150

so it is happy birthday to big ben 150 years old, and still keeping great time. not even the addition of an extra second to the year could fool it (this was the 23rd such leap second). engineers at the bbc had to add an extra pip at midnight, making it 7 pips (don’t fret about those engineers they pre-programmed it into the beeb’s atomic clock, so no need for them to be there, still if anything went wrong i am sure they had someone on hand to just go “pip” into a microphone).
the engineers working on big ben’s great clock didn’t have the luxury of pre-programming anything and they had to get the pendulum to add the extra second and this they did by adjusting the weight by removing some pre-decimal pennies. all very high tech. it worked.

oddly i have had close on 50 years to learn how to tell the time and thanks to the educational system of this fine country i can (and i can even use the 24-hour clock as well. impressed? i know you are). that said the one thing i have yet to grasp is the concept of being on time.
no matter what i do, no matter how i plan it the one thing that you can count on is me being late. it is almost like clockwork, except it would be a broken clock.
i appreciate that it is an irritating habit, but it is a constant one. so you would think that people would take that into account and factor my almost mutant like ability to arrive late into their calculations. they don’t and they can get a little smug at their own time keeping abilities while denigrating my own, which is a little like stealing candy from a baby.

still one thing you can always set your clocks by is start of a new year and the fares go up.
do you remember those heady days of nationalising the railways? do you remember those promises of better services, cheaper fares because that is what competition does? all the rail companies have asked for the maximum fare increases, all of them using the same excuse of “we need the extra cash so that we can improve the service”. perhaps it is time that they improved the service first and then charged people more money.
boris has put the fares up in london. thanks boris. he, of course, blames ken livingstone’s previous fare freeze for the need of the increase. others claim it is the scrapping of the western congestion zone.
not to worry though the extra money that goes on fares will make sure a few private companies, such as stagecoach, will have another bumper year of profits, and like me they will never be on time.