Above is a non-artist’s impression of my cycle journey home yesterday, after an area of south London between Vauxhall and Camberwell lost power at about 4 o’clock yesterday afternoon.  Am I alone in feeling a small charge of excitement at the vaguely post-apocalyptic scenes of backed-up traffic crawling through interchanges with no street lamps or traffic lights, police sirens wailing in the near, middle and far distance? There’s just something about a non-fatal state of emergency…

A couple of weeks ago I was going to write about something I saw on one of the mornings when I walk into work. On Camberwell New Road, pretty much half way between Camberwell and Oval, bunches of flowers were tied to a lamppost -  someone’s died, obviously.

As you approach, you also see the collapsed front garden railings of the house adjacent to the lamppost. What’s happened is now slightly less clear – there has been a spate of teen killings in South London over the last few months and one’s first thought is along these lines. But the flattened railings have obviously been hit by a vehicle. First guess here is that the motorist has died. However the flowers also go all the way up the front stairs, up to the front door of the house.

And then you see the Evening Standard newspaper cutting, placed behind perspex and tied to the lamppost.

Grandmother killed saving dog
Published: Wednesday, 30 May, 2007
LONDON: A grandmother died after she was knocked down outside her front door when a car careered onto the pavement.
Eileen Elliott, 67, died only months away from her golden wedding anniversary. Witnesses said she stepped into the path of the oncoming car to try to save her dogs as they returned home from a walk on Saturday.
Stanley Elliott, 75, heard his wife’s scream and ran outside in time to hear her last words: “Oh Stanley, please help me.”
She died at King’s College Hospital in Denmark Hill after the collision at about 3.55pm.
Eileen had returned home after walking her two dogs, Josh and Lucky, along Camberwell New Road, in south London. Witnesses said a light-coloured BMW careered off the road after colliding with another car.
The BMW was believed to have been breaking the speed limit. It had to swerve to avoid a head-on collision with a taxi after it drove onto the wrong side of the road while attempting to overtake another vehicle.
But the BMW clipped the taxi and its driver lost control, sending it smashing into the railings of the Elliotts’ front garden.
Eileen, who had 14 grandchildren, stepped into the car’s path to pick up her five-year-old dog Josh, saving its life in the process. But she and six-year-old Lucky were killed.
Stanley said: “We have been together almost every night for 50 years. I am heartbroken. We had seven children together. She was my soulmate. I don’t know how I’m going to cope. I have been close to suicide.”
Stanley said he was inside their house when he heard a screech of tyres and an “loud bang”.
He said: “I ran straight outside. I knew something terrible had happened. I could not believe what I saw. Our dog was squashed dead on the pavement and my wife had been knocked to the ground. She was groaning as I held her. She said ‘Oh Stanley, please help me’. That was the last thing I ever heard her say.”
Twenty-year-old student, Jailong Bao, appeared in court on Monday charged with causing death by dangerous driving in connection with the crash.
Bao, from Norwich, was also charged with driving without a driving licence, driving without insurance, and without MOT. He was bailed to appear at Inner London Crown Court on July 31. – London Evening Standard

The tragedy of the thing just hits you. You read the story and you see the devastation right there. You’re not one step removed, reading it on the train, or in the pub. It’s right on top of you and it’s almost too powerful to deal with.

There was another bloke there as I was reading. He took a picture of the article in its setting between the flowers. I couldn’t, for some reason. I wasn’t sure about writing about it either, but I’m still thinking about it, so I figured I should.

It’s not a shopping centre, but I’m marginally disappointed by this. I don’t know what I wanted to happen there, but I was hoping for something that matched the originality of the tethered hot air balloon that used to give birds eye views of London (before the days of the London Eye), and something that was as visually grabbing as the bus station.

It’ll be interesting to see how this ends up looking. A lot of Lambeth’s newer sports and leisure areas have been a bit nursery school like with lots of plastic and primary colours (not that I have anything against primary colours). I wonder if more plans are available anywhere.

Went along to the Ace Cafe London, biker hang-out extraordinaire, at the weekend to see a small gathering of Routemaster buses and their proud owners. A funnier bunch of bus devotees you never did see. We were mainly interested in finding out what people had done with them once they’d been decommissioned and sold off, but this lot were mainly bus owners of long standing. I’m sure there are some pretty funky possibilities for re-decking these things and using them as mobile venues and we heard stories of several such projects, but we’re yet to see an imaginative example in the flesh.

View flickr stream

A pleasure as ever, sir.

Arseblog was the first online social network thingummy I got involved with. It was pretty special to watch it grow from the (usually hung over, always funny) blog of an Irish Arsenal fan in Barcelona in 2002, to the inception of the ‘arses’ community through the blog’s comments (which now regulary top 500 a day), before the creation of a full blown forum with its own initiation and member selection process and some of the sharpest, funniest photoshopping I’ve seen.

I’ve met some fantastic people through arseblog, with so much more in common than just supporting the same football team. It really turned me on to the power of online social networking to bring people from all over the world with one common interest together. I still fondly look back on the first EwA meeting (Everyone who’s Anyone – you had to be there), and love being around to witness from the outside other online communities meet for the first time – that nervous approach of strangers in pubs and how warmly and happily people put faces to names. Some time ago it was a Bob Dylan fan club in the back room of the (sadly missed) Purple pub in Brixton before a gig at the Academy. On Saturday it was Routemaster owners at the Ace Cafe London, (pics to follow).

It’s hardly an original insight, but the interweb is great.

And mainly I want to take advantage of Russell Davies‘ inspirational recipe of how to be interesting while the motivation oven is still hot.