It’s a while since I visited central London. Mostly we catch a train to Euston from Manchester, walk the few hundred yards to Euston Square underground station and catch the Metropolitan line to Chesham to visit the southern branch of the family: our son and co. So I only see a very limited bit of London itself. And I was amused to read yesterday about pedicabs.
It seems that a whole branch of transport has sprung up in the last decade: pedicabs - a bit like rickshaws but powered by bicycles, a way of travelling round the city centre, presumably seeing the sights. Apparently some of them are decorated and lit up with fairy lights, rather like a taxi cab I read about in one of the books in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series. Of course, there are concerns about some pedicab drivers ripping tourists off because the pedicabs are unregulated and there is no cap on prices.
This might be about to change. This week, King Charles introduced a bill that is expected to bring in a new licensing system for the three-wheeled rickshaw-style carriages, which the king described as a “scourge” on the capital.
I think it’s a bit rich someone who rides around some of the time in a golden carriage, like a fairy tale prince, describing pedicabs as a “scourge” on the city. Was that his opinion or that of his script-writer, oops, I mean speech-writer? Given his views on some modern architecture - monstrous carbuncles - it might very well be his own opinion.
Personally I’d like him to take a look at some of the monstrous carbuncles that have sprung up around the centre of Manchester and tell me what he thinks of them.
Opinions differs, as always, about how many people attended the pro-peace / pro-Palestine march in London yesterday. Organisers of the march say 800,000. The Met police say 300,000. Either way, a lot of people - or as our home secretary might say, a huge “mob”. It seems that Tommy Robinson’s followers turned up at the cenotaph to stand up for good British values, some of them chanting ‘English ‘til I die’. I”m not sure they understand about British values. But the “mob” seems to have been quite well-behaved. Some of the British values people were arrested.
This is from a post by one of my friends:
“82 of Cruella's mates arrested; she should be arrested, too, as she incited them - she started it all off!
"While it looks as thought pro-Palestinian protesters passed peacefully through London on the march, the police said they had arrested 82 counter-protesters who opposed the demonstration.
The police said they had made the arrests to prevent a breach of the peace."
(Guardian update)”
Now, I always thought the northern lights were only visible in the far north. Surely the clue is in the name. However there was a little news item saying that the northern lights could illuminate skies across the UK on Saturday evening into Sunday morning, according to the Met Office. Recently I read that they were seen off Formby beach, near to my hometown of Southport. The latest lot could be seen across northern parts of Scotland, North Wales and the Midlands. Well! Well! The forecaster said the rest of the UK was likely to miss out on the light spectacle due to cloud cover.
Well, that’s about par for the course in our bit of Northwest England. Any kind of aerial phenomenon - eclipses, comets, blue moons - is usually obscured by cloud. So it goes.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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