Here’s something that I hoped I’d never have to write: Recently the City of London police put out an appeal to black cab drivers after a father left an urn containing his child’s ashes in the back of a cab, and cabbies responded with gusto. Unfortunately the general secretary of a London cab drivers’ trade union, responded by saying “I’m not in the slightest bit surprised… The stuff that gets left in cabs beggars belief. We’ve had babies and tens of thousands in cash.” True, but did it need to be said?
Category Archives: Thinking allowed
Protected: Right to Buy?
Buyer Beware
The latest pedicab overcharging incident saw Belgian tourist April Argenau charged £464 for a seven-minute ride from Oxford Street to the Royal Lancaster Hotel. Unlike some of the previous incidents, Argenau did look at the amount she was being charged before she paid, but “the driver refused to back down and was intimidating towards her, demanding immediate payment”.
Things I haven’t done in London
I have been a Londoner all my life, and as a cabbie, there aren’t many places in London that I haven’t been to or through. So I thought I’d look at those I’ve missed, either by design or I’ve just overlooked.
Cable Car
With the catchy new name IFS Cloud Cable Car, or Dangleway as diamondgeezer calls it, at £12 to go to the back of beyond and return to civilisation, while watching planes leave City Airport and fly towards you, seems to me a waste of 20 minutes of your life.
The Shard
From the toilet on the 68th floor, you can marvel at London’s landmarks as you gaze across the River Thames, but at £32 it seems a rather expensive way to spend a penny.
Sky Garden
At the top of the Walkie Talkie building, sorry the prosaically named 20 Fenchurch Street, is the Sky Garden and unlike much of London it’s free. If only I could organise my day better I could apply for free tickets, as it’s the only realistic way that you’d visit this gem in the City.
Churchill War Rooms
When the rear of Downing Street was bombed in an air raid which nearly killed Churchill’s cook, the Cabinet moved to this bunker in the basement of the nearby Treasury Building. After the war, this secret underground headquarters was left untouched, until Margaret Thatcher championed the initiative to get the war rooms opened to the public. After visiting Chartwell on numerous occasions, I really should visit.
Jack The Ripper Tours
Why should anyone want to discover more about a misogynistic person who preyed on vulnerable women? If there’s such an appetite for this I’m thinking of starting Dennis Nilsen tours, a necrophile who murdered at least twelve young men and boys in Muswell Hill.
Tour Bus
Designed to allow tourists to experience London’s weather, whilst wearing ponchos advertising the stagecoach’s operator seems, to me, something best left to gullible visitors.
Abbey Road Crossing
Do you really want to annoy London’s cabbies? This can’t be a more positive way to achieve that aim. I’m hardly going to join them.
Sights I’ve seen in London, and wish I hadn’t
Madame Tussauds
London Dungeon
London Eye
Tate Modern (the exhibits, not the building)
Oxford Street
Featured image: By Chiugoran – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0
Another Gutenberg ‘improvement’
I am sorry to keep on banging on about WordPress, but I have another complaint about Gutenberg.
Elon Musk decided that I cannot now reproduce my tweets on CabbieBlog’s sidebar (see 20th July Whinge), and in the course of rectifying this, I had to reorder those sidebar items (called widgets). After doing so I noticed that I’d ‘lost’ 1,000 followers in my sign-up widget, also the message thanking followers had changed. Contacting WordPress I received these words of advice:
Clear your cache
Wait and refresh
Check the widget
This last piece of advice showed I was using a ‘legacy widget’, so you might have thought with all the effort put in by Automattic the widget’s sign-up successor would be an improvement. Not so the new version, it only gives you a sign-in box. The old version changed the text depending upon if you’d sign up or not and was polite in doing so.
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