The telephone boxes over here are the most heavily utilised in London I’m sure.

It’s sometimes hard to believe that the theme park that is Westminster is where some serious stuff really does get done.

I conclude for now that the orange glows and light beams are detecting trains and/or people. Counting trains and people, perhaps by the breaking and un-breaking of light beams. Some kind of automated surveying. Why Moorgate? And why some other stations, but not others?

Later and across the river, there’s a Foyles bookshop set into the frontage of Southbank Centre. It’s the first time I’ve been into Foyles since the early ‘90s. In fact the first time in a Foyles that’s not *the* original Foyles on Charing Cross Road which I remember fondly for the pre-Amazon-era, primal running up and down stair-wells in my springy Hi-Tecs, dodging people doing the same. And many misspent hours hiding in quirky corners reading books (as opposed to buying them) and marvelling at the small, but expanding, range of O’Reilly technical manuals that were just oh so hard or nigh impossible to get hold of anywhere else at the time. Those were the days.

These are the days of the empty hand.

The Foyles on Southbank could have been a Waterstones or a WHSmith. Made a mental note to visit the relocated Charing Cross Road one.

“The maxim of the British people is ‘Business as usual’”

Sometimes it’s reassuring to know that in these darker, sterner days such wisdom would temper the goings-on on the mean streets of London town.

Stuff happens. Just before Christmas:

My old Samsung Galaxy S3 died on me. A complicated scenario in our household resulted in a couple of Sony Xperia smartphones being acquired and shuffled about.

We have 4G coverage from the mobile phone company in our house, and these Sony Xperia smartphones have 4G chipsets in them.

We also have Broadband in our house, the old non-fibre-optic kind technically known as ADSL 2+and like most people do, our smartphones connect to our home WiFi whenever they’re within range. The belief that it’s much faster (and cheaper) than using “mobile data” inside our home.

So, I thought it would be informative to do a quick test:

Both smartphones running an Android app called Ookla Sepedtest. Both side by side. One on 4G, one on WiFi home broadband.

The result is astonishing.

The 4G network is more than twice as fast for downloading (32 Mbps on 4G vs 14 Mbps on WiFi), and more than 14 times as fast for uploading (17 Mbps on 4G vs 1.2 Mbps on WiFi).

They say that “content is king”, but I’m never quite sure whether this refers to vaguely-interesting subject-matter or if it refers to a kind of happiness – or satisfaction  – i.e. fulfilment. As in contented. Round here it’s almost certainly not the former. And, well what can one say about the latter other than I must have gotten carried-away daydreaming for a long time at the very back of the upper deck.

Five years on: the smartphones are smarter, the definitions are higher, and the streets are busier than they’ve ever been before. But it’s nice to know that after all this time,  right at the very heart of this everyday mundanity is a story that’s just waiting to be told.

Standards deviate. Often. And especially this year. And when they do you carry on. As you do. And you do. Neglect is an accusation often aimed at the interlocutor, but in your case it’s me who bears the burden of lacking. For you’re always there when I look over my shoulder. And never there when I’m waiting in hope. In the dark, the wet and the cold. The last twelve months have had me dreaming too much and consequently I cannot account for any, nor much, of. It.

Wishing you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Let’s hope that 2010 will last on the memory a little more than this year, and that loyalties return to those we care the most for once again.

(Music is Wonderland by London-born singer/songwriter Raissa Khan-Panni, a song with which I fell in love with in the serendipitous act of being kept on-hold for far too long on the telephone to a Customer Services helpline. Click here to find the track on Spotify.)

Futures made of virtual insanity now always seem to be goverened by this love we have for useless, twisting of our then new technology, but if “manners maketh man” as someone said then you would know your history and you would know where you’re coming from. So have pity on those whose chances grow thinner, and just remember to always think twice. (Do think twice.)

When I walked out this morning, I don’t believe what I saw:

One hundred million bottles washed upon the shore. Where do we go? Where do we go now? None but ourselves can free our mind, because to the heart and mind, ignorance is kind:

So let me take you to a place where membership’s a smiling face and if you want to make the world a better place then take a look at yourself and make a change …

Click here for a brief description of what to do if you want to savour this wonderful dish. Enjoy!

More of my Slough in Pictures here: Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7.5

Some things that happened: I went to Westfield London shopping mall (and I actually liked it.) Our local Woolworths (Kingsbury Road) has become a fruit and veg shop called FruitAsia. And I travelled several times on the Jubilee Line from Kingsbury to Wembley Park. Click on a green button below to get some visual perspective into these events.

Features images from Barajas Airport Terminal 4, Plaza de Castilla, Metro de Madrid and Telefónica’s Distrito C office complex.

Click on the green button below, wait patiently, turn up the volume and take a walk through the Queensmere shopping mall in Slough one weekday lunchtime.

Examine closely every single person you see in the video loop. Imagine. Be them. There are an infinite number of stories in there.

Music is Rotterdam by The Beautiful South, released 1996.

More of my Slough in Pictures here: Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

It’s often all too easy for some people over here to dismiss the significance of this by arguing along the lines of Korea (like Japan) being some far off place where things are somehow different and don’t really apply to the rest of the world. Easy until you see that one of our closest neighbours, France, already leaves us way behind in today’s connected world.

However, walking down my local High Street the other day I saw something that made me realise that it’s not just massive government commitment and spending that’s gonna speed up our Internet connections in the future. It’s going to be about finding solutions to practical all-too-common problems like this:

It’s in between times like that, that I like to de-stress by doing something theraputic. Cooking is theraputic. It’s creative, harmonious and sensual. Nothing epitomises the theraputic nature of cooking than the making of pizza dough. It is an act that can only be performed gracefully and lovingly. Driving up and down the M1 to the making of pizza dough is like what bhangra is to a filmi love song.

The M1 music is Desi Jatt by the fabulous Miss Pooja (and Harjit Heera). The pizza dough music is the track Silsile Mulaqaton Ke from the 2004 film Bardaasht. (You can hear the full song from an old article on these pages from ages ago.)