🚓 What Cab News

I was rather surprised to watch Tom Hutley’s latest youtube video. Here he’s found a piece of film travelling around London in the 90s, at the time I first drove a cab. It’s remarkable how much has changed and Tom’s commentary of the changes is very surprising. Recommended.

🎧 What I’m Listening

Tom Hutley was a guest on the podcast WizzAnnCast discussing cabbie’s books – and thanks for the mention by the way – I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to start listening to Dean Warrington. A great listen if you want to understand or start The Knowledge.

📖 What I’m Reading

I’ve just finished Christopher Fowler’s The Water Room and it is a great romp around London’s [spoiler alert] underground rivers. So I thought I’d reproduce TfL’s Pride poster campaign including a fabulous map of London’s lost rivers.

📺 What I’m watching

East London Boy Jay Blades has been making a show for C4 – Britain’s Best Beach Huts, and whilst in Dorset this example amused me, with its nod to TV’s greatest comedy.

❓ What else

This diary entry from diamondgeezer made me laugh:

Tue 6: Today, as temperatures soared, I was privileged to be in attendance at London’s annual Please Carry Water With You In Hot Weather ceremony. Two members of TfL staff appeared at the far end of the Central line platform at Holborn station, the junior acolyte clutching freshly-printed rolled-up posters. The elder used his radio device to alert staff further up the line that the religious objects were ready, then handed them to a train driver for safe transfer to the next two stations. I missed the unloading ritual at Chancery Lane but at St Paul’s a member of staff graciously accepted the offering, checked that it had the sacred text “St Paul’s” scrawled on the back in pen, then processed serenely up two sets of escalators and delivered it to the control room. I imagine a prayer was said and the poster splashed with holy water, and when I came back a few hours later it was on proud display in the ticket hall.

📆 What date?

Seventy-five years ago, on 22nd July 1948, bread rationing came to an end. With Ukraine, Europe’s bread basket still at war with Putin, is Harrods’ Roquefort and Almond Sourdough Bread priced at £20 per loaf, under threat of being unavailable for us all?

🚓 What Cab News

I’ve recently received this email from British Airways: “From trips to the airport to rides across town, getting around with Uber will help you get away sooner. If you haven’t already, simply link up your Uber and British Airways Executive Club accounts.” So there you have it, flying the flag with Uber.

🎧 What I’m Listening

Listening on BBC Sounds – Fever: The Hunt For Covid’s Origin, a chaos of cover-ups, coincidences, and conspiracy theories, this is one of the biggest questions of our time: Just where did Covid-19 come from?

📖 What I’m Reading

Christopher Fowler, who has recently died, wrote a series of detective novels featuring the Met’s Peculiar Crimes Unit, led by London’s longest-serving detectives, Arthur Bryant and John May who with their wits, idiosyncratic practices and a plentiful supply of boiled sweets solve London’s most perplexing crimes. I’m reading book two (of 18) The Water Room.

📺 What I’m watching

Playing out on Drama TV is Just Good Friends, it was written by John Sullivan who was starting to write at the time Only Fools and Horses, it has all the clever hallmarks of this brilliant wordsmith.

❓ What else

I have this ritual when booking into a hotel, probably because I’ve watched too many 1970s disaster movies, the first thing I check out is the fire escapes. So when Zedwell Hotel opened “London’s first and only underground hotel experience”, I was naturally curious as to how guests could evacuate above ground onto Tottenham Court Road. The hotel is, of course, spinning this as a feature, billing itself as a place “designed to prioritise sleep, positive health, and overall wellbeing.”