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The shortage of heavy goods vehicle drivers (and consequently some food and drink), eh? I went to buy some tomato juice, but the shelf of cartons of the cheap salty from-concentrate kind was bare. So I sighed and got a more expensive bottle, which I don’t think is as tasty. But it turns out that I was wrong, and the tory “spiced” juice is excellent after all.
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Google Maps is imperfect, so sometimes drivers of light goods vehicles (ven) ask me where somewhere is and I get to tell them, which is satisfying, but it would be better if it were better. Anyway, I’m more fond of OpenStreetMap, which a concerned user has the power to change. (I know one can suggest edits to Google Maps too, but pfft.)
There are some new buildings around here, which I’ve added to OpenStreetMap, and I’ve marked the non-obvious entrance of this building, and there are some new roads I want to add (but it’s a bit difficult). All of which are even more satisfying, and might make those delivery drivers’ jobs a tad easier, although I suspect their robot GPS bosses mostly don’t use OSM.
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Went to Edinburgh. Excellent.
I was going to bring my bicycle, but there are disconcerting stories about the hassle of booking a bike onto the train, and the handlebars banging into the emergency 🛑 button. And anyway, I had a flat tyre – an inner tube seemingly full of water, or was it some kind of special glue intended to automatically seal any puncture?
So I hired one of them Brompton folding bicycles from Peterborough station. I’ve tried before – they text you some digits to enter into a keypad, and I’d never got past the stage of the keypad beeping to say “you did it wrong you stupid human”. But this time I tried again and again, and by the time I was almost late for the train a little door unlocked for me to lift out an entire bicycle contorted to the size of a small suitcase.
Apart from anything else, it meant I had something to sit on in the vestibule for the first few hours of the journey until a proper seat became free. And it’s quite a fun bicycle – you can’t help but smile and laugh when you see a grown adult pedalling furiously on a silly little-wheeled contraption, and it’s nice to spread smiles and laughter.