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Hello kind reader! Just a quick note to say thank you for your support in making 853 the best weblog written by a slightly grouchy resident of Charlton, south-east London. (Well, maybe the second-best, anyway). It’s all barking at the moon without your considered responses.

Speaking of responses, I’ve introduced a comments policy, mainly because I’ve had to flex the moderation tools a little bit in the past week or so. Essentially, it’s don’t be rude, be nice, and don’t spam.

I’m also taking action to deal with a couple of sockpuppets – those who create multiple online identities. I don’t want to have to make all commenters register, so please, create one username, and stick with it – WordPress will reward you after a while by letting you skip the moderation process, and all will be happy. Don’t like it? Start your own blog, then.

I should point out that neither of the sockpuppets is a well-known Greenwich-based journalist who’s been accused of it – but one is somebody who’s used multiple names to personally attack that person. Yup, struck me as odd, too. Like I said – please, create one name, and stick with it. Thank you.

If you squint, you can see what blocked my path while doing a further leg of the Capital Ring earlier today – police tape. Not many walkers have their strolls curtailed by a killing, but my path through Wandsworth Common was blocked by this afternoon’s shooting outside the prison, which left a man dead. Police are hunting for two men seen running away from the scene.

I’d been out all afternoon, having walked there from Crystal Palace Park, and was unaware of the news, so was a bit surprised to see two policewomen, police tape and a forensics expert where I was supposed to be walking. I’m a bit hesitant about approaching the police these days, mounting stories of officers who don’t quite realise they’re there to serve the public (harrassing photographers, beating up demonstrators, you know the drill) have left it in my mind to keep out of their way. But my sense of curiosity got the better of me – as did the queue of waiting cars with drivers shouting out “what’s going on?”

So, up to the officers I strolled. “A critical incident has happened, that’s all we can say.” Curious, I thought – clearly something had only just happened. I showed my press accreditation (not often I need to use it, but it was worth a go in case something had only just happened – there were old colleagues I could tip off). They laughed. “Then you’ll know what’s happened anyway.” I couldn’t be bothered to pursue it any more with them, although if this was my local area I probably would have done.

So, in the end, the internet on my phone told me what had happened, because the story had been on the BBC News website for two-and-a-half hours, while the two policewomen whose wages my tax pays for declined to be of any help. If Metropolitan Police ever wonders why ordinary Londoners are beginning to hold it in contempt, it’s little incidents like that that’ll hold the answer why.

It’s almost become a cliche to muse on just how right Charlie Brooker is, but he scored a bullseye on last night’s Newswipe with this rant about wossface off that show I don’t watch because I’m usually out or doing something else. In words I could never find at the time, it’s neatly summed up why I slammed the brakes on my own career, out of exhaustion with a world where the ins and outs of television talent shows gradually assumed such importance that you could simply follow them by reading the news, not watching the shows.

(Not that I’m contributing much else to the world at present, other than sitting at a keyboard ranting, but hey, give it time. Once I’ve come back from delivering some leaflets, that is…)

The train companies are finally discovering what we all knew 15 years ago – privatising the damn things was a disaster. But they still have to squeeze money out of them to tide their shareholders over, so they’re commissioning the nation’s best and brightest to help promote their 2-for-1 deals to get families into London’s attractions. (That’s 2 for 1 in the attractions, not on the trains themselves. Of course not.)

The bright idea these Nathan Barleys came up with? Why not spam Twitter users with generous offers to haul the family into the capital’s top tourist sites? So, this morning, I woke up to find I’m being followed by @Days_Out_Guide. Unfortunately, the multi-media nodes who created this haven’t got it quite right, and have set it up to spew out news agency stories about London.

Which don’t exactly present a flattering view of the city…

(Screen grab taken at 10.45am on 29 April 2009)

So, let me see – two stories about the capital’s most grisly terrorist attack (one from US campaign website FreeDetainees.org, surely not one that’s top of Stagecoach boss Brian Souter’s favourites), an Irish Times story about an Evening Standard poll, a stabbing in Stockwell, and, er, something about a new high school principal in a Connecticut city called New London. Well, after seeing that lot, I’m taking the kids to see the sights!

Oh dear – I wonder how much farepayers’ money went on that daft promotion? Talking of fares, I read something on the FT’s website yesterday about journalist Matthew Engel’s new book where he travelled by train around Great Britain for a fortnight to see the sights and, well, because he likes riding on trains. He did it on a little-promoted ticket called an All Line Rail Rover – almost-unlimited travel for a fortnight from £565 (or £375 for a week). Turns out transport minister Lord Adonis did just that a couple of weeks back, an experience he found an eye-opener (although not enough for him to apologise for privatising them in the first place). Suddenly, the thought of a wander across the country by train – up to Scotland, down to Cornwall, through the Lakes, the Peaks, into Wales, not going anywhere near Birmingham New Street… suddenly seemed rather seductive. I began to look at my diary.

And then I found, almost by accident… news which you won’t find on National Rail’s website. They’re hiking the price up by nearly 15% to £430 (for 7 days) from next month. The current rate of inflation is -0.4%. Suddenly the idea doesn’t seem such good value. Maybe I won’t do it after all. Still, I hope the goons who are spamming Twitter users on the train firms’ behalf will get their share of the rise.

One of the upsides about not having to commute anywhere at the moment is that I don’t have to see the free newspapers which clog up London’s transport networks each evening rush hour – partly because I knew what would be in them anyway, having been across newswires as part of my job, and partly because London Lite was, and, remains, the most awful, prissy, spiteful, trivial publication known to mankind. The London Paper, by contrast, has at least a spark of imagination to it, even if its news coverage sometimes leaves something to be desired. Tuesday’s paper, however, left me wondering what the hell they must have been on – who on earth thought scaremongering about the swine flu outbreak would be a good idea? I had to make a quick journey in and out of the West End and all I could see was that bloody headline everywhere. It’s crap like that which makes people panic, and when even the Mail takes a cautious line, someone, somewhere, should have known much better.

Oddly, though, The London Paper covered the kind of story which it can do well, about an epidemic that can kill thousands in London each year – and it’s something we choose to do nothing about, even though it’s entirely within our control. It says a report due this week claims 3,000 people a year die in the capital because of our high pollution levels. That’s a real scandal, and something we can stop. Naturally, though, the story was buried deep in the paper and doesn’t even appear on its website. It’s basic stuff, of course – papers like to whip up hysteria about things we have little control over, and play down positive things we can do to improve the place we live in; but I couldn’t help but be struck by the contrast.

Is there a moral to this? Don’t just run to the hills, get in your 4×4 and speed the way there, I suppose.

So, there I was yesterday, out and about in London, browsing trainers at Kentish Town’s correctly-titled Ace Sports shop, and finding to my delight that I can now get a train straight from there through to Peckham Rye and Nunhead – very handy for getting home.

Except, of course, changing at Nunhead, I found myself at the wrong side of a 45-minute gap between trains to Blackheath. It was only the start of rush hour, why should I have expected a train? But I knew that mighty Irish pub Skehans was around the corner, so I thought I’d drop in for a pint to kill the time.

While inside, I thought I’d check the live departure boards on kizoom.mobi – a much more convenient rendering of what you’ll find on nationalrail.co.uk. Except that it’d gone – “our license to use real-time train information from National Rail Enquiries has not been renewed”, an apology note read. Ah. Do these idiots actually want me to use their trains or what? I left the pub with little idea of whether my train would be on time or not. I’d always wondered why public transport operators had been slack on the uptake on iPhone applications – even though Transport for London promotes its “travel tools” with iPhone-style graphics, the terrific Tube Status is developed independently.

Today, just browing my iPhone apps store, what do I find…? A National Rail iPhone Application. Yes! Finally! But… £4.99?! They can shove that where the trains don’t go. Turns out it’d been launched while I was on holiday, and this had caused the axeing of a Kizoom app which I hadn’t known about, MyRail Lite.

Train times are public information. Thanks to both the past Conservative government and the present Labour government, we pay millions in subsidies to keep these companies afloat and for them to provide their services. So why should we pay again for something which advertises the trains we’d pay them money to use? (Assuming, that is, they’d bother to sell us a ticket, rather than trying to charge a penalty fare at the other end.) I can get this information for free on my computer at home – why should I pay when I’m on the move? A free application would have given these unpopular companies some goodwill from their users. Instead, they’re just carrying on in their same old money-grabbing ways. Maybe someone will have the guts to stop them. Can’t see it, somehow.

(Incidentally, iRail does timetables for free, because it uses the Europe-wide system which Germany’s Deutsche Bahn uses.)

Tuesday’s cancellation of the Greenwich Waterfront Transit scheme was, naturally, buried under old news about Crossrail, the Jubilee Line and the East London Line extension and adoring guff about the biggest investment to be made since… zzz…. – that’s right, announce some old stuff all over again and nobody will notice you scrapping things which could be really important. The capital’s main media outlets fell for it again.

Because the GWT only served Thamesmead, and nobody likes or cares about Thamesmead, do they? I’d be stunned if Boris Johnson has ever set foot in the place. So he can quite merrily drop a scheme which has been eight years in the planning, has had many millions of pounds spent on its planning because why should he care? It’s only a runt of a new town in south-east London which barely gets noticed by anyone who lives more than a mile or so away from it.

The GWT wasn’t perfect. Thamesmead should really have its own mainline connection by now, or be on the Tube, or the DLR. In the 1970s, the embryonic Jubilee Line was due to run there. But the plans – ironically, promoted by London’s last Tory leader, GLC head honcho Horace Cutler – were scuppered thanks to a lack of government investment. So Thamesmead was left to rot. The GWT was a modest attempt to address that.

It was only a bus – not a tram as first hoped for – but one that would have its own lanes and that would break new ground by opening up the cut-off Royal Arsenal development in Woolwich, and would help join up several other riverside developments there and in Thamesmead. It’d link those places with the Crossrail stations at Woolwich and Abbey Wood; the new DLR at Woolwich Arsenal; and the Jubilee Line at North Greenwich.

Of course, Greenwich Council were mad for it. Even neighbouring true-blue Bexley Council was dead keen – it launched a campaign, Jump On Board!, to get the GWT extended through the borough and out to Dartford, where it’d connect with north Kent’s similar Fastrack, which has been running for a couple of years. A smart idea. I bet they feel stupid now. (And wasn’t Boris meant to be all about the suburbs?)

But the omens for GWT weren’t good. Early plans for it to run on a dedicated path through Charlton’s retail parks were dropped – a empty plot of land dominated by a huge mound of rubble at the Woolwich Road/Victoria Way junction is that plan’s legacy. An early proposal saw it also serving Greenwich town centre – giving a public transport connection to the bloated Greenwich Wharf (Lovell’s Wharf to locals) scheme. But that went shortly after Boris got in. And finally, the rest of it got knocked on the head ahead of April Fool’s Day, the £40 million cost being considered too much when Boris could be spending that money on scrapping bendy buses to please the chattering classes and building his own Routemaster.

Ah, yes. Snobbery. Check the comments on the Evening Standard story – “Lauren Smith, Woolwich,UK” clearly didn’t want a bus route in her Royal Arsenal back yard, even though everybody who bought a place in the development knew a bus scheme was planned for its oddly wide boulevards. “This was vehemently opposed by Royal Arsenal residents as it added no value to the residents but involved the destruction of their quality of life by creating a high frequency bus route inside a residential area.” Don’t worry, Lauren, the Royal Arsenal development can stay as sleepy as you like it now – the rest of south-east London can stay outside those high walls around your place. Just don’t complain when people find it hard to visit you. (See Lauren’s response below in the comment section.)

Because this is what it boils down to. Many people who live in Thamesmead are poor. It’s a rotten area which desperately needs help. Its transport connections are appalling, limiting job and educational opportunities for its residents. Want to be profoundly depressed? Walk along the river to the Gallions Reach Urban Village, decaying only a couple of years after it opened. And it’s a huge, sprawling mess – poorly co-ordinated, difficult to get around even by car. It’s no surprise that in the 1990s part of the area was a hunting ground for racist thugs – encouraged by the kind of cynical, wicked people who thrive in areas that get screwed over by mainstream politicians. It’s the legacy of decades of rotten planning decisions taken by people who’d never choose to live there in a million years. And another rotten decision – by a man who probably thinks Thamesmead sounds like a nice place for a picnic at Henley – has just condemned the place to more years of isolation.

Of course, he’s happy to build his new vanity buses that’ll glide through Islington highways and leafy Kensington avenues; and he’ll change traffic lights in central London because that’s the world he lives in. Thamesmead isn’t part of that world, and isn’t part of Boris’s London. Forget his new Routemaster for a moment. Whatever mess Thamesmead is in by 2012 after years of recession and blight on property values – that’ll be Boris’s legacy. It’s just a shame he’s clearly too narrow-minded to see it.

So, I left work yesterday – after (I can finally say) 10 years at the BBC. And here’s one of the brilliant presents I got from my (now ex-)colleagues. Another life begins today.

Got to tidy the flat and do some washing first, though…

After the conflict of the previous entry, a peaceful scene. Spring has finally come to Blackheath – well, at the Royal Standard, anyway. (And so has my new camera, after having the old one nicked. Hooray!)

It’s a busy week this week, and there’s not much time to look after the blog. But something made me smile this evening. There was only one thing for it dashing home tonight – the 6.33 Misery Train from Waterloo East, because it bought me precious minutes in the race to get home for the white hot relegation battle dismal evening of bad football at The Valley, Charlton v Doncaster. (For tonight’s entertainment in SE7 and SE10, it competed with Tina Turner’s first UK comeback show at the Dome – it was a long way from Simply The Best, I tell you.) The Misery Train is an awful experience, only eight coaches long for a long haul to Gillingham. It’s busy at the best of times, but on football nights it’s always packed to the gills, and there’s always people shouting abuse and banging the windows at London Bridge because they can’t get on. Tonight, in the rain, was no different.

(There is a second, longer and more civilised, train to Charlton, four minutes later, which I usually prefer to catch; followed by another close-knit pairing of trains 20 minutes afterwards. This is Southeastern’s way of sticking two fingers up at anyone who might like to get home nice and quickly, or to the match. A bit like their weird habit of packing Blackheath station out with ticket inspectors, while leaving other stations alone.)

I stood in the middle of the train, unable to squeeze into the only remaining seat – I’m no lard-arse, but three strange men can’t sit in comfort together on one of those trains, and one of them had his laptop out, hammering away at some sort of spreadsheet. Nobody else seemed to want it either. I looked at the rain hammering it down on the platform at London Bridge, the glum faces around me, and the middle-aged chap on his spreadsheet. If I ever ended up playing with Microsoft Excel on my train home, I thought, please shoot me.

We pulled into Blackheath, and a load of people got off to face more hassle from the ticket inspectors, freeing up some room to sit down for the remaining couple of minutes. I parked myself opposite Laptop Man, who’d packed up his work. And then noticed his cufflinks. They bore a photo of James Dean. How cool was that? On a train that’s usually full of miserable, unhelpful souls, a shining light from someone not afraid to display some enthusiasm for something. And I realised that if I ended up in my 50s bashing away at some poxy spreadsheet on the 6.33 to Dullsville – there’d still be some hope yet.