Getting the hump over speed bumps, and other stories

Here we go again. Your 40-year-old pushbike and the 71-year-old lump of fat, bone and gristle pedalling it like mad (aka me) almost take off as we hit one of those stupid mini-speed-bumps on Silverthorne Road, at what for us is quite a decent speed.

If you think the idea of having two bumps, one in each lane, is to spare cyclists from the often quite dangerous jarring they get from these escarpments in nearly every residential street in inner London, think again.

No, it's more to allow ambulances and cop cars a smooth passage if they're having to proceed at high speed. Trouble is every other driver also knows they can give their fabulously fast and manoeuverable vehicles a quick flick around these obstacles, meaning anyone on two wheels has to be very watchful as said cars swerve into their paths.

But should we abolish speed humps? Of course not. They're absolutely essential to protect the lives and limbs of those foolish enough to be traversing these rights of way on foot or in pram or pushchair, wheelchair, scooter, bicycle or tricycle.

What rankles is that the bumps are ONLY necessary because drivers are too arrogant,  too infantile and too selfish to stick to the legal speed limits. 

Also, it's apparent some cars are now able to zoom over a whole series of the humps without wallowing at all. Maybe makers have tinkered with suspension to enable this? It's certainly not true for long low sports cars and boy racers: there's so often a delightful scrunching sound as they nose-dive into the tarmac, scraping their soft and expensive bellies on the hard stuff.

Many of these bumps are steep enough to launch the unwary cyclist into unexpected aerial acrobatics. They are just a pain in the arse for other road users, but they are positively dangerous for us. 

They also result in many drivers choosing the few roads kept free of speed bumps for the sake of emergency service vehicles. Trouble is I live on such a road and notice that barely a single private car adheres to the 20mph limits. A majority seem to exceed that by a factor of two; some three; and some even four.

So, what about using all this digital surveillance stuff to do some good road safety work?

Here's the boring rest of menu stuff:

1. Corsodyl tooothpaste.  Used to buy this as was only one that seemed to be unsweetened. Now they sell the "Original" with a "new improved taste". Well, if it has a new flavour it cannot any longer be the original. And the "improvement" turns out to be a noticeably sweeter and therefore to me quite disgusting new paste. Why do they force-feed sweetness, whether from sugars or synthetics, onto the British consumer? Obvious: profit for sugar companies, sweetener manufacturers, and the extortionate dentists who will later be dealing with the literal fall-out.

2. BBC radio trails: Still love the BBC for all its failings, but the noisy trails between almost every programme drive some of us mad. So often they seem to involve shouty sportspeople. Surely they know not all listeners to Radio 4 or 3  or even local stations are fans of such stuff? It's also odd that promotional stuff on BBC TV is so much more careful and sometimes even delightful, though even here we see the gradual invasion of Hollywood-style sound editors. And most of the promotional trails and jngles on local radio - even Radio London - are downright embarrassing. You can feel some of the more grown-up presenters wincing as they have to punctuate their sometimes very good programmes with these inane interruptions.

3. Beep beep! Drivers' ever-increasing willingness to blast everyone else (but especially cyclists) with their ridiculously powerful air-horns or hooters. This has been covered in painful length in earlier posts on this site, passim.

4. Idiot wind - the petrol-driven leaf-blower: A curse and a menace that is still rising as more of the recently-created gated private residential developments are completed. The racket of a Monday morning is unbearable. Often as not it's a bloke chasing two or three leaves around a small patch of expensive paving slabs, the turning and parking area of a new block of luxury apartments (which should by law have remained as grass and trees, but never does in this strange inner-London borough.) Electric versions are available: why not make the two-stroke stinkers illegal?

5. Flying ants in sporty pants: The visual pollution of the first sunny days of spring, when the male yuppies strip down to shorts, flip-flops etc and cover the local parks like pale maggots on rotting meat. Actually, since Covid they seem to have been wearing those shorts all year round, along with white trainers, white socks and and padded  gilets over sporty shirts - de rigeur gear for non-office days it seems. They go with the brutal squaddie-style half-scalp-razorings which might look good on a Brazilian footballer but not so hot on a pale pink City boy.

6. It used to be small is beautiful. That's all gone. Now, big is always better in Obese Britain. Another example - it's getting hard to find normal-sized baskets, notably in budget supermarkets Lidl and Aldi. They seem to be replacing them with dumper-sized baskets on wheels, with a little handle so shoppers can trundle them around the crowded aisles like all those ghastly wheelie-bin suitcases at Gatwick. These bigger baskets are worse than the massive trolleys, which are at least properly manoeuverable. They block aisles, trip other shoppers up, and generally make the shopping experience even more miserable than it needs to be.

Amen.

So which supermarket is really the best value? All of them, isn't it obvious?

Happy to add to the gale of derision which met the Which? survey finding that Sainsbury's is the UK's cheapest supermarket.

Anyone who belongs to that spectral army of austerity-stricken citizens hanging on in there on scraps of income from McJobs, freelance gig economy zero-fun contracts, swindler-sold private pension schemes, shrivelled benefits etc, knows that dear old J Sainsbury is far from the best value place to do your shop.

We have to shop around.

At least in the cramped suburbs of London the less-well-off can easily visit all the big name supermarkets in a short time to compare prices.

I am part of an anonymous circle of bargain-hunters who trace ceaseless circuits from Aldi to Asda to Tesco to Morrisons (Camberwell branch, as you ask) to Iceland and of course to Sainsburys and even on occasion, just for a laugh, to Waitrose.

Laugh? You have to, unless you'd rather cry. You heard, supermarkets are one of the few places an alarming proportion of the UK's population get any form of social interaction. It's usually just "How are you today?" "Fine thanks. And you?" And that can be enough.

Please don't ask us to do our comparisons online. The best thing about in-real-life shopping is the realisation that store managers are still human, and therefore unpredictable. Well, some of them.

Of course we nearly always end up buying most of the regular stuff at Lidl, which remains the cheapest, and surprisingly often the best quality (if you don't believe me, compare their fresh garlic with the miserable little things at Tesco, etc).

There's an obvious rule: avoid the "local" branches of all these places if at all possible. If you have time, it is possible.

But - look again. The Which? survey was based (mysteriously so far as I am concerned) on a basket of branded goods.

Madness. Why buy Mr Kipling cakes, when they're over twice the price of the German supermarket rip-off?

Well, I couldn't be bothered anyway, as I  subsist on cheap red wine,  nuts, spinach, oatcakes, bananas,  olive oil, garlic and the cheapest French, Spanish and Italian cheeses anywhere in the EU (may god preserve it). Mostly from Lidl, Aldi and Asda.

(Aldi, however, entails a sortie further south, until recently al the way to Tooting Broadway. Now there's a new one two stops closer, on Balham High Road, occupying the space vacated last year by Poundland).

For some reason I am always cheered by the high visibility of The Morning
 Star when you walk into Sainsbury's Clapham branch. Shop on, comrades!

Perversely, I do still go to Sainsburys on Clapham High Street quite a lot. This branch has a good feel to it. The first thing I usually see there is the Morning Star, displayed prominently on the newspaper rack: I love this fact.

In truth, Sainsbury's is not cheap, their discounts are rather mean, but they do regular 25 per cent off six bottles o' wine deals.  And if you take full advantage of Nectar cards and the occasional promotions, you can walk away feeling un-ripped-off. And their own brand sardines in olive oil are great.

Most of us cheapskate shoppers could use supermarket pricing policies as our special subject on Mastermind. I know the different approaches of Sainsbury, Tesco and other branch managers to cutting prices of fresh produce near closing time - though, mercifully, this practice is diminishing as more of the big stores donate their short-life stock to local food banks.

So, on we go, the hunter-gatherers of the SW postcodes swarm around that golden parallelogram.
At its western extremity, the shining duo of Asda and Lidl at Clapham Junction.

Ah, Asda. Now that it's owned by US retail monster, WalMart, perhaps we should avoid it. But this branch offers such a fine range of interesting food and drink, at good prices.  The staff are sweet as sweet, amazingly given the dastardly tricks of their employers.

But why does this store go to such lengths to deter cyclists?  It was built in the 80s, when the car was still king. It has a two-level car park (currently being re-surfaced). There is no way of penetrating it by bike without dismounting, carrying your bike down the steps from Lavender Hill entrances or up the travelator from the car park.

Retail fortress? Asda at Clapham Junction: a good value store once you get
inside - but what an uninviting prospect for anyone NOT arriving by car.

Their tiny bike-rack area does offer the compensation of fitted carpets. Does that swing it for you?

No. So more and more often we visit the nearby Lidl instead.

At the north eastern extremity - a 15 minute spin or 87/77 busride over Lavender Hill and Wandsworth Road - is the big Sainsburys at Nine elms.

This used to be a delightful meeting place: shoppers flocked here from Battersea, Stockwell, Oval, Clapham and beyond. But now it has been re-developed, engulfed by the ugly apartment blocks of the new Nine Elms, the shop itself raised to a first-floor, stuffy trading hall.

The strange magic of that 1980s shop has gone. It is now thoroughly unpleasant, unless, I suppose, you arrive by car - but who designs inner-London supermarkets to meet the needs of motorists in 2020? Answer: Sainsburys. It has a car park on the ground floor, just as bad as the Lavender Hill Asda (but that one has the excuse that it was built in the 80s).

So. We migrate south, to the Tesco on Acre Lane and the conveniently close Lidl; or the smarter, bigger Lidl near Stockwell tube station. I used also to go to Tesco on Kennington Lane, near Vauxhall: a lovely bread counter. For a long while I avoided the Tesco at Clapham South, as it is housed in the old women's hospital, which closed only after long public protests.

Now - shame on me - I can be found there, on occasion, popping two bottles of Tesco Sangiovese into my rucksack, two for £9. It's good Italian wine.

Enough of this blogger's impotent rage! It's time to celebrate surviving another year in south London with cheap cake and our favourite local podcaster!

The year is nearly out. I know this because  Panettone is on sale in Lidl, and one of the most loyal readers of this blog is once again offering the best audible - as opposed to edible - Advent Calendar your ears will ever be lucky enough to be plugged into.

So before I embark on the standard moan about what an even lousier year it has been - let's just hear it for cheap Panettone and Daniel Ruiz Tizon's fantastic podcasts. These two seemingly unrelated phenomena must surely force me to think again before consigning the whole of the Modern World to fire and damnation.

I enjoyed the Advent Calendar so much that I wrote a post on this blog in praise of it, and, listening just now to the fabulous 16th December episode (The Kindness of Strangers), I would say, without hesitation, that you'd be crazy not to listen to all of it! It's also good to see that Daniel's also working on new material for his Café Chronicles on Resonance FM - a Christmas Eve special goes out at 8pm on the 24th.

This excellent south London podcaster is also one - possibly the only - regular reader of this blog. He often gives us a favourable mention on his twitter feed, and often enjoys pointing out how few and far between are the posts. He has even, on a couple of occasions,  referred to me as the Greta Garbo-like recluse of this hellish world of online writers.

He's right, of course - there's no way a blog can flourish on one post every four or five months.

The thing is, I write dozens of pieces for every one I publish. The abandoned majority are nearly always ill-considered rants. The impotent rage of an elderly remnant of a pampered generation: one who never moved on from the trauma of the 1979 General Election.

It happens like this. I go somewhere, I see something outrageous, something that really gets my blood boiling, and on the way home I compose a searing diatribe that will surely draw full attention to the menace in question (it is usually some form of motorised road-user).

Trouble is, when I'm finally staring at the laptop screen, those wonderful armour-piercing chains of words have all blown away, and become just a harmless puff of hot gas....and there's nothing worse than a half-baked rant. But I try, and the evidence is there in blogger archive: hundreds of unpublished outbursts.

The headlines of a few recent spiked stories give a flavour of my bile-fuelled year of rage:

– Nine Elms' Sainsbury tower block fails to win 2018 Carbuncle Cup:  we wuz robbed!
– F.a.o truck owners: if you really can't see what's between you and the pavement, how come your vehicle's allowed on the road?
– Nine reasons to regret US decision to build Embassy in Nine Elms
– The dismal decline of London's listings magazines
– Blinded by the light: why are modern car headlamps so dangerously dazzling?
– Anyone able to squeeze out a tear for the stalled developers of Chelsea Barracks?
– Out on the streets I'm calling it murder: souped-up cars are the new lethal weapons of choice
– SUV drivers! Since when did it stop being a crime to honk your horn merely to express your arrogance?
– Confusion every which way: the bonkers new cycle-superhighway systems at Stockwell, Vauxhall Cross and Elephant and Castle...
– and so on, blah, blah, bloody blah.......

It was while writing the last one - provisional headline, "To the bloke in a tight white shirt and red-and-grey tie, driving a metallic grey Audi A8, at Clapham Common at 5.05 yesterday afternoon, who honked at the Nissan Micra in front because it was waiting for an elderly disabled person cross the High Street: learn some bleedin' patience, fatso! " - that I realised that the headline itself said it all, and I should stop writing these things until I could control my rage a bit better.

So, I have spared you from even having the chance to glimpse these bitter words. Anger, I now realise, is not enough: it is not a useful basis for a blog or for any other form of expression. I never really much liked hard-core punk music for the same reason. The Angry Young Men of 1950s Britain? Just a bit too pleased with their own righteous manly bristling for my liking. As for The Who smashing their instruments - that was just plain stupid.

So even though it has truly been a terrible year for so many people,  and although I really have witnessed many, many more incidents of extreme and unprovoked anger and selfishness and even violence on the streets of south London this year than in any previous one, I think it is a good idea to swallow my bile for once.

Instead, please join me in enjoying a slice or two of Lidl's £3.29 De Luxe Panettone, a few glasses of cheap white wine (Prosecco, if you insist) and get listening to that Advent Calendar! No better way to get through these strange bleak days.

And one 2019 resolution: I will start writing more regular, less negative items for Microgroove. Oh yes I will.....