We couldn’t have a tube strike in London without reference to the below song:
In fairness, I think Bob Crow is solely to blame for a lot of the agro; he just comes across as a self-obsessed trouble maker to me.
How can they turn down ABOVE INFLATION salary rises, at a time when a lot of people are either taking pay freezes to secure their jobs, or else reductions or redundancy?! I’d support TfL doing absolutely nothing and letting them throw their hissy fit and seeing that it gets them nowhere.
It is rumoured that their actions will cost the UK economy £100m per day that they strike. This at a time when there are signs that the economy is starting to recover, and is currently very fragile. Looking at it on wider scale, the cost of this strike isn’t just the extra thousands that they are selfishly demanding (and hopefully won’t get), but the unforgivable cost to the economy as a whole!
It is, however, good to see that BoJo and the TfL folk have laid on the extra services and whatnot – they seem to have made it much easier to get around London than perhaps it has been in previous strikes. Never thought that I’d priase Boris for anything… well, other than the pianos thing too heh. Also hurrah for the LU workers who stayed at work and are operating some of the limited services on some of the lines today.
All that said, today’s my day off, so I’m at home, plus I normally get National Rail in anyway, so I’m largely unaffected at the moment (unless it rains tomorrow, in which case, I’m screwed! ).
This is a rather good idea I think. Not sure how it’ll hold up, but never-the-less, it’s definitely worth a go in my opinion! Be interesting to see how it pans out.
Hopefully they’ll put a few in Covent Garden and we can get some musical theatre based sing-a-longs going!
Be great to burst into ‘Lets All Go Down The Strand’ on the way home each night! (can’t believe that I’ve managed to refer to this song twice in 24 hours on blog posts heh!). That said… would you believe me if I said that I didn’t already do this on a nightly basis?
Now, where did I put my flat cap and waistcoat…?!
Note, although Boris Johnson has green lighted the installation of the pianos, this is actually a part of a larger project by Luke Jerram (the website for street pianos project is HERE)
Will Boris Johnson’s piano plan hit the right note for London?
An assortment of keyboards will soon be found around some of the capital’s landmarks. I wonder what music they will inspire …
The mayor of London is going to put 31 pianos around the capital for three weeks from the end of June, with only a couple of metal chains and a laminated songbook for protection against the wiles of vandals and metropolitan musicophobes. Each piano will have appropriate ornamentation – pound signs for the instrument outside the Bank of England, pseudo-psychedelic swirls for the Carnaby Street keyboard – and the hope is that a combination of public-spiritedness and musical responsibility will keep them in good condition.
But what about the music? Can you really turn a few keyboards outside London’s landmarks into the equivalent of a pub honky-tonk for a good old knees-up; a 50s living room where the family would gather around the piano every evening, in some prelapsarian vision of the olden days; or the piano of the Victorian parlour, the heart of 19th-century domestic ritual? Hopefully the pianos will be about finding new, 21st-century meanings for the piano’s place in social music-making. Otherwise, we could end up with three weeks of this or this.
Oh dear… now, what was Mr Johnson saying about Ken’s administration being made up of phonies and crooks?
2 senior advisors let go (one your right hand man) in 2 months… hopefully in his third month it will be BoJo himself!
There is also a quote in the story that says “Ray Lewis hopes to support Boris Johnson in an unofficial capacity” – does anybody else think that this smacks of croniesm? Lets get Lewis out of the public eye but keep him on the books etc? DODGY and smacks of hypocrisy!! Well, that’s my opinion anyway!
For some reason, despite many friends receiving their postal votes for the upcoming London elections this morning, I only got the big bulky guide of how to vote, and not my postal voting slip. Gah!
I have no idea about how the London Assembley elections work (or even the Assembly itself!!), and after reading their guide, I am still pretty much non-the-wiser! I don’t know if I should just vote Labour as I usually agree with all their principals, or else not vote in the Assemblies so as not to risk diluting the vote with ignorance… hmm! I think I will research my Labour candidate further and probably vote for her unless she’s said anything too objectionable.
Back on the subject of the more exciting London Mayoral Elections, I must confess that the pamphlet and the idea of the supplimentary voting system were mucho confusing at 8:30am…especially for a northerner where we all vote Labour anyways. Two votes?! Argh, my eyes are bleeding!
Still, at least the postie got the right door for once! Plus I like the way that London brands it’s election process as “London Elects” – I think that puts a good spin on it and makes it more accessible to those who perhaps would not vote otherwise.
I have just read said booklet properly, and wasn’t particularly impressed with the bulk of my options, though I do understand the SV voting methodology much better now.
Having said that, my first impressions are that it may have changed who’s getting my first and second votes, which I wasn’t expecting it to do!
The BNP’s pitch made me laugh out loud… “I will make sure that people like you – the real Londoners are put first”… (he bolded the Londoners bit) technically I’m Mancunian but I’m still eligable to vote… the buffoon!
Their supporting quotes are laughable too.. one ‘student’ is blatantly referencing Irish elections; “I’m voting BNP because I’m Irish and the BNP are the only party that cares about the indigenous people of these islands”
According to ‘Housewife’ “only the BNP have policies which keep our children safe”… incredibly short-sighted!
The Christian Voice proposal was pure bumf, no substance to it at all, and Brian Paddick’s pitch was rather self-obsessed I thought. I’m sick of his people constantly spamming me telling me how wonderful Brian is and how he once saved the world with his little pinkie whilst having a cup of tea, practicing yoga and reading GT – the Lib Dems always seem to go OTT with the party info crap, wherever I’ve voted in the past! Ken’s pitch came across as arrogant and self-assured I thought… one page is a big picture of him, (btw, the cost of inclusion in the booklet was 10K for 2 pages) and the formatting on the other page setting out his proposals hardly make for stimulating/eye-catching or interesting reading – it was pretty much just “tube”, “tube”, “oyster”, “travel”.
Bo-Jo isn’t even getting a mention on my blog. Lets just say I take a very dim view to him and cannot believe that he is being taken seriously by nearly a third of the voting public!
Actually, I want to mock him, so I will concede to post the below;
The Green Party put in a good proposal, and I’d never really considered them before.
Current thoughts are Sián Berry (of The Green Party) for first preference vote, and then Ken Livingston for the more realistic second preference vote
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