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.

No room at the bin (10.04.09)

I don’t know how it happened, but I used only to put out the rubbish once a week, a simple task which took but a few minutes.

Now I have been promoted by Cabbie Wife to Chief Recycler. I spend a lot of time every week recycling rubbish. Newspapers and plastic bottles have to go in one box, but yellow pages for some inexplicable reason are unacceptable, wine bottles to go to the glass bank, not to mention leaves, cut grass and other garden waste collected separately. In the busy life of CabbieBlog it eats up between half an hour and an hour a week spent recycling.

Apparently I’m only member of the household who can perform this important task. If asked to get rid of a carton or bottle, which seldom happens, they peer at it as though they have never seen such an object before.

Millions of us have to recycle and we live in daily fear of being fined by officious council representatives for getting our bins in a muddle, putting out rubbish on a wrong day, or just putting the bins in the wrong place.

I still harbour a distant hope that in doing so I may somehow be helping the planet by ensuring that too many nasty tins and bottles aren’t buried in Britain’s green and pleasant land and thereby stopping polar bears drown in the Arctic.

According to Peter Jones, an expert on waste, who advises the Mayor of London, “the global warming impact of putting material through an incinerator five miles down the road is actually less than recycling it 3,000 miles away”. So there you have it, fewer greenhouse gases are produced if you burn rubbish locally than if you sort it and send it halfway around the world.

Now as a result of the current precarious state of the world’s economy, there is a collapse in the market value of recyclable waste and many waste disposal firms are having to stockpile paper, metals and plastics in vast warehouses because they are unable to sell them on. This means that the rubbish I spend hours struggling to sort out every day may, in fact, never be recycled because it is not economic to do so.

The Government and local councils are fully aware of the shortcomings of recycling, and yet they do not share their reservations with us. They seek to impose ever more draconian penalties. We have to do what we are told, whereas many councils do as they choose by collecting kitchen rubbish once a fortnight, as opposed to once a week, as used to be the rule. So we are bullied and intimidated and threatened by the authorities who, meanwhile, have the nerve to set aside their own traditional obligations. I have recently received a letter with a veiled threat of prosecution under the Environmental Protection Act 1990. Yet they know that recycling is a very imperfect process, and use the law to ensure that we carry it out on pain of a fine, one can only conclude that they love ordering our lives to the tiniest degree.

Most of us would cheerfully give up our time to recycle if we thought it was beneficial to the environment. But it is impossible to respect a Government that privately acknowledges the shortcomings of recycling – and whose adviser openly expresses his doubts – while it treats a small infraction in our kitchens as a crime.

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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.

My favourite things (27.12.09)

It’s that time of year when the media is crammed full of trivia, so in the Christmas tradition, here are CabbieBlog’s London favourites:

Neighbourhood: Clerkenwell; I had my first job in London in this small district populated at the time by Italians giving us great delicatessens, a catholic church and an introduction to their beautiful language. The principal industries there was watchmaking and typesetting.

Building: St. Paul’s is obscured by other buildings, so the best place to see it is from Bankside on the other side of the Thames, then cross by Millennium Bridge and climb to the top, and don’t forget to visit the crypt.

View: No problem choosing this one, Waterloo Bridge in the evening. Wordsworth got it wrong when he wrote Upon Westminster Bridge:
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear

Nice sentiment, wrong bridge. But to be fair to Bill, Waterloo wasn’t built then, Ray Davis was right though, with Waterloo Sunset.

Open Space: Hampstead Heath, the highest point in London, with its varied landscape and nutcases swimming in its famous ponds.

Interesting Shop: Pollock’s Toy Museum and shop in Scala Street near Goodge Street. A fascinating collection of toys from a bygone era.

Bar/Pub/Restaurant: Bar Italia on Frith Street, Soho, for the best cappuccino north of the Alps, their espresso machine is over 50 years old and still going strong. Open 24 hours a day, they just kick you out into the street when they want to clean the place. Or for a slightly upmarket tea try Claridges, good value, superb service and no tourists.

London book/film/documentary: London Sight Unseen by Snowdon. I was bought this book a few years ago. Snowdon travelled all over the capital photographing anything unusual or fascinating that caught his photographer’s eye. Or watch the play “The Knowledge” by the late Jack Rosenthal a brilliant comedy about becoming a cabbie.

London street/road/square: Queen Anne’s Gate. Unlike her statute outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, this exquisite little turning which takes its name from the aforementioned queen, encapsulates Georgian London, go there and be amazed that there are still places left in London like this, just don’t tell those modern architects, they’ll want to develop it.

Londoner: Thomas Coram although born in Lyme Regis, Dorset and spent much of his early life at sea and in the American colonies he’s an adopted Londoner. He later became a successful merchant in London, as a great philanthropist Coram was appalled by the many abandoned, homeless children living in the streets of London. On 17 October 1739, he obtained a Royal Charter granted by George II establishing a “hospital for the maintenance and education of exposed and deserted young children.” Visit the Foundling Museum near the children’s playing fields which take his name, just don’t go into the playground next door, you must be accompanied by a minor.

Period: 1650-1720 This is the time when London was brought to its knees after the Great Fire of London, yet within decades London was reborn as the greatest city in the world, in addition to surviving civil war, plague, drought and bankruptcy. It’s a time when London gave rise to a generation of extraordinary men: Sir Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, John Locke, John Evelyn and Nicholas Barbon.

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.

My Enlarged Hippocampus (21.03.09)

London Black Cab drivers are renowned for being ultra-brainy: we are expected to memorise the routes of up to 25,000 different roads in the capital, along with places of interest, important buildings, miscellanea, and we are not given a licence until we have demonstrated we have “The Knowledge”. And boy, can we talk politics and solve the world’s wrongs! With 70 per cent of trainees dropping out along the way and some Knowledge “boys” taking up to five years to qualify. Although your blog author only took 4 years 10 months and 13 days, I wasn’t counting!

Scientists have now discovered that cab drivers have a strong internal sense of direction that in many people is absent. The scientists found the brain area known as the hippocampus was larger than average in cabbies. This area of the brain starts firing neurons like mad as their cab driver owners ruminate on what route to take from A to B.

Researchers at the Wellcome Trust put dozens of cabbies in a brain scanner, asked them to play a computer game recreating London streets and then analysed their brain activity.

“The hippocampus is crucial for navigation and we use it like a ‘satnav’,” Dr Hugo Spiers of the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience at University College London told the BA Festival of Science in Liverpool. “London taxi drivers have powerful innate satnavs, strengthened by years of experience.”

He identified three types of cells behind the satnav effect: place cells map our location, direction cells tell us which way we are facing and grid cells how far we have travelled.

In addition, it is said that if you can drive in London, you can drive anywhere. One notable London cabbie was Fred Housego an ordinary working-class London Taxi Driver who won the BBC TV programme Mastermind, normally populated by posh lecturers and civil servants, with his amazing memory for random general knowledge, and his ability to memorise his chosen subject for study.

A recent study also found that an enlarged hippocampus might be the reason why people with dementia might not show signs of the condition. “A larger hippocampus may protect these people from the effects of Alzheimer’s disease-related brain changes,” announced Deniz Erten-Lyons, MD, with Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, at the American Academy of Neurology 60th Annual Meeting in Chicago.

So you see CabbieBlog has an amazing brain compared to the rest of humanity, or has Alzheimer’s and is unaware of it . . . now where DID I put my glasses!

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.

Max Miller’s Goodbye (21.07.09)

It’s hard to believe now but once, and I’m afraid you will have to take my word for this, once Leicester Square was a rather splendid public space. But in 1936 town planners decided to steal a march on Hitler and start destroying London first.

The old Alhambra Theatre was a prime site for ‘redevelopment’.

Max Miller who at the time was probably the most famous entertainer in England, heard it was being demolished he went along for the last look at the building he’d performed on many occasions.

When he arrived at lunchtime on hearing that the famous stage was about to be taken down he climbed on the boards and gave the workmen a hilarious one-hour performance. Ten minutes after he’d finished, the stage was gone for ever.

Near the end of his life he confessed that his proudest professional moment was as he put it “closing the old Alhambra”.

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.

Man’s best friend (16.03.09)

Dogs are called Man’s Best Friend and this week’s blog is an excuse to include a picture of cabbie.blog.com’s best friend.

Cute they may be, but not so appealing for some motorists.

According to the vehicle breakdown service, the RAC, dogs are the most frequent animal offenders and several have managed to shut their owners out of their vehicles on garage forecourts by activating the locks with their paws. Its patrols have also attended incidents where dogs had swallowed car keys and damaged vehicles by chewing the wires and steering wheels.

Animals are also to blame for other incidents. One patrol was called out to a car that wouldn’t start to discover a family of rats living in the fuse box, where they had chewed through all the wires. Another patrolman had a more traumatic day; he had to fix a van taking an alligator to a zoo. Another speedy patrol helped restart a transporter taking a cheetah to a zoo before it was dinner time!

A kitten being driven to his new home panicked on arrival and escaped into the dashboard of the vehicle. The entire dashboard had to be dismantled. Similar call-outs involved snakes, mice and hamsters hiding within the vehicle.

A particular favourite of mine involves a patrolman opening the back of a broken-down van to be startled on finding 17 pairs of eyes staring back at him belonging to a cast of falcons.

Another RAC member was mystified as to why he couldn’t unlock his car and, on arrival, the patrol had to point out that he was trying to get into the wrong vehicle.

One motorist had more money than sense when he managed to lock £80,000 in cash inside his boot.

One in three of the motoring organisation’s patrols also reported that they had arrived at a call-out to find amorous couples in the broken down vehicle.

A survey of its patrols found 39 per cent had helped a motorist get to a life-changing event, such as getting to a wedding on time and one even reported helping to deliver a baby.

RAC patrol person of the year Iain Vale said: “Our patrols respond to around 2.7 million roadside assistance call-outs every year and this survey reveals the extent of the very odd and unusual nature of what sometimes awaits us. Whether it’s meeting members who keep their dog’s ashes in an urn in the car, calls asking whether they can extend breakdown cover to their electric wheelchairs, or a new kitten that’s panicked and hidden in the dashboard, we get our hands dirty.”

The RAC’s other bizarre call-outs included:

A hapless groom nearly didn’t marry his bride when he locked the wedding rings in his car.

A £30,000 violin had to be rescued by a RAC patrol from a jammed seat belt so that its owner could get to a concert in time.

One RAC patrol rescued a referee on his way to a football match just hours before the game was due to kick off.

Another patrol rescued a police car, stuck up to its windows in mud having chased a runaway criminal across a ploughed field.

Fat Cats

Don’t worry about the collapse of the banks, the credit crunch and the looming recession, this is really serious stuff. The Department for Environmental, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), has just published a report that puts all these other problems in the shade.

Owners of fat cats and obese dogs could be fined up to £20,000 or jailed under these new controversial Government rules! No, it’s not a wind-up and I’m not having a laugh, it goes into detail to remind pet owners of their responsibilities under the new law.

It tells owners to provide “entertainment” ad “Mental stimulation” for pets, making sure upstairs windows are “cat-proofed” to stop animals from falling out and to avoid taking dogs for a walk in the hottest part of the day. Pet owners should also ensure that they give animals a suitable place to live and “somewhere to go to the toilet”.

So don’t forget, the next time your cat or dog is looking bored, entertain them with a song and allow them to join in the family quiz for their mental stimulation. And if your dog asks to go “walkies” and it’s hot outside, just lead him into his private toilet. I shudder to think just how much of the taxpayer’s money has been spent on this patronising and ridiculous Bill that assumes all pet owners are dopey.