New cycle

So after a few days of silence I'm back to wish you a good new year - or a fine forthcoming 365 days if perchance you subscribe to a calender other than the one here in Britain.

No links today (and I've got 5 days of news to catch up on) but the radio reports that last night's celebrations here in London involved an unprecedented number of knife attacks on otherwise innocent party-goers. A sad sign of the times and I didn't escape unscathed myself.

After a nightmarish few days stranded snow-and-icebound without communications in a remote village on the North Norfolk coast (where I'd been called on false pretenses at short notice and some cost anyway) , I arrived back in London only to be forced to navigate through all manner of intoxicated drivers in an attempt to cross town from the station to home. Since my bike was parked at the station and the tube system was out on strike for the evening I really had no choice but to cycle it. Fine until a big red London Bus came barging by and used a diagonal route to push me out of the cycle lane and into the fencing protecting pedestrians.

Thanks to some hasty halting by the car behind I have survived with just some nasty bruises, but when even public service vehicles are driven by people behaving like lunatics one despairs. My thanks to the decent people that picked me up off the road and rescued most of the bike too.

So I'll probably need a new cycle for the new cycle, but that's a minor worry given what could have happened.

Back in the less personal news I also read that the UK government is planning for a worse Winter than predicted and will probably cut power usage by industry in order to maintain the illusion that there is no energy crisis by maintaining supplies to our homes. Presumably it will be Spring before any cost to the greater infrastructure will be noticed? See here.

Later.