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.

Watching books die, slowly

I just finished selling books for a charity, and it was a grim experience.

I did it for a year, I was paid to list donated books onto an Amazon seller site; an online chairty bookshop, in effect, competing with hundreds of others of independent dealers in the UK and worldwide. All using the same system to spearhead their virtual sales machinery.

After a while, once the number of titles on offer passed a critical point (around 3500) , the operation seemed to lift off, and sales would begin to soar with little or no further effort, for a while. And then my work was cut out, packing, franking these books, then dragging them in an old ladies' shopping trolley up the hill to the post office.

With more effort - maybe six days instead of three per week, more help, more co-operation, it could have been so much better, and so much more money might have flowed in.  But this particular charity seemed to have a terribly bi-polar approach to selling books.

One thing I learned was that the hottest-selling books - apart from the obvious new bestsellers, which we didn't generally get - are quite tricky things to predict. But if you can predict them, you will do very well.

For example, best-sellers from 2 or 3  months ago might sit on the shelves for months, for years -  but a series of Freud's writing, or a desirable paperback imprint of modern classics - not just Penguins, though they are sure-fire sellers - but newer rivals like Vintage,  or an out-of-print biog of a disgraced Radio 1 DJ,  or a of recently deceased politician - all these things will sell in flurries, if you happen to have them on your shelves. For example, five copies of the new Vintage edition of Jeanette Winterson's Oranges are the only Fruit sold on the day I unpacked them.

Sometimes it's a simple mention on a TV show or in a review somewhere - or it's Radio 4 serialising some forgotten classic.

And then of course there are the seasonal staples. I hate to confirm that in January sales of all those dreadful dieting and exercise books that had sat on the shelves for months did suddenly pick up. As did demand for the self-help titles, the more optimistic the title the better.

Charlatan business guru type texts also do depressingly well. Spinning out the obvious into 12 long chapters full of homilies and cringe-making down-home parables.

The worst thing about this job was seeing how rapidly the value of what seemed to be fine books plumetted. In general, it seemed, most titles were destined to lose value, week after week, until they join that huge ocean of Amazon floaters, bobbing around on a sea of drowned and brine-sodden paperbacks, all available for one penny or less plus  the standard postage rate, in Amazon's case, £2.80.

Of course one longed to find books that had high value and small size - small enough to qualify for "large letter" postage rather than "small parcel". Some of the most profitable sales were in fact of slim volumes of paperback poetry - £5 or £6 cover price, 81p postage. In this respect we were lucky, every so often. The high point of it all, for me, was opening a box of donated books and finding a mix of recent titles from someone like Bloomsbury, Vintage, or Hogarth Press, sometimes they were proof copies or damaged stuff, but usually there were plenty of saleable books. We'd get US and Australian editions,  translations into all the languages of Scandinavia, review copies, stuff that had obviously languished in a warehouse for decades.

And just occasionally you'd find the right buyer at the right time, before the value of that heavily sun-burned bonkbuster trickled away into the sand.