Leaf-blowers: one more reason why it's a bad idea to live in a wealthy area (especially if you're not wealthy yourself)

It's 9.30 on a Monday morning and all hell is breaking loose in one of the wealthiest corners of south west London.

Those people still "working from home" will be bashing their heads against their laptop screens. Even long-term freelancers, who should have become inured to the many minor disturbances, find this particular noise difficult to stomach. 

If this post is more disjointed than usual, it's because I'm being driven mad by intermittent assaults on my eardrums.

Every week, at about the same time, a pair of men working for a contractor spend 15 minutes or so blasting air onto the expensive paving stones outside a luxury "townhouse" development behind the block of flats I live in. 

There were a few leaves on the ground, six or maybe even seven, and they're chasing them, trying to corral them into a corner. Clouds of dust and grit are raised. 

One of them wears ear-mufflers - just as well because the noise this petrol-powered blower makes is awful, echoing around the brick-clad walls of this hidden enclave of luxury homes. It sounds like one of those unsilenced mopeds beloved of trainee bikers. But this one's going nowhere, except to the next gated development which has a contract with the same property management company. And all the noise and stink of two revving two-stroke engines remains within the high-walled confines of this generally quiet zone. 

For the rest of the morning we can hear their labours in the surrounding streets, as they move around the various gated "communities".

It's a sad refection on how easy it is for a privileged layabout like this writer to find an endless stream of things to complain about. Even in the depths of the worst global pandemic in 100 years, you find solace in moaning about trivial nuisances. But then it's the silly little things like this that finally break us.

The leafblower guy is cleaning the carefully calculated space outside these new houses, which used to be a wonderfully overgrown garden. The space is just big enough to allow a full-fat Range Rover execute a three point turn; assuming the person driving knows what they are doing. Sometimes they don't. So, more dreadful racket as the drivers mess up their turns.

But the leaf-blower men worry me most. At this time of year it's an unnecessary job, and it shatters everyone else's peace, as well as polluting the air.  If it had been necessary, say in October when there are plenty of leaves to shift, what's wrong with a broom? Can that be more tiring than having a howling motorbike engine strapped to your back?

But now come pangs of guilt, because, however much that noise and the stink of two-stroke exhaust gas annoys me, at least the man has a job, and is paid something for doing this. Compared to him or many of the other thousands of people working around here to keep things moving, I am wealthy, thanks chiefly to having moved in here five decades ago.

Whether the wealth-gap between me and the leafblower is bigger than the one between me and the owners of those houses, or the even more expensive houses along this street (£4 -5million, at a pinch) is open to debate. Whatever the answer, the property machine has to keep on polishing its many assets, and it does so around here with alarming amounts of energy.

Yes, lockdown or no lockdown, let us keep the economy moving on, like those leaves, whatever the costs.

To get away from the racket I move to the front of the flat. There's some really loud effing and blinding coming from the pimped-up house across the road. Since December they've had endless streams of builders coming in to do something to what used to be a perfectly pleasant front garden. We wondered - are they going for a new bigger, deeper basement? For weeks it seemed like it, as a temporary roof was erected.

As lockdown came into force, the inhabitants and their many showy automobiles, large and small but all very noisy - decamped, thank god, perhaps to some other home.

In their place came new teams of builders and scaffolders and decorators. The work has been constant now. Occasionally some sort of boss turns up in a big black shiny pick-up truck and shouts at everyone at the top of his voice.

A terrible silence reigns. He drives off in a huff. The next day different teams of builders and decorators turn up.

More recently, one of the occupants of the house, presumably the owner, returns in his monster two-seater sports car, which is parked on that now horribly bleak, entirely paved area. No doubt there will soon be a weekly visit from the blower-man, lest any fugitive leaves from next door's verdant front garden should dare to encroach upon this immaculate parking lot.

 (nb: owning noisy cars seems to be another trait of the super rich. They pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for "supercars" with huge engines tuned to make that fuck-you roar when they hit the gas. Which is often at 6.45am when they rush off to their personal parking spaces somewhere in the City or Canary Wharf).

A few days later, an enormous removals truck pulls up, double parked. Two men in red company t-shirts jump out and are almost immediately on their phones, as there's no-one there to let them in. They sit around for hours, their truck half-blocking the street.

Only very wealthy people can afford to hire so many workers, and not even to be there when they arrive, presumably paying them for those wasted hours.

Truck jams are an increasingly common sight in the
wealthy residential streets of SW4,
even during lockdown.

Similar scenes are being played out at other houses up and down this street at any given time, and throughout most of the "lockdown" period. Every day massive trucks arrive with building materials or huge skips to remove debris. 

Sometimes they meet head-on and a sort of macho trucker showdown ensues.  And all for what? Houses that were fully refurbished three or four years ago are undergoing another total gutting, to suit the whims of their latest owners.

But at least these guys have jobs.

I've had several decades of being the strange old recluse on the top floor. I could name hundreds more annoying things my wealthier neighbours do. But you would almost certainly dismiss them as the ravings of a deranged and bitter old fool. And you would be right!

C*****m takes a well-deserved battering in local writer's twitter thread

The horror of Clapham Common on the first hot weekend of the year. To be fair, this was taken in May 2018, long before social distancing was an allowable phrase. I took this to illustrate yet another unpublished article on the strange behaviour of  the tribes of Clapham. 

After many weeks of lockdown trying to write a post explaining why lockdown might be a good thing for the dread postcode, SW4 - along comes a much more agile critic with a twitter thread that demolishes any of my remaining excuses for thinking it's OK to live here.

In an epic 17-post twitter thread yesterday, the Clapham-raised, Stockwell-based writer and podcaster Daniel Ruiz Tizon explained why he now avoids the place he so loved as a child.

And why these days, he says, "You cannot get me to #Clapham for love nor money and those that know me well, know not to ask to meet in SW4".

Like Daniel, I also loathe what the name "Clapham" now stands for in discussions about London suburbs (these discussions have been getting very heated on twitter of late).

It has long been a mockable address.  People have been joking about "Cla'am" for two decades or more now. I stopped rising to the bait in 2003, when those same people saw the values of their sensible homes in New Cross and Nunhead and Dalston soaring.

It got to the point in the early 2000s where I started to lie, rather than admit to living here. I would say "close to Lavender Hill". Sometimes more blatantly, by saying Battersea or Stockwell. In my defence I'd point out this flat is less 100 yards from the SW4/SW8 border. But that's like saying you're slightly pregnant.

Face it, hypocrite: you live in Clapham! And are you going to move? No, of course not. Like it or loathe it, I am rooted.

In fact a lot of this blog has been about trying to justify my presence here, even though I am now much more like one of those sad old relics living and dying in their bedsits back in 1985.

I agree with each of Daniel's points about the awfulness of Clapham now. I also agree that "No part of this city, or any city, should be exclusively white and middle class".

I agree that we've lost much of the diversity, the blessed shabbiness, the easy-come-easy-go transitory character Clapham had that made it attractive to all manner of migrants, external or internal.

I was about to argue that Clapham still has a lot of that diversity, it's just not quite so visible, and of course it has. There's still that patchwork of social housing; there are still the old grandees living on the North Side in their well-padded bohemian splendour.  With their views over a Common, often including the little camouflaged tents of migrant workers: late evening campfires, accordion bands, short stay visitors, sharing common turf with the crows. Park bench business dealings. Skunk smoke under the horse chestnut trees. Lone music students practising flugelhorn scales by the paddling pool.

There is still diversity here, but as in most of London's inner-zone residential areas, it's not the diversity you notice so much as the polarity.

There's a local photographer, Jim Grover, who has revealed some of richness of the Clapham demographic, right now. His work, inspired largely by the African-Caribbean congregations of his local church, tapping into the family histories of Jamaicans of the Windrush generation, or by the Jekyll/Hyde character of Clapham High Street, by day and by night.

Yes, here I am on the defensive again, sorry. The problem is that the most visible section of the population, especially in summer, are those youngish, well-off, white, "just-down-from-uni" types that Daniel complains of. The 2020s versions of the 1980s yuppies, of which I was one, if a distinctly shop-soiled example.

The worst time is early summer, when they (we) emerge all at once from their (our) flatshares like flying ants on National Flying Ant Day, to crowd the pavements of the "Old Town", pastel-shade tailored shorts, flip-flops, carefully casual cashmere jumpers, pink flesh turning red, oh Lord. This year, perhaps because of the press coverage of breaches of social distancing, they have been more noticeable than ever.

Poor old boring old Clapham Common. Come on, you can't blame it for the packs of loose-bowelled doggies on shared dogwalker leads who foul it so, nor for the hordes of keep-fit fanatics who will happily shower you with thier sweat if you get in their way.

But Daniel has much deeper reasons for the anger he feels towards SW4  as it is now. The gentrifiers have defiled the neighbourhood he grew up in. It is much more painful for him, than for a latecomer like myself.

I grew up in the leafy suburbs of Croydon, which in those days was categorically not in London. As a child of 7, I remember how the cityscape changed as we pulled out of Clapham Junction on the way to Victoria. The view across the smoking chimneys to the steep terraces on Latchmere Road, the then-new tower blocks of the Battersea council estates, and then the billowing clouds of steam above the power station: it might as well have been the title sequence for Coronation Street.

Yes, here I go, defending the place I arrived in almost by accident after a decade of moving around the postcodes north of the river, from NW1 to W9 to SW3 to E8. Despite claiming to hate everything Thatcher stood for, I too was lured into getting a mortgage, a foot on the ladder. My foot's still on the same rung of that ladder, but all around has changed beyond recognition.

As I peer out of the window so there's a god-awful howl reverberating off the houses, a black open-top Ferrari is hovering and revving up outside, a couple of thirty-something fellers in their designer shades, are braying away.  Lockdown? Wtf's that, matey?

Yep, OK. Clapham now. You win, Daniel.

Here's a necessary corrective to most recent posts. I love everybody

Looking back at recent posts, you'd be forgiven for thinking: "What a miserable, ungrateful, embittered old sod the author must be".

So, before the plague arrived,  I started writing a post which tried to celebrate some of the good things experienced in 2019.  To recall a few joyful moments. Even the freeze-dried husk of a human resident in a rodent-infested top floor flat in one of the wealthiest streets in one of the most selfish postcodes (reportedly) in south west London, is still prone to the occasional moment of pleasure, excitement, rapture, ecstasy ....dare i say love?

Now from the perspective of a third week in isolation a long way from London, the city I enjoy slagging off but which I really love, without which I cannot live, and which I miss more acutely than anything. I will publish this silly post. 

Here it is (author ducks out before you, mythical reader, can absorb any of it):

London, March 9, 2020: Someone quoted Wordsworth on the radio:
"It is the first mild day of March....this one day we will give to idleness."

The words triggered conflicting feelings. A rush of forgotten pleasures, against a shudder of shame, the guilt of a human wallowing in self-pity.

What about the good things that have happened in the past 12 months? What about the cultural riches on your doorstep?

Many things have cheered the soul. They're not necessarily fodder for the culture pages of Time Out mag (does Time Out do culture any more, apart from food and drink culture?)

(But hats off to Time Out for having the wit to rename itself Time In in the first week of the plague - ed).

Let's face it, for a depressive geezer of pensionable age, you had some good times, sometimes.

1. The local pub
A place featured in at least a dozen unpublished blog entries, the Bread & Roses. And a couple of published ones, such as this one from last summer.

This trade union-owned pub half way down Clapham Manor Street is still a gem. The times I  have been there,  knocked out by the talent and energy of performers, when there've been as many musicians on stage as punters on the floor.

This saddens me. Why isn't this place packed out? There's theatre, music, comedy and DJ entertainment most nights of the week, so I guess overall they must be pulling in enough custom. (Well, that was before the lockdown of course. Ed.)

The pub, previously the Bowyer Arms, occupies an impressive Grade 2 listed building designed by Thomas Cubitt. It was bought by the Battersea and Wandsworth Trades Union Council in 1995, and is run on solid socialist principles alongside the great Workers Beer Company (which slakes the thirst of crowds at Glastonbury and other big events around the country, year after year).

There are great music pubs keeping the flame burning in Brixton, Camberwell, New Cross and beyond, but the fact there's one here in the heart of affluent SW4 is just such a good, surprising thing, it needs to be celebrated, as often as possible.

Can you imagine property agents boasting about a trade-union owned pub with live music two or three nights a week to potential buyers of nearby multi-million pound houses? Well, who knows, it's such a gem I think they might. I like to think they would.

Long live this beautiful bastion of fairness, humanitarian values, and a sometimes unfashionable commitment to making all forms of performing arts accessible to all.

2. Meeting Damo Suzuki last March: a brief account of this almost life-saving event, a book launch in a record shop near Brick Lane, was published here.

3. Lambeth Libraries events team

Against Lambeth council's atrocious library closure policies, the Libraries' events team have been putting on some wonderful events in the surviving branches, right across the borough.

Thanks for loads of great evenings in Brixton, South Lambeth and other libraries. One of the most memorable for me was last October, held at Clapham Library for Black History month.

This event - Sound Systems, DIY Culture and 100 Years of British Black Music - was chaired by the  excellent events organiser Tim O'Dell. It kicked off with discussion on the history of black musicians in the city, led by author Lloyd Bradley. His latest book - Sounds Like London – uncovers lots of previously unknown stuff about black jazz musicians in Britain way back in the 20s and 30s, and the huge influence they had.

He screened a wonderful short film, Half A Century Carnaby Street, made by Lucy Harrison in 2013, celebrating Columbo's nightclub at 50 Carnaby St which introduced London to the delights Jamaican sound systems back in the early 60s. Lucy Harrison even managed to stage a breif return to the address - now the basement of Ben Sherman store - several original DJs and their sound-system.

Things became more contemporary with the arrival of all-round local hero and globally influential Jamaican-born musician and producer Dennis Bovell, who grew up in Battersea. One of his bands, Roots Radics, helped create that unique dub poetry sound in long-term collaborations with Linton Kwesi Johnson.

Bovell also produced The Slits' first album, helping them make music that you could dance to while laying down new layers of spikey feminist attitudes.

He talked about all this stuff that night, answering questions, for example, how he got Janet Kay to hold that incredibly high note climax to her big hit, Silly Games - in the process of which he invented (and named) a new genre,  lovers rock, which was a successful export, even to Jamaica.

He talked about his musical education, from his dad, from Sunday trips to the church in Brixton, his love of  Jimi Hendrix, hours spent at the Dub Vendor, then hanging out in clubs in Soho including Columbo's where he met visiting Jamaican stars (including Marley). He took reggae to far flung places with his first band, Matumbi, his sound system,  Jah Sufferer, and a mobile record store based on a VW camper van.

This was just one of many great evening events, mainly free, in all the borough's remaining libraries, organised by a small but dedicated team. Salute them, now more than ever.

(In the current lock down situation, libraries are closed but the events team have organised a full programme of online events and services, check it out! Ed)

3. Midsummer, a rare meeting in a Lambeth theatre-pub
One of those rare occasions when worlds I imagined would always be separate came together, briefly but to good effect. An old friend, who I used to work alongside at a Wapping-based educational newspaper, is now an increasingly busy actor. Like me and many others she'd taken voluntary redundancy in 2006 and thrown herself into the work she'd always wanted to do: acting.

By a strange coincidence she took part in a "Page to Stage" reading of part of a pilot TV series written by Stockwell-based writer, performer and podcaster - not to mention national treasure - Daniel Ruiz Tizon.

I was going to describe Daniel as having a wonderfully dark comedic style, until I saw the Italian Vogue had already used those words to introduce their rather good interview of him back in 2018. What a star!

Apart from being south London's finest and most devastatingly dead-pan podcaster and all round social commentator and good human (check his twitter feed for proof of this) Daniel is also this moribund blog's only fan, and even its occasional unpaid publicist.

So, on that warm June evening, I not only met old workmates, but also Daniel, for the first time in the flesh. I can report that he sounded exactly like he sounds in his podcasts, and that he looks just like his photo. Good facts to report.

I witnessed a read-through of part of an embryonic sitcom. It was classic Ruiz Tizon and left me wanting more.

Each short piece performed at this event, upstairs in a pub at Lambeth North, was critiqued by a front-row panel of theatre types. Some were kind, others less so, Daniel and the three other writers took it all on the jaw. Then we all went back to the bar.

We exchanged a few words.  I should've bought him one of the many drinks I owe him. I did not. Short arms, they used to call me. Another time perhaps.

I've always loved Jah Wobble and I think he loves us all. Seen here playing at
 the Cropredy Festival, Oxfordshire, in 2005, Mr Wobble recently became a 
part-time Stockwell resident, praise the lord.  Photo credit: Brian Marks/
Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

4. East end hero moves - temporarily? - into Stockwell
This truly happy piece of news hit me right at the end of the year, in an interview on BBC Radio London by Robert Elms.

Elms, a resolute north Londoner, managed not to sound too dismayed when top bass player, globally sought-after producer, ex-tube driver Jah Wobble, has found himself a gaff in Stockwell. He said they'd found a flat near the Wandsworth Road; it was ok, he said, nice and green.

At the time he was teaching "lonely old blokes" in the art and craft of dub music at an arts centre in Merton, as well as embarking on a new tour.

Now, who knows, maybe he's decamped to the Wobble family home back in Manchester. But how great to think that the musician and writer who finds divinity in Vauxhall Bridge should even temporarily be lodging not far away.

As any fan of the great man  will remember, the track on the Invaders of the Heart album, Take Me To God, expresses the bliss of religious experience in a way that only Mr Wobble could pull off so brilliantly. My favourite verse:

"I am limitless in space, time and matter
Simultaneously the planet Neptune
Part of the structural support to Vauxhall Bridge
I am your left breast
I am Stepney
I am Peru
I am divine and so are you.
I love everybody."

This is a turn-to song whenever things are really grim. (Like now! Ed.)

It always works. If you know his voice, if you know his bass playing, if you know the music of the Invaders of the Heart, then you'll understand. What a fabulous addition to the deep SW8 talent pool!

Nine Elms: Top marks for consistency in creating dismal-looking buildings

Funny how friendly and civilised the Vauxhall Bus Station now feels when compared with the murderous multi-lane
racetrack adjoining it, and the encroaching hell of the Nine Elms development. Here comes the next monster tower - the
DAMAC building.

You have to hand it to the Nine Elms developers: they are remarkably consistent.

In a decade of building on this previously neglected strip of inner-London riverbank, they have yet to erect a building which passers by might stop to look at and say, "Oh yes, that's not so bad".

The least-worst building in the whole Battersea
-Nine Elms-Vauxhall development? It's 30-plus
storeys of student accommodation.

Ok, hang on. Once, last year, from the top deck of an 87 bus heading north on Wandsworth Road, I caught a glimpse of that red-brick-look tower just behind the cylindrical block opposite Sainsbury's (the cylinder, it turns out, is called Sky Gardens).

For a few seconds, I really did think, "oh, that's quite pleasing".

I was looking at the narrow end of a 35-floor tower which, from that angle, seemed to mimic the shape of New York's  Flatiron building.

As the bus moved on the full blandness of this structure, a big nest of student accommodation, became apparent.  That said, it is one of the least worst structures thrown up on this tormented landscape so far. The  proportions are fair enough. It's not embarrassingly quirky like some of the stuff the other side of Wandsworth Road.

And it's not as lumpishly ugly as its new monster neighbour, the 50-storey "DAMAC Tower" , (aka the Aykon Building) now nearing completion. This tower boasts "Versace Home designed interiors" (presumably not,  however, in the 90 "affordable" homes promised in the 450-flat project).

An "interesting" combination of boxes aka the DAMAC
tower, furnished by Versace Home. A 1-bed appt yours
for around £980k

Can't help wondering what Gianni would have made of this unlovely construction. He famously rejected the idea of "good taste", so that wouldn't be the problem. But it's an awkward thing - not at all elegant, nor even very shiny – as it looms over the doomed Vauxhall bus station. There's some cladding which, in good light, evokes the colour of the Poundland store front.

Overall, it looks as if five or six mediocre office blocks had been swept up and squeezed together to create a rather lumpy, vaguely h-shaped totem pole, around which to worship greed.

All that can be said is that it's not as outright offensive as the One St George's Wharf tower - Le Plongeur, someone tried to nickname it, the helicopter-slayer, as I think of it - but it does make a reasonable try.

These buildings now dominate the view from my toilet window.

Very soon two even bigger buildings, already rising out of the mud,  will block this view of at least the rude up-yours finger of One St Georges Wharf. Work has re-started on the biggest tower of the whole development.  The architect's impressions show bog-standard luxury apartment stacks; but maybe they will help to pull this disparate group of sprouting steel and glass into some sort of cluster.

 You see, I like tall buildings, if they're well designed. They can be elegant, like the Shard. Or exciting, like those ultra-thin (size zero) blocks shooting upwards of 1200 feet in New York.

Even here - on the other side of London - there's a tiny sense of that thrill available from the first sighting of good high-rise buildings. I remember it in Hong Kong and Manhattan - now there's a hint of it in Docklands, if you choose the right vantage point.

The lumpy old Canary Wharf towers are surrounded, engulfed by lots of strange, shiny newcomers, many almost as tall; One Canada Square itself is losing its domination of the East London skyline. The view from across the river near Surrey Quays is as close as you can get to a New York-style cluster. Go there on a quiet, clear day at sunrise or sunset to see what I mean, when those two new tall buildings closest to the river are reflected on the water in afternoon sunshine.

Back at Vauxhall, it's not a cluster, just a scattering of nasty tall buildings.

Meanwhile, the only buildings that looked good on paper are going up around the disastrous remains of anyone's view of Battersea Power Station.

There's a large chunk of Frank Gehry studio blocks going up now, with the characteristic twisted, slightly wonky look, now a cliché, it has to be said.

How strange to think that, in 60 years time, people living in, growing up in these buildings will be enjoying or loathing their lives in SW8, just as much as we all have, hardly giving a thought to how their dwellings changed the landscape.

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.

Has anyone ever been fined for breaking the 20mph speed limit in Lambeth?

If you're cruising down this street at 55mph in your
Audi - as you do, don't deny it - would you even notice
this little roundel hiding in the shadows?

Does anyone make a cheap, reliable hand-held speed camera? During 2019, that grim year now blessedly over, speeding vehicles became one of the worst of hundreds of other daily annoyances that further depressed all quality-of-life measures in the stinking rich slums of south-west London. Yes, we need something to fight back with, us beleagured pedestrians.

If such devices exist, they should be bought in bulk by local authorities and handed out at libraries, doctors surgeries etc so that people can give lunatic drivers a little scare as they blast down residential roads at two or three times the speed limit.

So tell me, has anyone ever been banned, imprisoned or even fined for going at 24mph in a 20 mph limit  area?

Tell me, honestly, have you ever seen anyone driving at less than 25mph in a 20mph limit area? Really? I cycle at more than 20mph in some parts of London and clever signs start flashing at me furiously, kill your speed! But not round here.

In this wide,  almost straight street with no speed bumps, we're used to rat-runners paying no heed of the pathetic 20mph limit signs, and having no thought for pedestrians (who include kids going to and coming out of the local primary school).

Lambeth introduced the 20mph limit all over the borough a few years ago. Seems putting up a few inadequate signs was a cheap solution to residents' demands for traffic calming measures, rather than adding bumps or chicanery, speed cameras, planting trees etc, as requested at various "your voice counts" meetings with the planners.

This flimsy little 20mph limit sign looks more like one of those
horrible pennants used by property developers to guide people
to their "marketing suites"

I regularly have to get out of the way of cars and even big trucks going three times that speed....and perhaps more.  Trouble is the road is also used as a sort of drag strip for drivers who like to prove their manhood by shattering everyone else's peace. Not just boy racers but plump 40-year-old city types giving their silly McLarens, Mercs and Maseratis a bit of an airing.

Then there are the speeding delivery vans. Don't get me on this subject, which is at least 300 of the other 364 things wrong with the past year. These huge boxes on wheels, whether scruffy old white Transits or shiny new DHL vans, are one of many reasons we should all stop using Amazon, Ocado, and all other delivery services, unless we really can't use our poor fat little legs to make it to a London's quite good variety of retail outlets.

There are 20 mph speed limit cameras on Wandsworth Road and Acre Lane and probably loads of other places in the borough. I've seen those two flashing four or five times in the space of five minutes. Are these drivers getting speeding tickets and fines? I've never even seen police doing spot checks on these streets. Presumably they couldn't spare the personnel.

Other things which made 2019 shit and will probably make 2020 even shitter:

• Linked to the above - the ever-increasing girth and ghastliness of SUVs.  Who on earth believes a fat black Range Rover is something to aspire to?
• Linked to the above - the ear-splitting loudness of car horns, the sort people pay extra for in order to add to the fuck-off factor of their vehicle. A possible legislative solution to this dreadful form of auditory pollution was suggested on this blog many years ago.
• Linked to the above - small motorbikes that make more noise than even big trucks and buses. And luxury cars that have clearly had their exhaust systems expensively tweaked in order to emit a much louder roar when the driver revs it at lights.
• Linked to the above: why is Lambeth still allowing so many of its super-rich residents to pave over their front gardens, or worse still, to dig out underground cinemas or swimming pools or whatever else it is they need, thereby wrecking their neighbour's lives for months with endless flotillas of four-axle dumper trucks, skip deliveries, and even those revolting portaloos for the poor workers half-blocking pavements?
• Linked to the above: more and more trucks, vans and even car-sized pick-up trucks displaying "Cyclists Beware" signs on their rear panels. Honestly, if you can't see what's behind you or alongside you on the nearside of your vehicle, from your driving position, should that vehicle be legal in this congested city?
• Linked to above: often the silliest most trivial things annoy most. Last year it was the proliferation of those multi-LED indicator lights on the back of the newest SUVs and other flash-harry vehicles - the sort that seem to lick their way around the back of the car. Like the flicking tongues of some venemous reptile.
• Linked to the above - over-use of phrases such as "linked to the above"; proliferation of old farts using blogs to evacuate their spleen into the idiot wind of the internet, which merely blows it all back into their own twisted faces?
• Case rested.

Two London blights for the price of one photo: the crazy congestion caused by delivery vans thanks to Amazon, etc; and the

continuing madness of paving over front gardens...removing green patches, adding to flood risk.