Cross-making taxi rank at KX

King's Cross is now a snazzy new station. Everything has been changed and spruced up. Most of it is good to look at and easy to use - a successful piece of design. Most of it; but there's an exception. The taxi rank is a terrible, useless, amateur piece of design.

The passenger queue is a system that has long been abandoned elsewhere. Without constant supervision, its multiple lanes lead to inevitable accusations of queue jumping by frustrated passengers, often without the offending person knowing they are doing it. Tempers rise, fists are raised, heads are shaken.

If the passenger in the frontmost queue has any difficulties getting into the cab, if the driver has to get out and help, even if there's a full complement of fares trying to get in, all the taxis behind have to wait. The queues lengthen again. People walk off down the street to get into a cab in the long waiting line; but they are disappointed because the cabbies aren't allowed to pick them up there. They walk back and are refused their previous position at the front of the queue. Anger ensues.

Impatient passengers step out to meet the long awaited taxi, who stops for the fare a few yards before the designated pickup point. Result: there is now one fewer taxi in this batch of pickups. More frustration, more anger.

There is a second lane beside the taxi pickup lane, but it is never used. If there were slip roads out from the pickup lane, this second lane could be used to overtake and leave by taxis currently stuck behind a slow pickup, thus keeping the flow moving.

If there were actual markings on the pavement and the road for passengers to stand in and for taxis to stop at, there would be more equality.

If, as at Paddington, everyone joined the same queue, there would be no perception of queue jumping; instead, passengers at the head of the queue would go and stand in the next empty passenger circle, and the cabs would pull up in the right place.

The system, as it stands, would work better if the cabs simply picked fares up from a queue at the side of the road, as has happened for years and years and years.

If the so-called designers had bothered to talk to taxi drivers, this would never have been built. But they didn't, and so there's always a subject that you and the taxi driver can agree on when you get into a cab at King's Cross.

dig it

Wastefully Wistful

It seemed so easy at the time: sign up, sign in, sign on; and there you are: a new messenger for the new world.

One problem soon emerges. Messengers need messages. Always easy to find one if someone digs hard enough.

Someone?

Me?

But that sounds like work.

Same old.

What's that American Arse smoking?

Suarez has a reputation, not only as an exceptional footballer but also, as an exceptionally nasty person.  So why would the owner of Liverpool Football Club deliver a humiliating public rebuke to him? The only likely result is a series of petulant rebellions, some on "principle", others purely out of sustained, seething anger at being denied champions league football by a club which still can't admit the extent of its decline.

The dickheaded foolishness continues beyond Anfield, all the way south to Ashburton Grove, where the Arsenal  are still without a major signing. It should be made clear that this is not Wenger's fault. He is there to craft and polish a football team, to manage those provided to him by the club, not as the primary agent for acquiring new talent. He can't do deals and deal-makers are needed for the transfer business.

It is the club's fault that he has made no significant signings and the club are exemplified by the board. It's at their table that the buck stops. Their incompetence, their inability to understand just what an unfilled gap is still there in David Dein's vacated chair, has resulted in the whole in-out imbalance. When a club sells players like Fabregas and Van Persie it either replaces them with bods of a similar stature or it declines.

Arsenal is in decline, make no mistake about it, and has been since the departure of TH. The board have done nothing to change this for several years.

There is not one single director who has shown themselves to understand the modern game, they have all spoken with a smug self-satisfaction which defies reason, and the elephant-sized arsery of Peter Hill Wood, charming as he may be, pervades every corner of the room.

At the moment, watching Arsenal in the transfer window is like watching Michael Foot trying to get elected: the more he says, the more sense he speaks, the more likely he is to fail, and fail miserably. This team is half a centimetre away from the precipice and I didn't become a gooner to go cliff diving. Deal with it, dickheads: dump the board and start again.

blood on the strat

I've been playing the electric guitar (a Fender Strat which belonged to my late dear brother, Henry). Having spent years (over 40) trying not to play guitar, I eventually gave in on the sad occasion  of the instrument's arrival.

Recently my enthusiasm has grown and grown - it may be something o do with the addition of a medal and a box.

I think the next thing I should get is a plectrum...

Eton Shirkers

The BOF is so tired of hearing rose-tinted accounts of the bracing nature of Bogus 'mayor' Johnson's experience of sport at school that he thinks it is time to describe the torture as it really was. Generously, the BOF comes clean about his upbringing at Westbury House, a post war prep school in Arcadian Hampshire, and Eton College. Oh yes, he knows and will, for once, speak directly of his experiences.

Prepare for the change of person.

I was never good at sports of any kind, and I had no interest in them until it was too late to start playing. The first time I was picked for a school team, it was as scorer for the second XI cricket team, this only because of a summer cold laying strong boys low.

I declined, provoking a storm not unlike that associated with Oliver asking for more. What amazes me now is that I won. I did not have to fulfil the role. I was never picked again for anything, which suited me.

On to Eton, and a quick word about how it worked. There was no compulsorary two hours a day. No, it was a weekly total that mattered, and that was arrived at by a system which optimistically relied on the honesty of teenagers. We marked up a chart with Xs for the exercise we had supposedly taken.

As someone still allergic to team sports, I soon found the slacker's fallback, the cross country run.

Or, rather, the stroll(in shorts) to the Road Bridge. Shimmying up the slope of concrete, a place of safety could be found where blue tobacco smoke (and more) filled the afternoon air. A small transistor radio, a tranny, wafted 'Flowers in the Rain' or 'See Emily Play' or 'Honey'  around the new world environment of the motorway flyover.

During the summer I would row gently up the river to Queens Eyot, an island in the Thames with a bar exclusively for Etonians and a lawn on which to loll and laugh and become very drunk. How I ever rowed back, I don't know. Once, on this trip, a child's life was saved on the way there, something more satisfying than any sporting victory. 

No doubt the same thing was happening in every type and level of school. For those who wanted it, sport was there on tap. For those who didn't, it was a perfect exercise in skiving. Or perhaps a perfect exercise in self-determination - who knows? 

Whatever, it was not two hours of cumpulsorary sport a day. For many of us it was a daily triumph over authority. Sorry, Bogus; it was Xs, not hours that mattered. And, as every politician knoe, Xs mean votes. Come clean about your real school sporting days, Bogus.

Lines written upon visiting Damien Hirst's shop, Other Criteria, on Bond Street

Damien Hirst 

Is now the worst

Artist in this country. 

Other Criteria

Couldn't be drearier

Even if the cunt tried. 

Fiat fuck up

The BOF is puzzled.

He has been listening to and reading journalists on the subject of the financial crisis for years now. Slowly, they are getting down to a proper appraisal of modern capitalism but without focusing on what he believes to be at the centre of the crisis.

Money as we know it is based on a system of symbolism. The numbers and names of the money are a symbolic representation of value not the value itself. Fiat money by definition faces in one direction: it reflects the value of the real world back on itself, giving us a benchmark by which to judge comparative worth. It is a mirror.

What the casino side of the banks has done is to turn that mirror on itself, giving the instant impression that money goes on growing for ever. As with any multiple reflection, there is still, in reality, only one real object. All the rest, stretching into infinity, are an illusion. The fact that the real object at the centre of it all is still only a symbol gives a brittle delicacy to the construct.

The banks have tricked us into thinking that all those reflections are real objects with real value, whereas they are actually an illusion. They do not exist. There was no relationship between the stated value and the actual worth of sub-prime mortgages. It wasn't even smoke and mirrors, just mirrors and salesmen's talk.

The only way to stop this happening again and again is not to separate the high street from the casino. What must be done is to create two different forms of money: there is our money, the stuff we are paid for work and for selling things which we use to buy food and fun; it is a straightforward symbol of our worth; and there is gambling money, the stuff that's used to to turn money into an actual object. The symbol can be used to buy the chips, but the chips should never be allowed to affect the symbolic relationship which defines the value of money.

There is not enough natural morality in people to expect them to maintain this distinction on their own. They must be helped by legislation. A system which allows the value of a nation's currency to be arbitrarily altered at the whim of kids barely out of college who've come up with another wizard wheeze to reposition the mirrors and who have disdain for the actual people who have to live on that currency is not a proper system for safeguarding life savings and daily earnings.

In fact, who ever said it was ok for individuals to gamble with the wealth of nations? It's not, and it should be stopped. We have to retrace our steps a fair distance to do the rebuilding, but it must be done.

Money for us and money for them and never should the two of them meet. Only, ours is the real money. Theirs is the gambling chips that they have to buy at the door of the casino (paying a good tax), and then cash in again on the way out (paying another good tax). No buying Bollinger with those chips - they can't be used as cash, and any attempt to do so will be punished by removal and selling of all chips in the criminal's ownership to benefit the public good.

That should sort it. Well done the BOF.

spiced shit

This Spice Girls musical: the BOF is horrified by the level of support it seems to have, by the misplaced goodwill being shown to it, by the complete lack of opposition. It is a bad thing from all angles.

The records were only acceptable as popculture of the moment, and even then were horrible. For god's sake, doesn't anyone remember gerI halliwell? She couldn't even spell her own name, thinking that I was at the end of everything. Posh became infinitely more acceptable as Mrs Beckham, and as for the rest, they turned out to be ok once they'd disbanded the crap band.

So why would anyone want to...

Ah! Money. Of course.

There is no cultural significance to the Spice Girls, other than being the standard bearers for a particularly odious pair of Simons.

Should anyone really, really wanna see them and hear them again, can't they take a laptop under the duvet and do it there? At least the animals won't be scared again.

Seaman Shines

The old fart was chortling with frustration earlier. He'd heard that old Pony Tail from up Highbury way had been lobbed again. Memories of those days came back: every Big-Sam-type team that came there tried the lob, and more than a few went home. But the clip of today's lob isn't instantly viewable. No returns on searches, not right now, in the early evening of that day.

Good BOF behaviour, that exclusion: keep us waiting, make the reveal of the video that much more exciting...oh no, wait a minute, we're all supposed to decry manipulation of the media, we should be able to see it now rather than when some politically motivated TV production company chooses...cries of "No!" from the BOF. Umpires decision. Enjoy the show, even if it means No for now.

No will become Yes.

HomeLund

The BOF always enjoys the surprise of accidentally bumping into some half-way decent writing. Often, it only seems to be that way because of circumstances, but, hey, who cares? The pleasure's still the same. He suggests you try this.

Go!

St Martin's Lane - for a few days only - go see.

Dusty tricks?

The BOF says: if you're bored and want to pass some time, try searching for any previous mention of asbestos removal at Roman House, the site recently occupied and then hastily un-occupied by OccupyLondon, who appear to have been fooled by mendacious PR from a dodgy property spiv. (Try googling "should I buy from Berkeley homes?" as a starter)

Ain't no mountain high enough

The BOF woke up just in time to see it. The whole game, that is, not just The Moment. It had become a little dreary, with the dreadful russian making his now-familiar hash of things.

Then Thierry came on.

Why?

The only televised match tonight is Liverpool vs. Wigan, this despite the fact of several proper football-playing clubs being pitted against each other. The BOF is puzzled.

kuhai

Yeah, it should be 5
With seven following on.
I like other ways.

rimmed off

Mrs BOF is in Frankfurt, fighting for her rights - publishing rights, that is. Until recently she didn't know a byte from an apple but the advent of ebooks to her world has brought her smartly into the digital age.

The first sign of this came a few years ago, when her Blackberry started to put out roots and fasten itself into her person. The BOF has therefore been a little surprised that her messages continue to arrive as normal, while all around lesser beings bemoan the third day without Blackberry convergence.

A closer look the tail of the messages explains her continued connectedness, and serves as stark warning to those Commonwealth bores at RIM: Sent from my iPad.

touching thing

Touching thing, this getting old.
It has a rhythm.
So I can go on dancing.

sucky-babes' mouths

Tonight we heard this from Nick Boles (Conservative MP, Think-Tanker):

 "I don't want to knock ideas - I used to be an ideas man."

(Also author of Which Way Is Up?)

Freeview? Pah!

SkyTV offers most of the sports that the BOF wishes to watch. This, from their website today, is what they charge for it:

If you already have Sky TV, add the Sky Sports Pack for just £20.25 extra a month

This is what TopUpTV, the commercial arm of freeview, has to offer this morning:

Sky Sports 1 or 2 on their own will now be £24.99, while Sky Sports 1 and 2 together is still great value at £33.99

Quite what "great value" means under this banner is hard to tell. 2 channels for £34 compared to 4 channels for £20 indicates anything but good value. A starter package of Sky+ with Sky Sports costs £31.75 a month, still less than just 2 sports channels on Freeview.

Freeview is owned by another of those sprawling companies with an illiterate made-up name - Arqiva (sic) - as well as the terrestrial TV channels. The company's biggest shareholders are investment funds. We have, therefore, a national broadcasting system with the word free included in its name which is actually there to make a profit. Given that the government has decided that Freeview will soon be the only way to see TV other than satellite, it would be interesting to be reminded at which point we were told that the entire method of delivery of our TV systems was being privatised. The BBC used to output their own signal. Now, it appears, they are in the hands of privateers. 


Privatisation by stealth is an underhand, corrupt and damaging process. Why is there no fuss?