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 But I try, and the evidence is there in blogger archive: hundreds of unpublished outbursts.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.....

Calling all hunters and collectors, rummagers and moochers...here's a totally biassed and subjective update on the best London charity shops for book-lovers

One of the surprisingly few charity shops in Brixton is also one of the best in London - especially for lovers of music and
vintage clothes. This shop is so popular it's given its name to the junction of Brixton High Street and Stockwell Road - now
unofficially Barnado's Corner.

Sorry – four and a half years late, here's the promised update of an early Microgroove posting, Charity shop pecking order for the hopeless bibliomane, from March 2014.

Half a decade has not radically changed the London charity shops scene. Shops have opened and closed, the charities have become more professional (not always good news for the punters) and - given the aftershocks of the recession and Brexit vote, the nature of donations has changed. Maybe people are hanging on to their stuff a little longer, but for sure there are more people out there desperately looking for good cheap clothes, and the bargains keep on coming.

And for the most part they all still welcome ancient moochers like myself (Have to thank novelist Howard Jacobson for this word, as explained in his BBC Radio 4 Point of View programme, In Praise of Mooching).

Anyway, here's another totally subjective review of the charity shop scene in the areas I have happily mooched around in the past year or so, as of autumn 2018.

 I'm still visiting the same old shops, but have also gone further afield, rummaging through the cast off books, CDs, jackets and coffee-mugs of neighbourhoods as far-flung as Forest Hill,  Blackheath, East Dulwich, Streatham, Tooting, and even up north to Highgate,  Hampstead, Finsbury Park, Upper Street, Dalston, Kilburn High Road, and beyond. Does such a beyond exist? Good question. Charity shops in the outer suburbs and the Home Counties is a whole different subject, which I might (but probably won't) return to one day.

Some good new finds included the British Heart Foundation Books and Music shop at 94 Streatham High Road. This shop immediately makes anyone used to old-fashioned secondhand book and record shops at home. It's packed with stuff: give yourself and hour or two to do it justice.

It's not far from one of the biggest Oxfam shops in South London, on the other side of the suburban motorway aka the A23 Brighton Road. It's maybe a personal thing but I find those massive Oxfams (the one in Kingsland Road, another in Tooting) almost too much of a good thing.

Streatham High Road is a bit of a charity shop nirvana, with samples of all the main names popping up along its seemingly never-ending length. These shops are fed by the young families inhabiting the vast areas of residential streets surrounding it, and the quality of the gear is good. There's also a healthy traffic on these pavements so bargains go quickly. Yet, fine as many of these shops seemed, there was not one that stood out or made it to any notional, personal top ten.

Fabulous, imaginative, topical window displays are a
feature of all the best charity shops, but few
beat this one at Barnado's in Brixton

Two miles further north, however,  on the same arterial road, in central Brixton, there's a real gem.

Surprisingly, this stretch has only one charity shop - but what a shop!

Brixton's Barnado's shop  entered this entirely subjective, incomplete and unfair Top Ten all those years back, at number 10.

The big news is that this same shop has now soared to the Number One spot, knocking that old favourite,  Clapham High Street's Save the Children store, into a very close second place.

Barnados was always good, but last year it re-branded itself as a music specialist shop, and there's certainly a lot of interesting material there for lovers of alternative, reggae, Jazz, folk, dance and generally left field music, vinyl and CD, as you'd expect in this area, and in a shop opposite the Brixton Academy.

It's also good for secondhand guitars, drums, musical instruments of all types and PA equipment: but when they come in, they go very, very fast!

This shop has provided me with several favourite jackets and shirts. I still curse myself for not snapping up the beautiful old Super 8 movie camera in a leather case I saw there a few months ago. The shop has always provided good, often unusual bargains: eg, brand new XXXL string vests in Rasta colours, old film cameras, typewriters and other curios. Plus, friendly and helpful staff.

A new entrant takes the number three spot, despite being very small: the delightful Children of the Mekong shop which opened in Lavender Hill last year. Good quality clothes, good value books, CDs and DVDs, and some nice Vietnamese craftwork gifts.

With its regular sales and attractive window displays, this is a friendly shop run chiefly, it seems, by French and Vietnamese volunteers. Just recently, they seem to have reduced the book stock, which if it's a deliberate change is a shame....but even so I'm giving this small local contender a high placing in my latest, ridiculously subjective league table of charity shops within a 30-minute bike or tube ride from my home. The fact this shop is only three minute's walk is perhaps a factor. Unfair or what? But the staff are delightful.

Another newcomer is at number 4. Well, sort of new, in the sense that this is awarded to two shops - the original store in Battersea Park Road run by the Wandsworth HIV awareness charity Oasis (now just one shop, the clothes and furniture stores having merged), and its big new sibling in Clapham Old Town.

The Battersea Park Road shop is thankfully just as old-school as it always was - a big, quite gloomy shop with masses of books, CDs, toys (including, on one visit, some very scary china dolls), glass, pots and pans, bric-a-brac of all sorts. It's like something out of a non-existent Angela Carter short story.

This new OASIS shop in Clapham is big and cheerful, occupying the site of a former rather pricey fashion store in the Polygon area of Clapham Old Town (one of the poshest parts of SW4, it must be said - so much the better).

It's a magnificent shop on three floors, including a whole room of books. I popped in to check it out a few weeks ago and emerged about 90 minutes later with a bagful of books. If it caries on like this for a while, this store will be a contender for my personal number one.

The big MIND shop on Wandsworth Road can remain in its comfortable 5th place, if I can combine it with another MIND shop I've come to like in Highgate.

The SW8 store is a busy and truly cheerful shop crammed with stuff, close to the big 1920s Larkhall Estate. It's also not far from the new Nine Elms luxury flat developments: maybe they'll get some new customers!

The shop has always been good for the occasional surprise bargain, such as a set of lovely Italian Bialetti Moka coffee makers and interesting books and DVDs. It also seems very good for kids' stuff, clothes, toys, books, etc.

It now happily shares the slot with another excellent MIND shop, the double-fronted one on Archway Road opposite Highgate tube station. It's perhaps stretching the 30 minutes travel limit, unless you're very lucky with the Northern Line. This is a double dose of charity shop goodness: clothes and bric a brac in the first shop, books, CDs and records in the knocked-through next door shop.

In the original poll, the FARA shops in Northcote Road, Gloucester Road, Battersea Park Road and Balham scored well, and they continue to do so. The Northcote Road shops is especially good for designery casual menswear - presumably cast offs from all the well-heeled yummy young dads in this Nappy Valley district. Also, good for picture frames, lampshades, luggage, mirrors, ...oh, everything, even the occasional guitar. The Gloucester Road branch has a similarly delightful basement, and the clothes are seriously upmarket but NOT overpriced.

FARA has a slightly less posh and gloriously dark shop with a big menswear and book basement in Pimlico, with another branch selling retro Vintage clothing just around the corner in Tatchbrook Street. So FARA earns a good number 6 slot, and could easily return to a higher slot!

But none of them has served up the occasional brilliant bargain or surprising little treasure that they were so good at three years ago. So FARA shops stay where they were, in the upper to middle region of the chart. There's one in Earlsfield which is also worth a visit. They are certainly some of the most aesthetically pleasing shops to visit: all their staff seem to have some genius o for making a great display out of whatever arrives in the donation bags.

The Oxfam Bookshop in Portobello Road - great for art books,
classics, languages,  jazz and classical records, CDs, DVDs

Moving South East, I'm still giving plenty of points to the Herne Hill Oxfams. The general store nearly always has excellent music (often plenty of 60s and 70s vinyl) and recently has been good for men's clothes. The shop has that good feel you get only from the care of a regular team of long-serving staff.

Just over the road is a fine example of Oxfam's specialist bookshops. This one has very good art, Classics, history and general fiction sections. It's got a real bookshop feel, and the staff are usually very helpful.

There's another thing about these shops that annoys me: their idea of a "Cult Literature" section. This immediately begs the question, what is cult fiction? Who decides that Vladimir Nabokov or  JG Ballard or Angela Carter are cult rather than mainstream? Herman Hesse is a sort of blameless king of the cult novels, dating back to the days when he was "re-discovered" by the hippies, and read alongside Carlos Castenada, Tolkien,  and that stuff about Ley Lines and alien land artists.

And yet DH Lawrence - another big cult-like following there - is nearly always given Modern Classic status.

So, it is subjective. Why split them this way? Of course Oxfam is not the real guilty party here: they're following the lead of many highly respected dealers.

The Oxfam Book Shops in Balham and Portobello Road are consistently good as well; I've scored many fine art books in these shops, although the £2.99 flat rate for paperback novels sometimes seems a bit steep.

And these Oxfam bookshops really are great, they take such care to categorise and display their books in pleasing ways, they encourage browsing and even loitering. Their biggest shop, in Upper Street, Islington, is a marvel. I've kept it out of the chart only for the reason that it's not a general charity shop.

World's End, Chelsea and Pimlico are further charity shop hotspots, each with a good Oxfam. In the West End, both the Goodge Street and Drury Lane Oxfam branches are worth a serious browse.

Strange to say, in all those wanderings, I've yet to find a shop that's significantly better than the best shops in the SW2, 4, 8 and 11 postcodes. This corner, inner south-west London, is blessed with the variety of its charity shops.

One chain that started in this area, supporting Trinity Hospice on Clapham Common, has grown and also added "Royal" to its name - at the same time concentrating even more on upmarket clothing with prices to match.

Some of the new stores, such as the one in St John's Road, Clapham Junction, have no books or music. If you're after Hugo Boss seconds, this is the place for you. There's a newish one in Camberwell, in that 60s shopping arcade next to Morrisons, which has a good feel, and the old Clapham High Street branch is as good and diverse as it ever was, with plenty of good book and  music bargains.

But overall their move towards high-end clothing does nothing for me, and it's sad to see that once marvellous book and music shop in Kensington Church Street is now serving as overspill for the adjacent clothes shop. Then again, I know what a briliant place the Hospice is: and I know that these shops exist only to provide as much funding as possible to keep it going. Maybe it's a change in society, or the changes in media technology - but there's clearly more profit to be made form clothes and shoes and accessories than from books, records and CDs.

SW4 has some good and surprising one-off shops supporting local charities.  One well-established shop is the Ace of Clubs homeless charity shop at 8 Clapham Park Road, just round the corner from Clapham Common tube station. It has plenty of books and the higgledy-piggledy feel of a true charity shop, the sort of place you sense you might unearth a true gem, if only you look a little harder.

There's also a long-established shop by Clapham North tube run by the well-being charity Green Light London which is good for clothes and new age stuff, crystals and joss-sticks as well as occasional book and DVD bargains. Great that it's still surviving, like dipping back into the 70s each time you visit.

Like I said, this "league table" is totally personal,  and in fact bonkers - what you have for realise is that any charity shop anywhere win the country could suddenly become number one, the moment some kindly soul drops of a couple of sacks of old Penguin Classics and their late uncle's 1960/70s vinyl collection.

But actually it takes a lot more than this to create a really good shop, charity or otherwise. As soon as you enter Barnados of Brixton and Save the Children  in Clapham, you detect the presence of a good, caring, imaginative and original management team. There's often good music playing, and the shelves and rails are tidied and  restocked regularly. There is space to look and browse.

There are some equally promising looking shops - I won't name them, but one is in Tooting, an even bigger one in Dalston, and a third in Streatham - that should be great but almost overwhelm you with the volume of  stuff. And then depress you when you realise you've already looked through most it, a few weeks back. Other shops - such as the big national BHF chain - often have excellent stock. Yet they all seem to follow the same shopfloor layout which means you have to squeeze through narrow gaps between clothes racks before you reach the books and other stuff.  I don't mind clutter, but this seems to be deliberately planned clutter, just like the way Debenhams puts a maze of perfume and cosmetics counters between the entrance and the stuff you want to look at.

Guerilla advertising brings London's SUV drivers down to size

Well it's an old joke and maybe a bit childish, but after multiple bad experiences with the drivers of these fearsome things in London I couldn't help but smile at this poster featured on the Londonist website.

A Birmingham-based artist known on instagram as fokawolf has been busy in London over the past week or two, with lots of subversive posters pasted up in the busiest localities - including this beauty to be found in the Brick Lane area. Apparently that's a genuine phone number and the artist has already had some interesting answerphone enquiries about this NHS offer.

Of course when it comes to  SUVs and luxury 4x4s I have plenty of previous. I'm a cyclist, yes, but also a pedestrian and a car driver. I've found these bloated vehicles to be not only the most aggressive and arrogant of road users but also plain nuisances, they way they block pavements and narrow back streets with their morbidly obese bodywork. But be patient, read on.

fokawolf's other London-themed efforts include a satirical take on the moped-mugger phenomenon, a worthy poke at the heat suffered by passengers on the Central Line, and an even better poke at the inexplicably popular London Eye ("only £74 per rotation").

It's worth checking out their instagram feed for loads of other timely takes on what passes for life in 2018 UK.

Note to Brixton graffiti writers: thanks, nice...but we've too many yups here already

Some useful signposting on the overground rail bridge in Brixton High Street...trouble is they all tend to go right, straight to
the Pop Brixton container park....

That new bit of graffiti on Brixton's high-level rail bridge made a nice little photo-story for the Brixton Buzz site.

The writing is on the bridge. It reads: "Clapham that way, you 2D Flat White Tepid Colonialist Yuppy Wanker". There's an arrow pointing west down the Overground line towards the next stop: Clapham High Street.

Yes, it's fun, it's funny, it's to the point. Clapham was thoroughly yuppified back in the 80s - and that strange breed still prevails in much of SW4. But please, I've lived in the bloody area for longer than is reasonable, and the last thing we need is more of the buggers!

In reality the Yuppie has changed a bit since the 80s. Maybe the truest 2018 successor to the yup is the hipster with their artisanal this, their authentic that; the obsession with everything being just so. And of course they would not be seen dead in this postcode: strictly east and southeast London, please...

Vaguely hipsterish people I've met like to mock SW4: it's either Cla'am or Crapham. Probably the least fashionable place in all of London, from the viewpoint of Hackney Wick or Peckham Rye.

What used to be the yuppiest bits of SW4 are now colonised by corporate types - families with live-in au pairs and even chauffeurs living in huge houses. They are much, much richer than thou, antiquated Golf GTi driving yuppy of Peter York fame!

But keeping an Attenborough-ish, threatened species eye on the place, it's clear there are still millennial versions of real 80s-style Sloaney yups in Clapham, with a few differences. 1980s yuppies bought their crappy flats; the 2018 versions have to rent. They tend to share flats in the slightly cheaper parts of the area. Here they often mix with another strand of the young professional type: sports-mad Aussies, Kiwis and South Africans who for some reason still seem to love SW4. Probably it's the proximity of wide-open space on which to play games with strange shaped balls and frisbees.

How consoling it is that the young flock to our great open spaces at the first
real sniff of summer: May 19 2018, Clapham Common...

Every bright morning, every evening, the Common is a nightmare of grunting and sweating types, trying so noisily hard to get in trim like their bronzed Australasian neighbours.

But the core breed, yuppie lethargica, are most visible on the first really warm weekends of summer when they come out en masse and sit their well-fed, pastel-coloured-tailored-shorts-clad bottoms down on that little triangle of the Common nearest to the Old Town shops.
Sadly, they know nothing of re-cycling or even taking their litter (Prosecco bottles, etc) away with them. All the rubbish bins will be overflowing with over-stuffed orange Sainsburys carrier bags by early evening.

....but how sad that they so often neglect to take their rubbish
with them.

The richest ones (who live in the more expensive new builds in Old Town), will show off their powerful sports cars, often annoyingly revving the engines for no good reason at traffic lights. That really is wanker behaviour.

Yet, as one commenter on the Brixton Buzz story says, Clapham is actually a bit shit: it was always a byword for the "ordinary" suburb, ie mediocre, drab, stuffy. And it always will be.

It's not really a place, it's a collection of tube stations. It has no real centre: it's defined, if by anything, by a dirty open space - Clapham Common. The better bits to the north are either Stockwell borders or Battersea-Nine Elms borders. The better bits to the west around Lavender Hill are Battersea. The southern bits improve when they become Balham.

There are a couple of visibly smug areas - Clapham Old Town, Abbeville Road - that typify that first wave of well-heeled yuppiedom. Many of that first wave moved a bit west and south when they shacked up and had kids: hence Nappy Valley (really Battersea again, by Northcote Road, wrecking what was once a decent street market).

But there's a lot more to the social fabric of this district than the stereotype would have you believe. There's still a lot of social housing, and there are still a few hanging-on 1970s boho types, who, as we all now know, were actually the first essential phase of re-gentrification.

This blog has tried to throw some light on the social history of the area. But no-one, in recent years, has done more to reveal the many layers and deep and diverse roots of Clapham residents than the Jim Grover , who has had five acclaimed exhibitions in quick succession, all focusing on the area and the people who live, work and play here.

A fine example of a "Front Room" display cabinet, a rarity
now, but these took pride of place in many West Indian family
homes in south London back in the 60s. From Clapham-based
photographer Jim Grover's recent Windrush Generation
exhibition at the Oxo Gallery, London SE1.

photographer

His most recent show was Windrush: A Portrait of a Generation, a celebration of the West Indians who arrived in this part of south London 70 years ago. He got to know some of the original Windrush passengers and their children and grandchildren at his local church; as with all his work, he earned the trust of the people he wanted to portray before getting out his camera.

Other exhibitions have focused on the long-established Café Delight at Clapham North and its varied clientele; the double life (daytime and night-time) of much-maligned Clapham High Street; and the work of a priest at the church in Clapham Park Estate. It is already an impressive body of work that shows this area in a very different light to the media stereotype.

It's work like Jim Grover's, patient, painstaking, that truly reveals the complexity of a neighbourhood, of communities; lives that are led, families that flourish...others that do not. 

But thanks anyway graffiti people for reminding me of the way home. As for being a yuppie, well maybe 40 years ago. 2D? Well I guess I know what it means: bland, dull, fake. Flat, yes, flat white. But am neither smooth nor sane enough: I'm more like 5D. Flat-white? I prefer espresso. Tepid? Yeah, OK. Colonialist? Well, had to live somewhere. At least I got out out of Dalston just in time so that the real Dalstonites could move in. Wanker? Obviously.

Cyclists killed on London's streets: a new Ghost Bike commemorates another death in Deptford

It feels like an undeclared war in London between drivers and cyclists has broken out again, with three cyclists killed in the last month - all in the Greenwich-Deptford area of south east London.

The first two cyclist deaths on London's roads in 2018 were both on the A206 between the Greenwich Naval College and the Blackwall Tunnel roundabout: that deadly route to Woolwich. According to the report in the Evening Standard, both were males, 46 and 37, and both were killed by lorries, on May 9 and May 18 respectively.

Cyclists' groups have campaigned for cycle lanes to be built here, but the authority - Greenwich - has failed to take action.

Then, last Sunday, June 3 - ironically, World Bicycle Day - a male cyclist in his fifties died in a shocking and puzzling incident at the junction of Childers Street and Rolt Street, SE8. This was a hit-and-run incident, at a junction where traffic-calming measures and a new supposedly cyclist-friendly route had only recently opened.

The case is under police investigation. A 37-year-old man was arrested on Wednesday on a charge of causing death by dangerous driving, then was released.

By Thursday, one of the white Ghost Bikes had been chained to the signpost at the scene of this death. I know this corner well, often cycling to this exact point, to visit the Acme studios in the former Propeller Factory on Childers Street. It's only in the last few months that many of the streets and pavements around here have been re-paved and traffic calming measures introduced.

It seems the bike became trapped under the car, which was then driven up Childers Street to the next junction. Unable to dislodge the bike, the driver was then seen to run off on foot, abandoning the car. You can see the scratches gouged into the recently-resurfaced road by the trapped bike. It is a chilling sight, when you realise that at the time these scratches were made the rider was dying on the street, despite efforts to help him from several passers-by.

Rolt Street is part of a well-known rat-run for drivers trying to beat the traffic in the Surrey Quays - Deptford - New Cross triangle. Locals say the new one-way system is often ignored by motorists, and that the council has often been told this: even after the death, cars and vans were shooting through that narrow one-way lane in the wrong direction.

There's no point in going on. Except to say - unfortunately - that no London cyclist will be surprised by this horrific event. The levels of car/van/lorry driver aggression have been increasing: anger seems to be in the foul air we all have to breathe. Cars screech to a halt at junctions, their nasty bumpers two or three feet out into the cycle lane - they can't wait for the cyclists to pass, they bristle.

Each one of these deaths, like any other unnatural, unnecessary killing, creates terrible ripples of grief which extend far beyond family.

We're in a city suffering creeping death by vehicle pollution. Air pollution, visual pollution, stress pollution, noise pollution. The power-brokers are trying to keep the motorists happy, even when they know it is essential to discourage private drivers,  and to shift the balance towards more sustainable public transport.

Each cyclist killed on London streets is a victim of political decisions and business decisions. Such as the decision to allow hundreds of ready-mix cement and tipper trucks on to the narrow streets of central London, as they rush to feed the greedy construction sites of the City, Nine Elms, Blackfriars, Elephant and Castle, Old Street, Waterloo, Chelsea Barracks etc etc etc...Yes, just to build more unaffordable luxury apartments in tower blocks which add more visual pollution to the skyline. And whose occupants - if they ever move in - will probably soon be blasting down your street in their obese Maseratis and Range Rovers.

For many years, the groups who fight for safer streets for all have marked each cycle death with a white bike - a ghostly reminder to all passing traffic of a horrific event.

I look out for these, knowing the locations of many white bikes within a few minutes ride from here. Recently, one has disappeared - the one on Lavender Hill, Battersea, opposite the Police Station. It marked the spot where 32-year-old Lucia Ciccioli was killed at 7.54am on October 24, 2016, by a massive truck, which appeared to be delivering plaster-board to building sites.

Maybe this memorial has been removed at the request of the family of the victim. But if not - why has it gone? To make life easier for somebody? If that's the case, I'd say it was a dismal move.

I wish these  Ghost Bikes would remain in situ for ever: concrete them in, reinforce them; make sure they get in people's way, make sure they cause drivers' heads to turn and consciences to start pricking them.

Maybe in 100 years people would look at them in disbelief that such fragile, elegant machines could have been so much at the mercy of speeding lumps of metal, oil and plastic, filling the air with their toxic stench and their hideous blaring horns and roaring engines. And so often carrying just one or a couple of people, unnecessarily, very slowly, to schools or shops.

Feeling less lonely as Standard columnist blasts SUVs

At last, an opinion piece in the Evening Standard that pins down everything that is vile about the vehicles known as SUVs ("sports utility vehicles", that is big four-wheel drive farmer's trucks tarted up to appeal to rich and insecure urbanites).

When I read Anna van Praagh's short piece in Wednesday's edition (May 23, Comment: My boy's obsession with 4x4s will not do, page 19) I almost did one of those embarrassing "YES!" gestures loved by footballers who've just scored the winning goal.

So, yes! There is someone else out there who finds these bully-boy autos totally repugnant. She hits the phenomenon right on its chrome-plated, sneering grille: "Childcrushers are so vulgar, so selfish, so crass, surely people driving them can sense how much they are disliked?"

Exactly. She distils most of my reasons for loathing these vehicles in a few very well turned sentences. But are they actually so widely disliked? There's a conundrum here.

It's odd, because there has always been a good deal of mockery and distaste for the urban use of vehicles which might be appropriate on a ranch in Arizona, or in a war zone - but are simply an unattractive nuisance in a city like London with so many congested, narrow streets. I can remember people commenting harshly on the drivers of  "Chelsea tractors" way back in the early 1990s, and possibly before that.

Yet none of the jokes, none of the disapproval, has made even the slightest dent in their popularity: in fact they have burgeoned, and conquered the car market, getting bigger, fatter and much, much uglier year after year.

The original 1970s Range Rovers look positively slimline compared with a 2018 Land Rover Discovery - which, at over 2 metres wide, surely should become one of the first to be banned from confined routes like the Rotherhithe tunnel.

Cycling through the back streets of my own unmentionable suburb (the postcode is SW4), the ratio of these vehicles to normal is about half and half. If two of the fatter SUVs are parked on opposite sides of a road, there's barely room for one of their plump brethren to pass - without forcing everyone else to head for the pavement.

There's also an irony. One of the widest, tallest and  longest SUVs encountered today was a Tesla - an electric-powered vehicle. Many of the top-of-range SUVs around today are more fuel efficient than some of the sweet little cars you love so much, you hypocrite author!

OK - maybe that's true. But that does not make up for the sheer physical provocation these massive chunks of metal and and plastic represent; the way they flash their stupid LED fair-lights at you, blast you out of your saddle with their high-powered air-horns, swish past you on their great fat tyres, looking down their noses at you from their elevated, kid-leather-seated comfort.

Grrrr: this isn't SUV envy, you know, it really isn't.

Rookery Road on Clapham Common: the re-surfacing job that time forgot...

Rookery Road cuts across the north-east corner of Clapham
Common. It gets very heavy traffic (as you can see) and yet it has
not been resurfaced in decades. Unlike all the other roads
around here. Why not?

Both Lambeth and Wandsworth Councils have shown exemplary enthusiasm when it comes to re-paving certain troubled areas of their boroughs.

Soon after the 2011 riots, the whole of the Clapham Junction area broke out into a pleasing arrangement of tastefully-variegated pastel-shaded paving blocks: the old dark grey filth-stained pitted tarmac and granite gave way to soothing garden centre chic.

Seven years on this lovely new work is already showing serious signs of decay; no material known to humankind can cope with the daily downpour of spat-out chewing gum, nor the vile stains of McDonald's toxic shakes as they dribble out from discarded polystyrene buckets.

Let alone the pollution from tens of thousands of combustion-engined vehicles passing through the junction every day.

Meanwhile, Lambeth labours away to make little bits of nice street furnishings: Clapham Old Town; Windrush Square; Stockwell Cross. Weeks and months of disruption to locals and passing traffic as gangs of workers rip up the old and carefully lay the new.

All jolly good - we suppose; if we are charitably-minded. What a splendid way to use our council tax quids.

Pity they totally fucked up the traffic flow in Clapham Old Town in the process - giving even more rat-runs to the mumsnet SUVs and off-white-van drivers, confusing cyclists with a ridiculous cycle-lane layout and sending pedestrians all round the houses to find safe crossings. Trouble with those rat-runs is drivers tend to speed up when sneaking into them, hoping they won't be spotted.

And - AND - above ALL! - what about Rookery Road? Yes that little but very important bit of road between Clapham Southside - the main A3 trunk route - and the left turn turn down to the Northside one-way system.

The deeply pot-holed surface of Rookery Road: enough to throw you off
your bike and under the wheels of a speeding SUV.or whatever.
Who will take responsibility for this death-trap?

This couple of hundred metres of road sees very heavy traffic. It is called Rookery Road because it passes under the great plane trees that still accommodate  some truly fine murders of big black bastard carrion crows.

But the surface of this road is also MURDEROUS! It's bad enough in a small car - but approach on a pushbike at any speed and you are dead. Especially if you are trying to position yourself centre road to take the north-flowing lane towards Old Town and Larkhall Rise.

Does this bit of road not fall into one or other borough's care? Who is responsible for this? Most of the other roads around there have been re-surfaced two or three times since even one bit of gravel has been replaced here.

Why?

Maybe Lambeth and Wandsworth think the crows should do it.