Bank of China

My Talk-Talk broadband service went to pieces when it rained Wednesday and Thursday. It's not too stable if it gets cold either. Do you think that might be because the copper into my house has not been changed since I moved in thirty years ago? And it was old then. Insulation goes, moisture or water gets into connections at the pole... all sorts of things. And Talk-Talk wonder why I won't upgrade and watch TV over their service. Which is copper all the way from the local exchange.

And of course the weather was awful. I took the week off.

God hates me.

The Air Park in Spring

You wouldn't know it has council flats on one side, a municipal baths and the A312 on another, a light industrial estate on the third and some flats and my little estate on the fourth. It's not Royal, like Bushy or Richmond Parks, but it is about a hundred yards from my front door. It's been a good Spring.

Leaving Out The Gin Bottles, Soho

Steps of the Caffe Nero across from my gym, early one Saturday morning. I swear I did not pose this. I leave milk bottles out, but clearly the denizens of Soho get a wider range of products delivered by their milkman.

Punjabi National Bank

Another City photograph from last summer. Since the Punjab is a region of India, how can it be the Punjab National Bank? Anyway. I have distractions at the moment, so posting is erratic.

April 2017 Review

Maintenance month.

I watched a number of car maintenance and driving channels in April, and prompted by Scotty Kilmer telling us that he changed his oil every 6,000 miles and that anyone who didn’t was storing up troubles, I checked the service frequency on the Punto. Uh-huh. I was around 37,500 miles and should be having services every 12,000 miles. So I booked it in a local Fiat dealer and got a full service, with oil changes and other good stuff. This requires driving there at 06:30, leaving the car on the street, taking the slow train to work, and then taking the slow train back, and driving home in the evening. It makes a change, and if you look along the track at the station you could be in the country. My regular station is much less domestic and friendly.

The garage found a bunch of other things - leaking gearbox seal, worn rear shock bushes, a hole in the exhaust and thin front break pads - that I drive away, thought about, called them and said YES to. I’m passing on the new set of tyres for a few more months. I can’t tell you how many pounds lighter I am for all that.

The back porch acquired a vivid green sheen, which I killed with mosskiller. I tackled cleaning the path to my front door, which has been looking grungier as the years have gone by. This is not rocket science: wet the path, pour on diluted cleaner from a watering can with sprinkler head, scrub in with stiff bristle broom, count to a hundred, water again and scrub clean. However, it’s a lot more effort on muscles I don’t use in the gym. Lower back. Gardening is hell on the lower back.

My brown garden waste bin from Hounslow Council arrived within days of me applying for it at the start of the month - I was expecting it in mid-May - and I spent the first two shots getting rid of lawn cuttings and other stuff from months ago. This week they are taking away some plant trimmings and more grass cuttings. I’m far more motivated to do an hour’s hard labour with shears and trimmers when I can dump it all in the bin and not have to drive to the Tip. This is as big a result as buying your own washing machine and never going to the launderette ever again.

Talking of launderettes, I read a book about sleeping, and it prompted me to try cleaning my duvet and pillows. These are always washed, even if you take them to a Dry Cleaner. I took one of my duvet+pillow sets to the local launderette for a service wash, and while they got the duvet right, I had to air out wone of the pillows and dry out the other one with heaters and radiators. Not going back again, but the idea is a good one. Except, it isn’t cheap. Unless you have expensive Siberian goose-down pillows, it may be cheaper simply to replace them. In cost terms, two washes = one new feather duvet.

And yes, I did the thing with the mattress and a vacuum cleaner - I have a Dyson V6 with an animal-hair brush head - and it didn’t pick up a darn thing. But then I use a mattress cover. I washed the newer one and replaced the worn one, requiring a trip into John Lewis in Kingston, something I usually try to avoid as much as possible.

And as described elsewhere, I got my little Asus back working well again. Curse Windows Update.

So that was all the exciting stuff.

Sis and I just squeezed in a supper, at Native in Neal’s Yard. The food was good, but the atmosphere was a little too casual. Quite where they found carrots that small I have no idea. I had a trip to Gulu Gulu after the gym on Payday Friday. Oh yes. I know how to live it up!

No movies. None. I finished off Angel S4.

I read Nick Littlehale’s Sleep: The Myth of 8 Hours, and I thought it had a lot of good ideas. I have definitely switched over to thinking of sleep in 90-minute (ish) cycles. Also David Ley’s The Myth of Sex Addiction, Alex Reinhart’s Statistics Done Wrong, Juan Pablo Villalobos’ I’ll Sell You A Dog, and Thomas Oliveri’s anthology Geek Art, and I finally finished Michael Rush’s textbook on Video Art.

Maintenance. Does anybody really budget for it?

But I like getting maintenance done. And I don’t mind paying for it. Which doesn’t mean I rush about finding stuff to do, but I don’t grudge it when I have to do it. It’s a form of looking after myself. It lets me know I’m not letting everything slide.

And over Easter, I ate my way through a Tre Marie Columba from Lina Stores.

Dear Captain Capitalism, Men Don't Demand Female Beauty

Aaron Clarey, aka, Captain Capitalism, is one of the smarter men out there. But he has a blind spot. Here it is again:

I have said it before, and I'll say it again, and the reason I'll do so is because it's true, but the most valuable commodity in the world is not oil or gold, silver or diamonds, copper or plutonium. The most valuable commodity in the world is female youth and beauty. And the reason why is very simple. Because it's true. No other commodity in the world is in as high of demand as female youth and beauty. And the reason why is that half the world's population (they would be men) demand it. And not only do they demand it, they demand it highly. They demand it so much that they built civilization to afford it win it over, so much so to the point we could say nearly all of human civilization and global historical GDP was created to get it.

Ummm. Nope.

Female beauty isn’t a commodity. We can use a commodity to create something of value: as wheat is used to create flour is used to create bread. Female beauty cannot be used to create anything. It has value to the woman insofar as she can use it to manipulate and gain advantages from others, but for anyone who is not having sex with her, her beauty has value in the way that art has value. People who say that art is a commodity are trolling you, not making a serious point.

Even for pimps, madams and hookers, female beauty is not a commodity. The commodity is sex. Beauty is a competitive advantage, a unique selling point.

For another thing, men do not demand female beauty. Don’t listen to what men say, look at what men do. They settle for… well, by definition, in a country where over half the women (and men) are overweight, most of them have to settle for Four and below. Sixes may be sexy and attractive, but they are not beautiful. Beautiful is above the Pretty Line, and that's a very small proportion of the 18-40 population. Three per cent or less, and in some places, it's zero per cent. And yet the guys line up to court and marry overweight, unattractive women. Lenny Bruce got it right: "You put guys on a desert island, they’ll do it to mud!"


Men don't demand youthful beauty. They fantasise about it. They have the same fantasy about Ferraris, holidays on some Pacific archipelago, getting a Knighthood, seven-figure bonuses, or any other form of fame, fortune and recognition. All these are unavailable to them, and any idea they could have any of it is a fantasy.

As the regular man grows older, the fantasy fades and he accepts what he can get. Until she divorces him, the boss sacks him, and the cost of everything goes through the roof while his salary stays the same. At that point he discovers that what he thought he was getting was as much a fantasy as dating Gigi Hadid.

What about the men who don't accept what they can get? They don't get into long-term relationships, and they sure as heck don't get married. We bachelors enjoy women's company from time to time, but she needs to meet our minimum standards for the time period involved in the interaction. (This is proportional to her hotness, logarithmically proportional to her ability to maintain a reasonable conversation, and inversely proportional to the sum of the work required to entertain and / or to to seduce her. This means that unavailable smart hotties don’t get lots of time, which makes sense, as it’s all wasted, since she’s not going to have sex with us. But I digress.)

The good Captain doesn't understand what motivates men. Neither does Rollo, who makes the same mistake. For the majority of men, women are not a reward, a status symbol, a source of validation, or a goal. They are an activity with costs and benefits, a resource with uses and hinderances. This is not an explicit calculation, by the way, it's instinctive, it's the immediate sensation of "Nah" or "Yea" when someone suggests something: we can invent reasons afterwards, but none have anything to do with that immediate reaction. It's probably a simple algorithm: we avoid the stuff that was tedious last time, and we do the stuff that was rewarding last time. Hence that overwhelming feeling that in all human affairs, you're only as good as your last (enter activity here).

The women I see, day in and out, on and in the trains, pavements, offices and shops of London don't inspire me to do anything. And I'm sure they feel the same way about my grey-haired ass. There's a brief moment in our lives when men and women matter to each other, for reasons that make no sense ten years after, and then it sinks into indifference, so we can get on with inventing gadgets, discovering medicines, building bridges and castles and sewers, solving mathematical problems, creating art, and all that other good stuff that life is really about. Babies are a by-product. Boeing 747's are the real product. Life is about business.

Things You Don't Realise They Do For The London Marathon No38 - Runner's Clothes.

My walk back to the District Line takes me through St James's Park, unless the weather is horrible or I'm feeling especially knackered. This morning, something seemed to be going on, because there were policemen everywhere and people wearing jackets, and seemingly the London Marathon was coming through St James' Park to end at Buckingham Palace. Didn't it used to end at Westminster Bridge? Then I caught sight of this...

What is going on here? I asked a friendly person with an official jacket. All those plastic bags are the runner's clothes and other equipment. All bagged up and numbered, to be collected on finishing. The things organisers have to arrange. If you had asked me, I would have said that the runners turned up at Greenwich in their running gear, and were met at Westminster by friends and family with coats and drinks. On further reflection, I would have realised that was silly, and that yes, runners would turn up in coats, tracks suits and with stuff to wear on the way home. Also food, probably. Which they couldn't leave in Greenwich.

There were a LOT of these trucks.

The front runners were arriving as I was trying to get to St James's station. What surprised me was the size of the gaps between the front runners. There might be four in one little bunch, then a thirty-second gap to a single runner, then a twenty second gap to a pair pacing each other... it wasn't a steady stream, nor a large crowd, as I suppose would have appeared an hour or so later. The elite runners really are running each in their own bubble: high performance is not social.