Zeusblog

During the election, the Tories kept saying they were going to make massive cuts but it wouldn’t deepen the recession because they would be cutting out lots of waste. I thought then, and still do now, that it was just a smokescreen for deep cuts that were ideologically rather than economically motivated.

But then a greedy outsourcing company called SERCO and (giving them the benefit of the doubt) incompetent civil servants conspire to give the Tories an example of staggering waste and the excuse they need to continue to cut away like mad axemen.

The waste in question is £105 million spent over three years on a website. Yes, I really did write £105 million. And yes, on a website. And no, not a website like google or facebook or twitter - the website in question is the one for Business Link. Yes, Business Link.

I already thought Business Link was a box ticking waste of time and money having had to endure a three hour meeting with one of their “consultants” (the word consultant should have raised a red flag but we live and learn…) discussing how the way ahead for our business was to write out environmental policies and the like, but the revelation about their website is the icing on the cake.

Read about it on the BBC blog I read about it on by clicking > here  <

I could go on and on in an outraged of Mortimer Street style, but the comments on the original blog have got that covered ( with some interesting cost analysis from web professionals ). Suffice to say, we’d be happy to do the job for half the price… very happy indeed

So they’ve redesigned the pedestrian crossing at Oxford Circus.

Apparently, it’s based on street crossings in Japan. According to a Westminster Councillor “Taking our inspiration from the Far East makes perfect sense as the Japanese have perfected the art of managing large numbers of people through good design and engineering.” 

And that’s not all…

“This new crossing, which will transform Oxford Circus and ensure visitors who emerge from the Tube are impressed by what greets them, is part of a whole series of improvements taking place to ensure the West End looks truly world class in time for 2012.”

Our office is round the corner, so I went to see it.

Hmmm. Looks like some different coloured tarmac to me.

But the really puzzling thing is how some tarmac and a few extra traffic lights cost £5million.

£5million. Yes, that’s what I wrote. £5million - that’s what they said it cost.

I think I’m in the wrong business…

I’ve been listening to Heart FM quite a bit recently. Not through choice, but laziness. As a serious thoughtful type, I tend to listen to Radio 4, but because my son is nine he’d rather listen to Heart FM and retunes the radio every time he’s in the car. When I can’t be bothered to touch the dial I listen to Heart.

So anyway, I’ve come to a conclusion about Heart, which is that they should really be called Lionel Ritchie FM. Honestly that guy could sort out the global economic crisis with his royalty fees from Heart alone. And they should change their tagline, regardless of whether they change their name to Lionel Ritchie FM - ‘More music variety’ - I believe the technical name for that kind of tagline is called ‘the big lie’. The idea is that if you have a big obvious problem, just say the opposite in a confident voice over and over again. Eventually it will sink in and people will believe it. Other examples include ‘This is the age of the train’ when everybody thought British Rail was just, well rubbish really, and ‘I’m Lovin it’ when I’m so not. So if you play the same old music over and over and over and over again you say ‘More music variety’ over and over until people think it’s true. Well I don’t listen to Heart often enough to fall for that one.

I quite like Jamie and Harriet though.

The Dunwich Dynamo is a magnificently eccentric event. Every year, on a pre-arranged date (this year it’s July 4th), hundreds of cyclists turn up at London Fields. They pay £1 for photocopied directions (handily avoiding dangerous A-roads once you’re out of London) or just follow the long line of blinking red LED lights. Then they all ride off through the night to Dunwich on the Suffolk coast about 120 miles away. About halfway into the ride there’s a village that opens up its (warm and dry) village hall in the middle of the night and sells pasta salad, flapjacks and tea to refuel the weary cyclists. Other than that, you’re on your own - there’s no backup or rescue service. 

When you get to Dunwich you’re supposed to jump in the sea, but most people get breakfast at the beach cafe and fall asleep. To get back to London, you can book a slot for your bike in a furniture van and a seat for you on a coach. Some people catch the train back and some nutters ride back. People do it on all sorts of bikes; race bikes, touring bikes, commuting bikes, fixed wheelers, recumbents, folding bikes, and even tandems. I say even tandems because my cousin and I did it on a tandem a couple of years ago - quite the stupidest endurance endeavour I’ve ever undertaken. We thought it would be fun on a tandem and we might even be quite fast. But it was a tandem with soft mountain bike tyres - it was like pedalling through treacle, and in the rain; the torrential, unremitting, cold, wet, wet rain. We did have a lot of good laughs in the face of adversity though. Which is why we’re doing it again - but not on a tandem! If you’d like to join in, click here for details from the organisers.

You can get an idea what it’s like from this (quite long) video of the 2007 event, which was the one we did on a tandem…

Chalky