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Monday: had an excuse to try the new Flixbus 007 from Stratford to Norwich, which meant squeezing into the tube at rush hour to get to Stratford on time, only to find that it would be departing almost an hour late so the rush had been unnecessary. Fair enough, the previous journey had gotten stuck in traffic and the driver needed a break, but I wished I’d known earlier. I could have thought to use the Flixbus tracker website together with my knowledge of drivers’ hours rules and deductive skills, but also Flixbus’s advanced technology could have been clever and texted us or something.
Something I liked about the Yutong GT12 coach was the screen at the front informing us of various temperatures, humidity, seatbelts and probably the time and date, in a font that might have been SimSun – certainly it reminded me about the semiotic and aesthetic idiosyncrasies of the anonymous Latin glyphs included with CJK system fonts. (They’re monospaced, for a start, but it’s more than that.)
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I left my bicycle at a train station over the weekend and a bird shat on the downtube, probably slightly damaging the paintwork. Days later, I bicycled a great distance and another bird shat a (bigger, more colourful) shit on the pannier, and most incredibly a bit went on the back of my trousers too. Any suggestion that this is a sign of “good luck” is of course horseshit, but it’s not all bad news: now I know what part of a bike frame the downtube is, and after washing the pannier and trousers they’re cleaner than ever.
(I forget who was marvelling recently at how for some people “shit” is as acceptable a past participle as “shat” or “shitted”, something irregular verb something.)