Strange but true: many shoppers actually prefer self-checkout (and other weird reports from south London's retail frontline)

 Asda, Clapham Junction, on a busy Sunday afternoon, last week or any other time of year.

There's a huge queue of  mainly young people - the type who  used to be called yuppies but who might now be called gen Z-ers or whatever - waiting to use the self-check out tills. 

Most wearing sports kit of some sort or other, some clutching multi-packs of beer, energy drinks and crisps. Maybe hoping to get them home before some big match kicks off on tv.

Clutching my own haul of bananas, pitta bread, and a kilo of Lancashire Farm yogurt, I am  surprised and happy to find much shorter queues at the two or three remaining real check-outs, with a human being at the till. The further you walk from the exit, the shorter the queue. I am through in three minutes, and have a brief chat with the check-out person into the bargain.

If you think this was a freak inversion of normal experience, think again. Over the past year  I've benefitted from this phenomenon dozens of times. Not just in Asda, but all the supermarkets I ever use, even the Germans. 

Sainsburys on Clapham High Street is, at certain times of day, a reliable example. This medium-size supermarket is where two separate SW4 demographics meet but never coalesce. Well-off, youngish professionals rub shoulders with mainly less well-off residents of nearby social housing estates.

In the former group, the young men _– sports shorts and sporting that uniquely unattractive hairstyle of the moment – were joining an already  massive queue for the self-checkout tills. 

Perhaps they don't even realise that there are two or three human check-out tills at the back of the store. Here are much shorter queues, often old people (like me) who have an instinctive dislike of machines that tell you off.  Also people who for whatever reason don't have debit or credit cards let alone mobile phone payment apps.

Not saying these yuppie types are bad or unpleasant people - simply that their upbringing and London lifestyles seems to turn them against engaging with "others" (ie not their sort) in the flesh. Maybe some are scarred by Covid (but these are surely the ones who rarely even go out to shop, but stay home and  have everything, even a single bottle of Heinz Tomato ketchup, delivered to their door). 

This is perhaps a trivial example of a deeper, longer-term change in behaviour. Reluctance to even think of wasting time, and assuming that anything involving touch-screen technology is bound to be quicker and more efficient than the old ways. The terrible risk of becoming engaged in small talk with some grubby old man in the queue (that's me, obviosuly). Getting stuck behind the mum with a clutch of lively kids, who's having problems with her Nectar vouchers; being silently judged by others for your purchase of a twelve-pack of lager and those tubes of crisps (that's just my prejudice talking).

Or maybe it's just herd instinct - seeing a long queue of your type of people, and joining it.

Long may this phenomenon persist as it means other shoppers can enjoy a bit of human interaction and get throuhg more quickly.

But self-checkout continues to expand, with many smaller branches rarely having any staffed tills. The retailers prefer machines to people; they are so much cheaper. 

Another trend seems to subliminally encourage people to buy more.  Two or three of the shops I used to use have now got rid of nearly all the small baskets in favour of enlarged, deformed plastic baskets with wheels and handles.  

These new contraptions block aisles and other shoppers trip over them. They're just as annoying as the flotillas of wheeled suitcases that trundle across the departure zones of all big railway stations, airports, etc. 

But they're there, and everyone except me and a few other stubborn users of old-school baskets, have accepted them.

Reminder to self: you are just a relic of a bye-gone age. Don't worry about these things!

Context: First versions of this post were written soon after the covid lockdowns, when shoppers were still re-learning the rules of social interaction. Like the majority of stuff written for this blog, I didn't publish, thinking it too trivial and subjective, too much reeking of prejudice.

Ironically, the day I chose to put it out into the open air, large numbers of kids were dropping into supermarkets on Clapham High Street and avoiding all the check-outs, whether self or staffed. These end of term disturbances  on Saturday and Tuesday seemed to me like a bigger version of what happens on that stretch of the high street every school day at abut 4pm, when bunches of demob-happy kids crowd around bus-stops and the fast-food outlets. Similar surges have been seen all over London over recent years. 

The location - one of the most dismal High Streets in London – sees diferent but equally disturbing displays of anti-scoial behaviour every Friday and Saturday evening, when the ya-hoo stag and hen night crowds descend. It's  like a laboratory experiment for sociologists. That big shiny new M & S oppostie Sainsburys is emblematic of the Clapham disease. The shop is for well-heeled young professionals with lots of cash but not much time. I wonder if that space had been taken over by Lidl instead of M & S, would we have seen such enthusiastic crowds of non-paying customers on Tuesday evening? 

 

No, I don't have a "smart speaker" at home. And I never will, thanks very much.

What is the four-word sequence most often repeated across all BBC radio stations?

I don't have proof for this, but I'd say the phrase that has struck my much-abused eardrums more than any other over the past two years is, "ask your smart speaker..."

This message is repeated so regularly, and with such urgency, across so many stations (I've even heard versions of it on Radio 3 recently) that I can't help feeling someone at the BBC is on extremely good terms with some consumer electronics suppliers.

Why else would they be urging us to use these mysterious products? Surely if we're already listening to BBC local radio, Radio 4, or whatever, you don't need a "smart" anything to find it again? My sad experiences with any other "smart" technology (ie, phones) suggests the clever speaker would almost certainly serve up the wrong channel and refuse to find what I really wanted.

I do remember, well over a decade ago, being invited round to drinks with some former neighbours who wanted to show off their latest gadget - a sound system with "Alexa", an early version of this smart speaker craze. The entertainment we would have asking Alexa to find some obscure piece of music, then crying with laughter at the unlikely alternatives it played for us, lasted for roughly the first bottle of wine. And that was it. 

I could not then imagine that, all these years later, I would be driven mad being urged, every half hour or so,  to ask one of these devices to find one of three stations I listen to most often. 

I might of course ask it to find me the most recent edition of Point of View featuring a favourite such as Will Self or A L Kennedy. Would it tell me the BBC scrapped this gem of a programme over a year ago? Never has ten minutes of radio airtime been more intelligently used than in many of those broadcasts. I suppose the speaker would just send me to the well-stocked BBC Sounds archive. But it ain't the same....

Oh well, just another topic for endless grouchiness in this and other outlets. Further miserabilist rants are in the pipeline.

Meanwhile, no. I don't have a smart speaker, and I am determined never to have one.

This post was written in spring 2023, when these blatant plugs for "smart speakers" were already annoying interruptions to listening on some BBC radio stations. One of the main culprits was BBC Radio London, but it's clear the same promos are playing out on local radio all round the UK. 

No doubt the BBC feels it has to promote itself this way because so many more people are using these voice-activated audio devices. Alongside this, more BBC radio content is being re-packaged as "podcasts" for BBC Sounds online.

Has anyone noticed how some presenters are now poking gentle fun at smart speakers?

That's what I love about the crazy BBC.

A new demographic marker - when Lime bikes descend like swarms of locusts

 Lime bikes are getting people's backs up in all parts of town, mainly for being thoughtlessly dumped on narrow pavements, blocking entrances, 

Here we're generally pro-bike, so it seems a shame to come down on these rental contraptions. But, apart from being a blot on the landscape (a grim achievement, given the beauty of a simple bicycle) and sometimes being ridden by dangerously careless or clueless individuals, these bikes are also a particular menace for other cyclists all over town.

For example, the racks for normal cycles outside most tube and rail stations in the most yuppified parts of London. (Sticking with the word yuppy for its perfect associations with young "professional" incomers to London, with plenty of money but little interest in the communities they barge into. The current use of Gen Z or X or Millennials seems ageist, too vague and too generalised).

You couldn't get more neo-yuppy than Clapham South, and that's where, at certain times, you'll see huge clusters of rental bikes around the station entrance. Trouble is those bikes are very heavy and very difficult to lug around, especially as they're locked/immobilised until you rent one. So you have to hunt for accessible bike parking.

Ironic to see full racks of Santander bikes about 30 yards down the road. 

I've never seen such a profusion of green, black and white plastic in other parts of town, but all around here they appear suddenly at some puzzling location, maybe near a new shop or café, where they're dumped and I suppose forgotten until the Lime collector does its rounds, if there is such a thing?

I've never tried one of these, mainly because they require use of a smartphone (I think).  I've tried Boris bikes and their equivalents in other European cities, and was generally impressed with their robustness and simplicity. But these were not electric-assisted and thus lighter (but still heavy by my standards).

As for Lime and their rivals, well it seems their time could be up. They are so dangerous for so many reasons. Brent Council is likely to be first to ban them unless they promise to provide designated parking places. But that would be very expensive to provide and also reduce their attractiveness to lazier commuters.

Only recently realised that the people taking phone snaps of these bikes are probably not bike-spotters but are taking them as evidence of where they dropped the thing. Oh, how very 2024, yee-euch.

*Why, why, why...why are we sleeping?

So why quote this line from the 1968 Soft Machine track?

The lyric was typical of its time, a lysergic bad dream, intoned in Kevin Ayers' dark chocolate voice. But that insistent chorus, which builds in urgency through the song, has been ringing in my ears all the time recently. 

Why is no-one apparently awake to the havoc that these orgies of fossil fuel-burning is causing?

The final straw for me was reading a piece in the ailing London Evening Standard (that reliable source of blood-pressure-popping entitled people's waffle) by the sister of former PM Boris, that is Rachel Johnson. 

It's a typically breezy 600 words or so on how much she's hating our non-existent summer and oh, if only she could blame someone for it.

You could dismiss it as just another inconsequential filler if it wasn't (a) on the main comment page of this august publication and (b) so annoyingly missing the glaringly obvious answers. She asks this question, time after time: "I can't think who to blame for this summer. Who to sue".

Is she being deliberately disingenuous? I mean, sue the manufactuers of gas-guzzling SUVs for a start. The ones I see ferrying Wimbledon tennis stars and VIPs around traffic clogged SW London, by the way.

Well, we really ask you, Rachel. Because you really do know.  We're all to blame. Have you not heard of the climate crisis, of the tilting of the Atlantic jetsream, of our being condemned wet, windy summers (and springs, etc) while most of the planet burns or drowns? We need to sue - ie tax - ourselves, and spend all the money on alternative energy sources.

As if to underscore our collective gormlessness, news had just been released showing higher than expected IC car sales last year and a return to almost pre-covid levels of  tourist air traffic.

How can we thus be surprised when we shiver through the spirng and summer months, and are buffeted by endless Atlantic storms. 

Maybe you only notice when cycling through a city like London, negotiating apppaling congestion, inching the narrow bike between very wide and shiny SUVs. Despite many electric vehicles, the air is heavy with the stench of cars, the extremely hot exhalations of their AC, mixed up with burning chip fat from costcutter delivery vans.

All of this, even into the ULEZ and congestion-charge zones. And, it's even worse in the traffic jams of outer London.

It's just a small example of how the West remains in denial of the mess it has created on this planet. The West, all the former imperialist European states, the UK above all, North America, Australasia. We no longer seem to want to know about the onoging climate disaster, largely caused by our greedy consumption of all the wealth we could dig out of our earth, and the earth of the colonised regions.

We'd rather sleep now. Who wouldn't? 

Maybe I should be more charitable toward Rachel Johnson? I mean, there's a place for frothy, amusing writing in the most austere publications. She probably tossed that piece off in a few minutes, and you never know what the subs will pick out for a headline. But no, she's no starving hackette, no unpaid intern or desperate freelancer. And this piece really wasn't at all funny.

The Evening Standard is said to be in its last few weeks as a daily newspaper. One of the main causes of its decline is said to be the provision of wi-fi on London's underground network, so that commuters can get all the news & entertainment they require via their cursed i-Phones. It's true you now see unclaimed stacks of the freesheets at every tube station.

Like almost every other printed form of news, the Standard  has long been the plaything of billionaire owners. Perhaps this is not all bad. At least there'll be less need for unsustainable forestry methods to produce so much newsprint. 

* Why Are We Sleeping first appeared on Soft Machine's first LP ("The Soft MAchine") released in 1968. The writing credits are to Kevin Ayers, Mike Ratledge and Robert Wyatt

Here's a YouTube link: Soft Machine _ Why Are We Sleeping?

And here are the lyrics:

It begins with a blessing, it ends with a curse
Making life easy by making it worse
"My mask is my master", the trumpeter weeps
But his voice is so weak, as he speaks from his sleep

Saying: "Why, why, why...
Why are we sleeping?"

People are watching, people who stare
Waiting for something that's already there
"Tomorrow I'll find it", the trumpeter screams
And remembers he's hungry, and drowns in his dreams

Saying: "Why, why, why...
Why are we sleeping?"
"Why, why, why...
Why are we sleeping?"

My head is a nightclub with glasses and wine
The customers dancing or just making time
While Daevid is cursing, the customers scream
Now everyone's shouting, "Get out of my dream!"
Saying: "Why, why, why...
Why are we sleeping?"

It begins with a blessing, it ends with a curse
Making life easy by making it worse
"My mask is my master", the trumpeter weeps
But his voice is so weak, as he speaks from his sleep

Saying: "Why, why, why...
Why are we sleeping?"

Editor's Non-Apology:

Given that this blog was originally supposed to be about music on vinyl, cassette, etc, I thought the use of this 56-year-old song was allowable. In fact, maybe this lyric is not so unrelated to the story. Thus, "making life easy by making it worse"....hm, isn't that exactly what we've been doing for too long? If I find any other old or new song titles that seem to fit blog posts, I'll use them!

Dear Paris, please would you lend us your mayor for a few years?

Having banned traffic from the north bank of the Seine, and reduced the scourge of SUVs in the
centre,  Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris, enjoys a ride in the city she has made safer for cyclists and pedestrians

Less than two weeks to the London mayoral election and the gap between incumbent Sadiq Khan and Tory candidate Susan Hall is shrinking. Given Hall's murky record, it's shocking to think she might grasp control of one of the world's most ethnically diverse cities. 

A booklet - "My vote doesn't count" - arrived by post the other day. It's the GLA's official primer on the election, complete with self-penned blurbs by those Mayoral candidates willing to stump up the £10,000 fee. 

That money buys them two pages and the right to say whatever they like, so long as it's legal. 

Eleven of the 13 candidates decided to avail themselves of this free speech opportunity. Sadly there's no statement from Count Binface (was hoping they might offer a solution to London's renegade wheelie bins). 

All but one of the 11 live up to lowest expectations. Overall, it's a dismal read, occasionally stomach-churning (see: Reform UK and Britain First's entries). The good guys (ie Sadiq) play bland and safe, seeming to lack all conviction,  while the baddies - well they're hardly full of Yeats' "passionate intesity", but they don't mince their words either. 

The only candidate who has anything new to say is Femy Amin, of the Animal Welfare Party. She wants to make London "the global leader in opposing speciesism". Good luck to her! Can't help thinking it might be a good idea for her to join forces with the Green Party.

Of all London's many problems, the most polarising one is private car use, with the Tories and several others hoping to gain votes by promising to ban the ULEZ in outer London boroughs as well as the LTNs.

Although he's hardly shouting about it, Sadiq is the only one determined to stick with  ULEZ. Even the Greens and Lib Dems are non-commital on this issue. 

Much as his commitment to cleaner air is to be admired, I do feel Mayor Khan needs a break. The poor guy, the only politician in the country to do anything concrete about the 21st century's most critical problem, is the target of the vilest abuse. Even the leadership of his own party, who should be mightily proud of his achievements, always hold back on giving him their full support. The achievements are remarkable considering the outright hostility of car-loving Rishi Sunak's government.

Sadiq deserves a real holiday, and London needs new ideas and more urgent action to tackle our deteriorating urban environment, increasingly blighted by private cars of ludicrously expanding proportions,  plus all those Ubers, delivery vans, construction trucks, and supercars that should be confined to racetracks..

Where to turn? Well, in a dream world, just a two hour  Eurostar ride to Paris, a city which has just announced that more of its residnets now go to work by bicycle than by car. The statisitc is largely to the credit of its mayor, Anne Hidalgo, and her mission to make her beautiful city an even more delightful place for human beings to live, work and play in.

Mayor Hidalgo is that rare thing – a politician with ideas, who makes them happen, and takes enough of her electorate with her. Now in her second term, having already achieved the miracle of pedestrianising the riverside motorway through central Paris, she has just administered a sharp prod to the fat flanks of SUVs.

A close win in a referendum earlier this year  means owners of the biggest,  heaviest private cars, ie SUVs,  have to pay three times as much to park in central Paris.

Just imagine the uproar of the British media if Sadiq Khan had even breathed of a plan to do this - let alone succeeded in implementing it!

Imagine the convoys of morbidly obese leather-padded vehicles lumbering in protest to the strategic points of the South and North Circulars, their deathly-white always on LED headlights glaring like the eyes of a nightmare psycho-killer.

That sounds too vile a prospect to envision - except that we see it every day anyway, as these four-wheel fatties dominate the congested, narrow, potholed streets of this messed-up city. Encountering one of these vehicles charging straight at you on a residential street is as grim as seeing a cruise liner blotting out your views of Venice. Howl's Moving Castle had nothing on a top-of-range Range Rover in full flight, its death-ray lights sucking the life out of anyone caught in their beam.

Now in her second six-year term, Mme Hidalgo came early to the realisation that automobiles are among the greatest enemies of human wellbeing in urban settings. It maybe too late to make any difference to the downward spiral of climate change. She might not save the planet but at least she'll make the final decades of life in her city safer and more enjoyable for those not addicted to huge luxury vehicles.

Of course Mme Hidalgo has powerful opponents. As with our embattled London mayor, most of the active opposition comes from the suburbs well outside the city.

And that's where she has a great advantage over Mr Khan. She doesn't need to give a fig for these suburbs. Her electorate resides entirely inside the relatively small Paris commune area, the 20 arrondisements. She does not have to win over the commuting classes and small business white van folk outside this golden circle, living in the various self-governing departments of the Ile de France region.

She also has more power than the London Mayor. Like Khan, she's a Socialist, but her party does not undermine her in the way that the current Labour regime has been so iffy about Sadiq.

And while she has a famously spiky relationship with France's President Macron, the national government doesn't interfere in her business as much as Sunak's lot do with Sadiq Khan. 

None if which is to belittle Mme Hidalgo's achievements: the Parisian electorate is famously argumentative and sceptical.  However they are also famous for having good taste, intelligence and a propensity for making decisions based on reason.

There was no shortage of information to support Mme Hidalgo's policy to penalise SUVs, and those detailed statistics were available to all. The website of Le Monde provides rapid access to a panoply of statistical research on the impact of SUVs on the urban environment.

To me one of the most compelling findings was the vast amount of limited public space taken up by autombiles at any given moment - whether static in parking lots or parked on streets, or moving through the traffic-clogged boulevards. 

There are also detailed statistics on the inexorably rising weight and size of private cars in the city in the past two decades. Heavier vehicles (with the biggest SUVs now topping two tonnes) not only create more pollution - from tyres and brakes as well as the engine - but also damage roads and cause worse injuries in accidents. Their bulk reduces sightlines of other motorists, cyclists and pedestrians.

Oh, and by the way, as I've been saying on this blog ad nauseam, SUVs are a vile blot on any urban streetscape. They're so big and brash: the lumpy, macho and often aggressive styling acts on us all, even subliminally. 

So, yes, please let us have a dash of the Hidalgo spirit. Surely we could borrow football practice, where premier league clubs will loan one of their senior players to lesser teams for a few matches? 

Failing that at least give her the Mayoral equivalent of a state visit: a tour, on bicycles obviously, of London's many notorious traffic whirlpools. I'd nominate the Battersea Park roundabout for a start: an object lesson in how not to use cycle lanes, and in how to confuse and annoy motorists, cyclists and pedestrians equally.

Rest in peace, Damo - your sound carries on, you crazy sound carrier

I love this quote of Damo's on the back cover of 
the memoir published in 2023 - but I'd also like to
slightly disagree. Damo belonged everywhere, and
everywhere he went belonged to him!

Don't worry. I'm not reviving this moribund blog. But not giving it a coup de grace either.

Just have to add at least one more post,  to remind all about that mysterious electric disruptive delightful soul Damo Suzuki who died yesterday aged 74.

When I think of Damo I think first of all the sound he caused to be created and to hum and sing around the planet. His own version of the never-ending tour, the Sound Carrier network - hopping across oceans and continents non-stop more or less since he left Can, 50 plus years ago. 

He met music-makers and sound carriers in big cities, small towns, remote villages, the network kept on swelling and vibrating and humming, and it all somehow seemed to be infused with Damo's cosmic sense of music - whatever music is - and I find it hard to separate that from the smile on his face as he made or listened or contributed to these sounds.

Last time I saw him was at Rough Trade East in London, what three or four years ago: and I curse myself for missing him on many other occasions at easy to reach locations. On that evening, where he was talking about his days on the publication of his sort-of autobiography - titled, in a wry tribute to Mark E Smith - "I Am Damo Suzuki".

MES had of course written a song of the same name, a typically oblique bit of musical fanmail to be found on The Fall lp This Nation's Saving Grace.

Smith had died  the year before, and in a wonderfully strange tribute Damo, visiting Manchester a few months after his demise, met up with the last members of The Fall for a cheeky photo-opportunity: "I Am Mark E Smith". Only because it was Damo and the final iteration of the Salford phenomenon, could they get away with it, knowing MES would have loved it.

This delightful story is one of hundreds told in this marvellous book, which includes loads of autobiographical fragments woven into a series of in-depth interviews wwith some of the hundreds of musician and others he performed with, influenced, loved and in some cases fell out with. His joint author, Paul Woods, does a brilliant job both in the interviews and stitching thr whole thing together to make a very readable book, whether straight through or through infinite dippings-into. 

As well as assembling all those irresistible lists, discographies, and some truly priceless photos. There are also some examples of Damo's weird and cheerful artworks.

Paying tribute to a tribute: Damo Suzuki slips into the gap
 left by the Fall's founder Mark E Smith, who died in Feb 2018,
three months before this photo was taken. Damo is surrounded
by the members of the final iteration of the ever-changing band. 
Photo @ Michelle Heighway, from her documentary about
Damo's Network,  ENERGY following Damo Suzuki's
 Network over 7 years.

If you don't have this book, get a copy asap. It's available at £16.99 from publishers Omnibus Press.

That evening at Rough Trade, when Damo answered questions about his life and work, and also spoke a bit about his illnesses (which had been extremely serious, as described in gruelling detail in the book) turned out to be one of his last appearances in the Uk. 

He had recovered from the cancer which had returned decades after a first bout, but sadly it turned out this remission was only temporary. 

That night you could see he was clearly feeling the reduction in energy that such suffering have on the toughest of souls. But it did not stop him crossing the planet, carrying with him some sort of burning magical musical energy which infected, inspired so many others young, old, every type.

Thanks Damo, we love you still!

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.