have not been hit. I’ve been riding for 38 years, and not been knocked off… so safe riding is 100% possible. I give credit for this to my grandad who told my mum in the 1950s when she was learning to drive to assume everyone else on the road is an idiot and drive accordingly… plus ca change!

I did my Bikeability Stages 2 and 3 a couple of years ago and learnt loads. This, I think is the solution… not mandatory, but massively, massively encouraged. We don’t throw trainee skydivers out of the plane lack a sack of spuds, we put them through several days of training as it’s accepted there’s a risk so newbies are taught how to manage that risk. Same with cycling – all new bike purchases should come with a voucher for Bikeability (which is provided FOC of the local authority anyway) + a massive push from local authorities and TFL. An idea from one of my clubmates yesterday – if you can prove you’ve done your Bikeability, discount off the new bike…

This is NOT victim-blaming, it’s accepting there’s a risk for cyclists until infrastructure and culture change, and in the meantime, give us the tools to manage that risk… every adventure sport – skydiving, climbing, mountaineering, caving, diving etc have been working like this for decades – accept there’s risk, identify the risks, work out a plan for dealing with it, teach it to the new starters… the process is well-established so no reason not to apply it to cycling.

It’s so horribly predictable. Boris is massively encouraging cycling participation whilst at the same time knowing full well this particular risk (tipper trucks) is the cause of almost all the deaths (IIRC 9 out of the 12 deaths each year), and doing nothing about it.

Personally I steer well clear of a tipper truck when I see one – the data speaks for itself in terms of the risk and anecdotally they’re not always driven with skill and care… I would like to see a massive push towards Bikeability – whilst the main problem is these things being driven badly on crowded roads, you can do a lot to avoid them – e.g. pulling over and waiting 60 secs till they’re gone is easily done but for newbie riders I don’t think the risk is evident and some training would go a very long way to reducing the numbers of deaths.

We really should be making a huge racket that so many people are dying under tipper trucks but no change is being made to reduce the risk.

You can’t compare the average cyclist with the average London cyclist, rushing to work and ignoring so many potential disasters. I’m just amazed its not one a day!

This is really important to remember, cycling is really nothing like as deadly as you may think. We lose around 12 people a year and 120 nationwide, but – in City AM this morning there was an article about pedestrianising Oxford St with this quote: “Clean Air in London estimates that over 1,300 Londoners have died prematurely this year due to air pollution” I’ve seen a figure of this being 30,000 nationwide and another 30k from obesity-related diseases…

I know this isn’t quite like for like comparison but there’s plenty of stupid/avoidable ways to die in the UK, of which cycling makes a very tiny contribution…

You might also ask the same question of UK consumers – why give us more debt (particularly mortgages) when we’re in it up to our necks…

Europe has an ageing population, real economic growth stopped in the late 70s as the post-war baby boom (population growth) and re-growth of the economy after we wrecked it in WW2 came to an end.
Governments have given us debt to replace previously rising incomes to help give the electorate an illusion of rising wealth and rising living standards. We didn’t realise this was what they were doing at the time and have swallowed it whole, hence massive amounts of personal and government debt and, as Manic Street Preachers put it in 1991 in ‘Natwest, Barclays, Midlands, Lloyds’ – ‘They’re sanitising credit’.

Greece is just the canary in the coalmine IMO – the most vulnerable of the debt-laden countries. Italy, Spain, Portgual, UK not ideally placed right now either.

Scarily, the Chinese seem to have got themselves into a debt-laden speculative mess too… failing to learn the lessons of our mistakes.

Fingers crossed that we’ll be able to progress softly into a low-growth world, it’s going to take some serious skill on behalf of policy-makers to avoid a repeat (possibly worse) of 2008, which in itself was a sign of the underlying problem, rather than the problem itself…

None of this asks the question of how to finance feeding and housing a fast-rising global population (with expectations of a Western middle-class lifestyle) as well as meeting the costs of climate change…

Cyclists are pedestrians on wheels, yet they are put into this group that must abide 100% to a bunch of rules that were created mainly for motorised vehicles and the dangers they present.

That’s a really interesting perspective. The criticism of the general public of the apparent lawlessness of everyone who rides a bike is rank hypocrisy and seems to be present in even the most intelligent and thoughtful of my friends…

It’d be interesting to get a social psychologist’s view on why ‘cyclists’ are ‘expected’ to adhere to the rules of the road to a much higher standard than non-cyclists and why so many people take it upon themselves to punish anything less than 100% adherence.

Although the answer may be just simple bullying of a vulnerable minority who represent change… just finding excuses to justify their desire to be bullies.

Pretty much. Some of the road rides I can come home feeling stressed if the driving’s been particularly unfriendly but 99% of the time, riding a bike is a good thing…

She’ll probably have to do that crappy ‘What’s Driving Us’ course that I did. Won’t teach the dozy cow anything.

I suspect the thing that will teach her a lesson is that all her friends and work colleagues know she’s a total moron and no doubt spent this week giving her a hard time after it got splashed across mainstream media – social pressure’s more powerful than driving courses or fear of legal action IMO

Positive outcome

It looks like both the Police and the lady driver agree with the cyclist that what she was doing was wrong. She’s handed herself in.

Just a half-hearted attempt to do the right thing, and failing…
Good reason to have an old car…
There’s red paint on the rightside back corner of my car which appeared last week. If you look at one of my neighbours red cars, there’s silver (the colour of my car) paint on the leftside rear. I assume they screwed up their parallel parking. No note, nothing.
If I had a new car, I’d be furious. Cos it’s 10 year’s old, I’ll let it go.

Some people would actually give up mountain biking completely because a new wheel/tyre size became available… really?? LOL

I effectively have – I hardly ride MTB these days cos it’s much cheaper generally to ride road.

And if I can’t get replacement 26″ tyres when these ones wear out and I don’t have £2k to spank on a new bike… what happens then?

You do realise I’m just illustrating scenarios here don’t you – to show how such a strategy is doomed to failure… if I was riding MTB every weekend like I used to, I’d find the ££. But you should remember not everyone’s that wealthy anymore…

Applause, maybe given they seem to be last years model or used

oh and as far as the obsolete road thing goes, one of my road bikes is a mid 90s Merckx, All modern groupsets and wheels still fit just fine!

+1 – my summer bike is 6 years old in November. Have upgraded bars, stem, wheels + put a new chain on since I bought it and if anything breaks or wears out it could be replaced with the same.

Road is trying to go through a similar process of forced upgrades – discs, electronic shifting, 25mm tyres but culturally, road is far more conservative and mired in heritage so hardly anyone’s changing. Just a few noobs who’re carrying their consumerism through from other parts of their lives 😯

Looks like Nepal.
I’d be constantly falling off my bike, being too busy being stunned by the view!