The Tepid Take

1. BAIL OUT TfL, BAIL ON CROSSRAIL Sadiq Khan can count himself lucky for the latest bailout package TfL has received from the Department for Transport. Not because it is particularly large or unprecedented, because it isn’t, but because it was a particularly hard-fought battle. Despite being prepared to offer an immediate bailout to train operating companies, the government was not prepared to issue an additional bailout to TfL unless they agreed to substantial changes. These included scrapping the Zip and Freedom passes (forcing under-18s and over-60s to pay for travel regardless of circumstance) and the extension of the Congestion Charge (which I’ve already explained would be a poor policy decision). The demands posed by the DfT are exceptional themselves given the amount that TfL makes back from subsidy; compared to other transport networks, under normal circumstances, the London Underground makes back 1.2x its costs in revenue. That's incredible compared to the New York s

2005. Summer. Dad is drinking one of the beers he calls "stubbies" because they come in squat little bottles. He is sitting on a blue sofa in a burgundy red room with yellow carpet and I am ignoring the in retrospect unforgivable clash of colours by directing my eyes squarely at the television which, given that this is 2005, is roughly a billion feet deep. It is a good size, though, to display that summer's diversion of choice. In the coddled doldrums of the school summer holidays, I have - off the back of a frankly incredible experience with my friend's Sega Genesis - jumped onto the Sonic bandwagon. As a precocious brat at the time, I don't remember thanking my parents enough for buying a chunky Xbox and a copy of Sonic Heroes to play on it - but I took to video games like a duck takes to skydiving, which is to say it was laborious and perhaps ill-considered. The remainder of my memories from that summer are patchy: I might've gone to a wedding (painfully

This morning the dawn has not-quite come and so the Saturday night hangover is present in the clouds: even though it is ostensibly morning and the to-ing and fro-ing ought to be beginning again, the signs of the night persist: up-lit buildings, cars with their headlights on, and, most clearly, the cold and the dark and the rain. Like a barrier against the coming of the day. Like a barrier against any light breaking through. Sunday is in stasis. Every time I look out my bedroom window the world will have grown a little brighter until, finally, it is really day, like it happened without my permission. And then, sooner each day as the winter nears (5:00, 4:30, 4:00) the dusk will come around too, and I won’t realise it’s night until I go and check and confirm: yes, it is night. The preponderance of the daily rhythm is torn apart by the machinations of the ever-available 24-hour clock and a desk that happens not to face the window… Herbert Marcuse noted that mass media and consumer culture

I’ve finished staring at Word documents for the afternoon. I know it’s about time to close the computer and reassume a life of physical objects, as opposed to the ineffable intranet communications with people I have never actually met. Even a year ago it would have been absurd to assume that the latter is the employment, while the former is merely recreation. But so it goes. There is a Supergrass song that is not playing on the hi-fi but it is playing in my memory:      "It’s late in the day… I’m talking to you, hear what I say… so long, so long for me."      The music video for seminal 1997 hit single Late In The Day features Supergrass dancing around London on pogo sticks. Shot entirely on location, it makes the city seem surprisingly empty. Now, it is like that every day.      I close the door and walk out into ice-cold, there-it-is, it’s the wind from the Great Siberian Plain again. They say, there’s no hills from East Anglia all the way to Russia. That puts Napoleon'

The events described below took place in January 2020.      It didn’t feel like I was moving at all. I was on a bus, gently departing the greyed-out forecourt of Brent Cross Shopping Centre. Before I got on, I noticed that each individual standing in the bus shelter’s gift shared the same look of discontent. No matter how many shopping bags they were carrying, not one customer seemed pleased with their purchase. Maybe they got the wrong impression: mystified upon transition from the pacifying shopping parade into the no-man’s land beyond. Shock therapy: here is the hand that feeds the world of consumption. It didn’t feel like I was moving at all. It didn’t feel like they were moving at all. It didn’t feel like we were anywhere.      I was new to Brent Cross. It was my first time in literal terms and my last time in aspirational ones. As a cyclist – one of Outer London’s dogmatic bugbears – I wasn’t welcome to cross the North Circular, or the A5, a former Watling Street stretching beyon