passing through London

I'm sitting in the Apple Store in Regent St, using the free wi-fi on offer. Lots of people around with their shiny Macs. There is a guy using a PC laptop nearby, but he's getting lots of dark looks, I suspect!

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Late hours television continues at Maidstone. I've been having a look around this town during the day (after sleep!), and yesterday I watched a guy operating a model boat in the lake at Mote Park. It was a glow-engine powered machine and it seemed to break down often, requiring the hapless modeller to row out in a little dinghy to perform the retrieval. I saw on a noticeboard that there is to be a model yacht event at the lake this weekend, so I might wander down then.

This is cool - an article i wrote about my encounters with Apple computers has been published halfway down this page.

in sunny Kent

I'm in Maidstone in Kent, having a lazy day after doing an overnight shift of audio supervising for the quiz show The Mint. I'm sitting in Cafe Nero using the wi-fi-hotspot. It's a nice place to sit and watch the world go by.

Are all coach drivers comedians?

And in other news...a major inconvenience at Victoria train station - not being able to pay to go to the loo. Hopefully they'll fix it soon.


I went over to Maidstone in Kent yesterday, to learn the ropes of a simple show that is produced for ITV at Maidstone Studios. It was an ok session, if quite long. The Calrec audio console is a familiar style and not unlike the last one I used at Ten in Melbourne.

My journey to Maidstone yesterday started in Poole, with a bus trip to London Victoria, then, seeing as they were doing `engineering works' at Victoria, I had to take the tube to Blackfriars and get on a train bound for Ashford, which conveniently enough dropped me a Maidstone East, which was the original plan. The ride out from London and back is pleasant - I like above-ground, overland train journeys, and generally feel quite relaxed at the end of them.
It was hot today on the bus from Victoria back to Poole. I guess there hasn't been an enormous market in the UK for mobile air-conditioning, and the driver did apologise for the fact that we were on an older coach which did not possess such air-cooling apparatus.
With the warm weather today, it was punter city in London, especially around The Palace.

Monday trains

I went off to Southampton this morning on the train to see someone about getting an NI number. Not that I had doubts, but I knew I was in England when two fellow passengers in front of me started whinging about the impunctual nature of British trains, and what needed to be done. Spike Milligan suggested that the very concept of lateness had its origins in the workshop of George Stephenson, where the first steam locomotive began its life. Were Mr Stephenson around today, I'm sure he'd pass the buck to James Watt.

It was my first real visit to Southampton, and I must say it looks straight out of the sixties. I'm sure I've seen some of the concrete urban architecture before in a Boring Postcards book. No matter. The guy I spoke to at the Job Centre place was friendly, and seemed quite keen on Monty Python. I'm a fan, but suspected that perhaps the Monty Python ruse has credentials as means of weeding out the potential terrorists (if suicide bombers recite the Spanish Inquisition before pressing the switch, then the profiling system has hit a new hurdle).