All posts by Gibson Square

A Licensed Black London Cab Driver I share my London with you . . . The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Previously Posted

Previously Posted: Zil Lanes

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For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Zil Lanes (28.12.2010)

Today’s post comes with a health warning, before reading further please hold onto something to steady yourself, or better still sit down. It has taken east Londoner Paul Charman two years using the Freedom of Information Act to bring to our attention just what we signed up for when London won the bid for the 2012 Olympics.

Don’t expect to find an available hotel room for the duration of the Games, London has to provide the International Olympic Committee (“IOC”), staff and officials with 40,000 hotel rooms including 1,800 four- and five-star hotel suites, ensuring the Dorchester, Grosvenor House and London Hilton are already booked solid, in addition an Olympic Village for athletes is being built in east London at a cost of £325 million.

Dedicated traffic lanes nicknamed “Zil Lanes” from Soviet Russia will provide 250 miles of traffic free travel, even the Royal Family doesn’t enjoy that privilege, and one lane stretches from London to Weymouth to facilitate access to the sailing events. Using those Zil Lanes (no buses, bikes or taxis allowed) will be 500 air-conditioned limos, complete with uniformed drivers.

All advertising for the duration of the Games can only contain material approved by the IOC, so unless you are a sponsor, to the Games your product may not see the light of day in London. Even spectators may not wear clothing advertising a non-Olympic sponsored brand, so forget wearing your football stripe to east London. Journalists and photographers are not allowed signage of any kind, and so if a photo-journalist used Nikon cameras presumably if Nikon is not on the approved list, tape will have to e placed over the camera’ identity. London police have to be made available to enforce any infringements to these draconian requirements, so for the duration of the 2012 Games most of London will remain a state within a state with many of our right and freedoms subservient to the requirements of the International Olympic Committee.

Every lamppost in the Capital looks to have hung from it what the IOC call pageantry, and because French is the Olympics second language expect the “pageantry” to appear in England and French.

This post can only be a taster for what is expected by the IOC, if you still have the need for more information to what London has signed up for, read the excellent article by Ed Howker and Andrew Gilligan in the Spectator.

A window on My World

December’s monthly musings

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🚓 What Cab News

From next January Uber is encouraging London cabbies to join their platform, despite this shameless company spending a decade trying, and failing, to destroy London’s black cab trade. This is the same company that has shown little regard for the well-being of its passengers. This is the company that makes a mockery of the UK tax system. This is a company that has no regard for women’s safety. This is a company that had exploited its drivers until it lost its case in court. This is also the company that has subsidised fares to the tune of billions in an attempt to bankrupt the centuries-old black cab trade. They need us to help grow their market share, and give them some kind of legitimacy. Oh! Did I mention our first court hearing suing them is in January?

🎧 What I’m Listening

London Particular (BBC Sounds) London is not one but many cities, a city of curious anomalies and dark secrets, of hidden portals to other dimensions, a city so vast and varied that the weird and the uncanny blend seamlessly with the ordinary, where the person sitting next to you on the bus, or walking beside you on the pavement, may, in fact, be a visitor from another time.

📖 What I’m Reading

Ten-Second Staircase by Christopher Fowler. I’m now on Book 4 of 20 of his Bryant and May mysteries by this quintessential author of London noir. Diagnosed with a tenacious form of cancer at the very start of lockdown, last year marked a sad premature end to the sparkiest of creative minds.

📺 What I’m watching

I’ve been watching BBC’s Planet Earth III, this beautifully filmed and meticulously researched series that has run for 20 years. What should been an uplifting programme, I’ve found depressing, 30 per cent of species have become extinct since David Attenborough started Series I. I hope my grandson’s generation does a better job than we have.

❓ What else

The Chicken and Frog Bookshop in Brentwood has shifted a few copies of my book. This great local retailer specialises in selling children’s books and teaching youngsters, which might say something about my magnum opus.

📆 What date?

100 years ago on 1st January 1924, the Met Office issued its first Shipping Forecast broadcast, at this time it was called Weather Shipping.

Thinking allowed

Happy Christmas from the Back Of Beyond

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With thousands of acres of farmland and woodland in every direction, it’s great to see this festive decoration from Sadiq, unfortunately very few will see it as it’s pretty unpopulated around this edge of London.

Puppydog tails

Johnson’s London Dictionary: Trafalgar Square Christmas Tree

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TRAFALGAR SQUARE CHRISTMAS TREE (n.) Gift from Oslo that doth is displayed in London bedecked with single rows of lights that make the specimen resemble a rocket rather than a celebration of unity at Christmas.

Dr. Johnson’s London Dictionary for publick consumption in the twenty-first century avail yourself on Twitter @JohnsonsLondon

Thinking allowed

Britain’s changing culinary habits

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Today of all days, while you’re still digesting your Christmas dinner, the last thing you want to read is about food, but here goes.

Not so long ago, Britain’s national meal was probably a roast dinner. Chicken or on special occasions a capon or turkey, likely sliced thinly and served up with plump roast potatoes and various spoonfuls of veg, all covered in thick gravy with a dollop of cranberry sauce on the side. The perfect roast dinner would be served up by Lynda Bellingham, an OXO-crumbling Mum ladling out gravy every Sunday to a smiling family sitting around a bountiful dining table.

As a change (and to give Mum a rest) on Friday nights, the national takeaway meal was fish and chips. Plump white cod fried to within an inch of its life in thick crispy batter, packed together with a mountain of greasy thick chips, unwrapped from a semi-transparent fat-stained sheet of grease-proof paper, rolled up in last week’s news. Dolled out by Dad and sprinkled liberally with brown malty vinegar and salt.

That was in the days when the family meal was a regular feature in our homes and yesterday might be the only time everyone sat down together this year.

I posted some months ago about how London’s high street is changing from a place to shop for essentials to somewhere we can graze, when my local had 24 fast food outlets since then more have arrived from a vegan ice cream parlour to a purveyor of waffles.

I blame that 1970s invention, the chicken tikka masala. A meal so convincingly Indian that legend tells it was probably invented in Glasgow. De-feathered meat from battery farm hell, already pre-chunked to save effort should you choose to hurl it all up later. The perfect chicken tikka masala would arrive in a thick liquid gloop that’d stain your carpet orange should you spill a drop, and stain your intestine orange if you didn’t.

The orange gloop spelt the end for mobile grazers, it’s not easy to walk, check out your socials and shovel rice immersed in the sauce at the same time.

Enter the Holy Grail of takeaways, Chicken-in-a-Box. It’s quick to cook, easy to get hold of, and extremely portable. It slips off the fingers with ease, and it slips down the throat in seconds. You can see the evidence on the streets – generally littered all across them. It’s Chicken-In-A-Box. And it’s everywhere, all over London you’ll find signage above these outlets, many with slightly different names, but all with a similar corporate identity.

As cheap and nasty fast food goes, there’s little to compete with Chicken-in-a-Box. In fact, our local NatWest Bank has become an outlet, who would think there’s more money to be made in selling the very dodgiest scrapings of scrawny poultry, recombined in over-salted water, and given a greasy overcoat of soggy breadcrumbs, than making money from, well money?

Naturally, this isn’t eaten in a restaurant but served with a liberal portion of thinly chopped potato sticks, similarly fat-soaked, dumped into a cardboard box and topped off with artificial squirtings of slimy red sauce. Throw in a can of sugared fizzy water for good measure and there you have a balanced meal. No wonder the nation is in the grip of an obesity crisis.

Now because this food is cheaper today than the roast dinner of our grandparents’ day, a new tradition has gripped our Nation. This ‘food’ is so indigestible that it is rarely entirely consumed, but disposed of upon the pavement for the foxes. Will we soon see overweight canines roaming our towns?

Featured image: Roasted Chicken Dinner Plate, Broccoli, Stuffing, Potatoes, Demi-Glace by Michael J. Bennett (CC-BY-SA-3.0)