do u get the feeling you have to do something on this longest day?

london 5.58pm 22C sunny. sunrise and sunset same as yesterday, saturday 2019

today is the same length as yesterday which was the longest day… so we have joint longest days this year. though the next day is 3secs shorter, so subjectively, we wont notice the difference.

its pleasant of course to have such long days. its what summer is about. and it is a pleasure that only us in the temperate latitudes can enjoy, as the nearer you get to the equator, the length of the daylight hours become quite unaltered and the sun rise and sun sets practically the same time all year round. there are lots of summer fetes going on in london. we might not be famed for our bbqs, but we are famed for our summer fetes.  full of people sneezing and hay feverish. haha.

i find that i tend to stay indoors. it is unconscious, somehow my mind knows it will be very bad to go outdoors too much. but having said that, though, i intend to go to the tesco near me at about 7pm. i am hoping the pollen will go down then.

there is a westend festival at trafalgar square today and tomorrow, where the westend musicals offer a sample of what they are about to entice people to buy tickets to see the whole thing. it gets very crowded. i have seen it getting bigger and bigger from its small beginnings at leicester square, to now in the bigger trafalgar square. i tend to skip it as it gets so crowded they have to stop people going in. 

i suppose this long day must make people feel they have to go out and do something, just to make an occasion of it, to celebrate it. i can understand that feeling. i satisfy it by going out to the supermarket later in the day , to enjoy the outdoors, before the hay fever strikes, whilst making it worthwhile by having a destination to go to, and possibly finding some bargains in terms of groceries.

i found out only yesterday that this tesco that i am going to, is closing down end of this month, for about 2wks, for renovation they said. one wonders what they are putting in place. i have a feeling they are going to adjust its checkout areas, to accommodate the new gadget where u can scan the goods with your smartphone whilst you pick up items around the store and let it tally up and then pay up at the end without needing to queue up at a service till. how they will stop people not scanning the goods and sneak out without paying for them i wonder. maybe have more security cameras and staff to spot them.

like this article where they caught a woman doing it, and banned her from all asda stores. this is the first time i read that they are finding and punishing these people. perhaps they hope it will scare everyone else from doing the same thing. for her to be banned suggests that she had been doing it for some time, and given warnings. the interesting thing is she is not charged with shop lifting… with theft and the police brought in so she can be charged. instead they banned her. maybe the law is a bit vague on this, not scanning on a self scanning device may not constitute theft. 

it could be that the police are not prosecuting any shop lifting offences involving small sums of money. she was stealing £16 worth on a £45 shopping bill. so the supermarket may find its hands are tied to deal with petty theft like this. so banning her is the only way to deal with persistent offenders.

i just have a thought. how does she tag loose items like bananas where u need to weigh them first and there is no codes to scan?

crowded places

london good friday 2018 6.2C 7.37am cloudy/sunny.

i saw this article about population density in europe, and saying they dont tell the whole picture…

for eg, There are 33 1km² areas across Europe with a population of 40,000 or more: 23 are in Spain, and ten are in France. England’s most densely populated km², in West London, has just over 20,000 people in it. Globally, the highest figure is close to 200,000, in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Read more: 

it does explain why my own personal experience bears it out. i live in central london and my area can be deserted with hardly any people during the course of the day.  ok you might say maybe i am lucky to live in a small pocket of residential area with no businesses around, so no one is likely to be walking about, but still, there must be people living here… but all the windows are blank and i see no one when i do happen to go out. of course everyone could be at work , haha. so during the day no one lives here so perhaps mine is  not a good example. hehe.

but right now i look out and really the place looks like the whole place is empty of people. i suppose it does not help that it is a bank holiday weekend and maybe practically everyone have left town. i wonder if that is one of the urban myths, that london practically empties of people durng the bank holiday easter weekend. usually on working weekdays, before 9am would be a troop of office workers walking past my flat, on their way to the home office and other govt buildings further down the road. and after work,a fewer number  of them walking back to the tube station. 

i think my area is always very quiet and deserted, but maybe london does get emptied during these bank holiday weekends. we hear of long traffic jams with everyone seemingly heading out of the cities , or airports full of departing passengers… not so much of arrivals … because they dont hang around in the airports for us to notice them. so by rights those who leave should be evened out by those who come in to visit london. 

but still, when i was in hongkong,(oh this was quite long ago, so it must be worst now) the noise! the crowds! people everywhere!!! i remember there were lots of drilling and at one stage i had to walk about with my fingers in my ears, starring straight ahead when i walk on the pavement in an attempt to block the noise and everyone around me and everything that was happening in my vicinity.  it was that unbearable. i have never felt that crowded in all the years living in london.

you could say that is nothing, just wait till u get to an indian city. haha. but maybe it just goes to show that our own personal experiences may not be a useful guide to how busy a place is. here is where statistics play a role in showing us the truer picture. 

 

royal mayhem , if u ask me haha

london 1.25pm 21.8C saturday 2016

there was a voucher for a free frozen yoghurt from swirl,for today to commemorate their opening a store in islington. so i went there and got it. quite nice. the voucher mentioned the name of the place is swirl, but it has another name. rather strange, and googling it earlier, i noticed there was a store called sambaswirl in number 21, that had closed down. this one is in 38 upper st. that one was 5yrs old. its really strange how businesses operate. maybe the lease expired in that other one. 

 and i had a spare voucher, it was published in yesterday’s metro and i found two newspapers with the vouchers lying around in victoria station. and i gave it to a lady who paused outside and  curiously looked in, just as i was coming out with my frozen yoghurt. so i asked her if she wanted one for free and gave her the other voucher. i did not take any photos, which i should have done haha. well that is my birthday treat taken care of haha. i had google greet me with a doodle this morning when i log on. how nice! i thought at first it was for the queen, because it is her official birthday today too… but when i click on it, it says happy birthday anthony… 

 

anyway my friend , peter, from bournemouth arrived in london and came to the flat at about 9am. and he had been indoors watching the live broadcast of the changing of the guards and big do in the mall. i came back just in time to catch the last minutes of the live broadcast of tv showed the mall jammed with people and crowds outside buckingham palace… i just thought how awful, who wants to be mixed up in all that crowd and u cannot see a thing anyway. but obviously there are plenty of people wishing to do so. peter tells me that when he was coming to london on the national express coach, in the short time he was there, he saw 5 hired coachloads of people going to london. so there are these many people coming from outside london for this.

added. i was very startled to see how bright green the colour of the queen’s outfit… and then it dawned on me that she have got it right all along. she needs to be noticeable. that is the whole point of it all.  it wont do for her to be wearing dull colours. and she is the only person i know who can carry off these really dramatic colours. the telegraph have a nice article mentioning it. 

i wonder if i am a bit weird, in that my first reaction to seeing all this is to avoid it. i had wanted to go to seven dials, in covent gdn for a do there… but now i see the big crowds i think i shall give it a miss. the centre of london will be a mess, with all these people wandering about. peter asks me to join him in it, but i decided not to . i know i shall get a bit bored with it.

i know it gets a lot of hype and the anticipation must be at fever pitch, but all i can see is the big crowd of people and that is a horror right from the start. i avoided all the crowds by taking a different bus route that avoids that area when i went to islington and to the library this morning… so i wont tempt fate by going out again and right into the centre of that mass of people now that i have got back.

i just had another thought, there will be the naked bike riders to add to all this mayhem. i think i shall sit this out.

added 7.12pm, my friend have been texting me about his doings… once he text that he found £5. later when he came back he told me it was 5 £1 coins in the cobbles on the ground. at first i thought he meant all in one place, but now i had a think, it is various places. he is lucky that way. he can find money easily… it is his knack,like he got a radar that attracts money to him or makes him finds them.

 though he dont have the knack of saving them. haha. mores the pity. he called me and told me he is at the local supermarket and seeing the reduced foods section… but he came back spending £18 , amazing how anyone can spend that amount of money if they have only bought reduced foods… and sure enough when i see what he had bought it is all sweet stuff, cakes, etc. a waste of money really haha. all about £1, but they sure mount up if you are not careful.

crowded london

london 3.07pm saturday 2015 sunny 19C

it was the eid celebration in trafalgar square today. so many people in central london and not just at the square but everywhere from parliament square up to and beyond trafalgar square. i am glad i dont live in that area.

today is dry and sunny so unlike yesterday when it rained all day and night. the eating stalls were extremely busy. there were not that many stalls, so its possible some have cancelled when they see the weather yesterday and think it will be the same today. if it had rained, like yesterday it would definitely be quieter. those stalls that decide to carry on now reap the rewards as queues were very long. 

Digital StillCamera

Digital StillCamera

Digital StillCamera

Digital StillCamera

Digital StillCamera

Digital StillCamera

Digital StillCamera

Digital StillCamera

Digital StillCamera

London Bridge: Commuters jump barriers to escape overcrowding amid rush hour ‘chaos’ – Transport – News – London Evening Standard

London Bridge: Commuters jump barriers to escape overcrowding amid rush hour ‘chaos’ – Transport – News – London Evening Standard.

this illustrates all too well that london is a commuter city with many times the number coming in everyday and going out of the city everyday just to come to work.

one curious effect of this is that even though there are millions in the city during the day, the streets are very empty outside the lunch hour and the rush hours. the city is like a ghost town in between. everyone is indoors working.

i know this because i have seen it. it is a strange feeling, one moment, the streets are dead, then suddenly huge amounts of people appear. they queue for the food, they crowd the pavements, it is quite an amazing sight really. it looks like a indian city, or hongkong, or s.e.asian city but whereas in those places it happens at all hours, but for this one place in london, it only occurs for a few hours at lunch time, and beginning of the day and end of the working day.