Week 239

Monday 16 October 2023

• Anonymously reported to the council a broken button at a pedestrian crossing. I’d seen people standing there for ages waiting for the lights to change, apparently not having noticed that the light that lights up when you press the button hadn’t lit up when they’d pressed the button.

  Crossing the road just a day or so later, I pressed the button and the light illuminated immediately … so I think it had fixed itself. Perhaps repeated presses and/or rain had loosened the mechanism or something like that. (Remembering the trouble with my kettle, maybe you need to strike the button aggressively at just the right angle.) And I feel ashamed for having wasted the council’s time with a non-problem, but I hold out hope that it was actually their shit-hot team who sprung into action and fixed it.

• Twice to London and back. Once to Off Menu at the Royal Albert Hall – I had no memory of buying a ticket, so it’s lucky that their system sends an email the morning before the event. Now they know how many pathetic losers/podcast listeners it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

  Everyone rightly moans about how shit their local train operating company is, so can I take a moment to shout out the rock-solid reliability, the sickening punctuality of Greater Anglia? (Between the first and second trip, so I only got fleeced once, I learnt about their significantly cheaper summertime “hare fares”, only available from the Greater Anglia branded website and app, an offer which (and by extension summer) ends tomorrow apparently.)

• Things forgotten from weeks gone by:

  • Peering through the window of the local One Stop shop, I noticed plastic cups attached to all the bottles of wine – what an ingenous idea for a shop that’s on the way to the railway station, a free plastic cup to drink your wine out of on the train. It’s the continental way, isn’t it? But of course they were those anti-theft devices more usually seen on bottles of spirits.

  • Baader–Meinhof phenomeon of the week: Boygenius. It’s true what they say, you know you’re getting older when police officers supergroups seem younger.

  • “Just been tossing the pill about with Chuggsy a little bit”