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A personal weblog with photographs and comments. Quiet ramblings, quite rambling...

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A health and safety warning to would-be burglars.

This is very thoughful of the construction company in Greenwhich which has placed the warning on the walls of their site. I guess it’s owned at a certain category of burglar: stupid, but not too stupid to read.

This is the stairwell of the Maximilian hotel in Prague where I stayed earlier this week. The hotel comprises (at least) two adjacent buildings that are joined on a mezanine (1st) floor. According to the literature, the interior of the hotel was completely remodeled by Czech architect Eva Jiricna in 2005.

I have pointed out how Surrey County Council like to take cyclists to a tricky intersection and then abandon them.

The lane above falls more into the category of doing something futile for cyclists. What the Council seem to be saying is “intersection ahoy! Mount the pavement, take the corner, get back on the road”. So there is no consistent allocation of space to pedestrians, cyclists and motorists. This also sends a mixed message to road users: yesterday’s lane says “make space for cyclists at the intersection”. Today’s lane (which is actually the same intersection but a different approach) suggests that “cyclists should move out of the way of cars at the intersection”.

How are cyclists meant to connect the dots of all these cycle lanes? Following my post earlier today on the 15 metres long cycle lane in Chertsey here’s the joke on the other side of the road.

The Surrey County Council seems to put cycle lanes whereever this is convenient to their road engineers and there is just a little bit of space. Where road navigation is tricky or a lane might impinge on motorists’ space it abandons the lane, often at the most dangerous point.

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the short cycle lane in Chertsey which guides cyclists off one exit of a roundabout (but provides no other clear function). Here is the cycle lane leading up to that roundabout. It’s also about 15 metres long, and it starts and ends about 100 metres before the roundabout in the previous post. Again the general impression is that Surrey County Council decided “oh, we have a few metres here, why don’t we put in a short cycle lane”.

A map of the cycle lanes around here must look like a connect-the-dots puzzle.

And here’s the view from outside the hotel, at street level, looking up at the church opposite.

The map they give out in the hotel identifies many pubs and only a few churches but I suspect this is the 13th Century convent of Saint Agnes of Bohemia. A sister of King Wenceslas I, she was only made a saint very recently (in 1989). The convent is one of the earliest gothic buildings in Prague and now houses part of the National Gallery.

I do hope that I haven’t misidentified this building!

This photograph of the Town Square, looking towards the astronomical clock, reminds me of the Weather Project.

Here’s the same view out of my hotel window (as yesterday but this is the night view. The church opposite worried me at first but thankfully I never heard the bells once.

I awoke this morning to this view from my hotel room. Quite pleasant, although the weather is overcast and it’s fairly chilly (12 degrees Celsius). Tonight I’m going out for dinner with some colleagues. It’s just a pity that I haven’t shaken my cold.

Here’s a close-up of the intersection I showed previously to illustrate my point about cycle lanes in Berlin.

To recap: They do them properly there, the lanes continue undisturbed through intersections, they continue where the road narrows, and are supported by traffic lights.

(I’m not sure what the yellow sign means: U boats turn right?)

About two weeks ago a young driver from Oxted crashed and completely wrote off her vehicle here when her tyre burst as she drove over some pieces of asbestos that had been dropped in the road. She was lucky to walk away without serious injury (according to a police officer who witnessed the accident).

It is illegal to dispose of asbestos in landfill sites, like the one at the Oxted quarry. The streets in and around Oxted are currently being littered with the debris of the trucks coming to-and-from the quarry, which is currently being filled with landfill as part of the reclaiming/landscaping exercise. Could one of these trucks also have littered the asbestos which caused the accident?

Asbestos is a dangerous substance: over 3,000 people die every year in this country from asbestos-related disease (and the number is expected to rise to 10,000 by the year 2020).  It is also the greatest single cause of work-related deaths in the UK.

Here are my previous posts on the subject:

• Chalkpit Lane
• The Oxted Quarry
• Local Planning Meeting: The Chalkpit Lane Issue
• Follow them home
• Something Fishy

Yeah, right. What is it about women of a certain age (like Madonna) and their (artificial/plastified) cowboy hats?

On the front of this one are the sequinned letters USA. I wonder if Madge gets a cut in the profits on these things.

It reminds me of the young American woman at the French conversational circles evening in Strasburg. We were a group of non-native French speakers from around the world and the topic of conversation was “Traditional music in our home country”. She told us very earnestly that in America the traditional music is pop music, like Madonna, and asked if any of us had ever heard of this American singer. Bless. She didn’t understand why everyone else found this amusing. Well I guess it saves you having to describe some obscure instrument or dance that nobody else in the room has ever heard of. Nobody laughed at the guy from Uzbekistan when his turn came round.

This sculpture looks like a German aviator. It’s found in the smoking zone outside Tegel airport building in Berlin.

This is a view of a piece of sky over SE27. I saw blue on the weekend. Today the grey has returned.

Four wheel drive vehicles are more dangerous to those around them than conventional cars are.

This applies even more when the driver is reading a magazine in (slowly moving) motorway traffic as this idiot was yesterday morning.