pumpkinstrokemarrow

After not having done it since the spurt of activity in the New Year (see, for example, 10th January), did a bullingdon today. Illustrated for any readers who may be doubtful. Note the way that the emergency bag bag (from Osprey) rides comfortably in the luggage rack provided.

Both the supporting belt from http://www.sashstomabelts.com/ and the supporting computer from Serco http://www.serco.com/ behaved themselves with this last allowing me to buy a £1 access period online without any fuss and the docking station at Vauxhall allowed me to remove a bullingdon with a similar absence of fuss. So far so good. But before you buy some shares in Serco you should know that while I could hire a bicycle OK, I could not access their home page. Although to be fair, I am not confident that this is Serco's fault as the HSBC site has been playing up today as well: has Chrome acquired a nasty from somewhere?

Headed across the junction at Vauxhall Cross to find that if one crosses the line just before the lights change you are in serious danger of being run down by traffic heading south over Vauxhall Bridge. It also took a while to reacclimatise myself to lights generally: I had forgotten how many of them there were - but I had more or less got the hang of things by the time that I rounded the shard and headed back to Waterloo. Impressed with the top of the shard where the designer has cunningly avoided coming to a point. What he has done instead works much better.

Back at the ranch took a look at one of the daily emails I am getting from TFL about olympian disturbances (on the grounds that I am a paid up member of their cycle scheme) to be pleasantly surprised by its informative and easy presentation. A good bit of page design.

But then, BH innocently wondered under what flag olympians from Northern Ireland fly. Which takes us to an extensive entry in Wikipedia which explains that sorting all this out was a troubles in microcosm with lots of unpleasantness taking years and years to sort out. However, the olympic bureaucrats more or less held to the line that national olympic committees should reflect the political facts on the ground: it was no part of the olympic mission to support or otherwise sort out subnational aspirations, a line which suited us well enough but which did not satisfy all comers from Northern Ireland. We seem to have arrived at a compromise whereby individual olympians can decide whether to go with Britain or Ireland, a compromise which just leaves the bureaucrats to sort out what to call Ireland, a term which might be taken to include the north, which would not do at all. And the paddies themselves are not keen on Eire. Lots of fun to be had by all.