Today’s run was the longest so far – a 9-miler around Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill. All felt good, but the strength of the sunshine and the 22°C heat left me sprinting for the shade and wondering how those folk running ultramarathons in the desert cope. It’s surprising the difference even a couple of degrees makes.

Right. I deserve cider.

So from Friday, aside from a visit to my family up in Wales, I’m pretty much free as a bird, with all of credit-crunched London at my disposal.

What’s a boy to do?

Victoria line being off is a slight nuisance though, and it causes all kinds of woe when people want brave the tube and come round to share in said tea.

Because I’ve yet to find one, I’ve created an iCal of the closures up to November on the Victoria line only, compiled from the not overly parseable pdf of planned track closures on their site.

The next things I will do with this are:

• Add evening closures
• Write to tfl and ask them nicely to provide their own iCal version of the skanky pdf document of closures on tfl.gov.uk
• Update the calendar to include closures to March 2009 done
• Add the others lines’ closures (whilst waiting for tfl to do their own thing)

Download the Victoria line closures calendar (iCal) now

Update March 1st, 2009: the calendar now includes all closures through to November 2009.

Over the last month or so I’ve been flat-hunting extensively, crossing the threshold of various abodes listening to the same estate agent spiel.

Sadly the experience was nothing out of the ordinary, and despite what anyone says, garden flats will always be a bit dark; rooms remain the same size regardless of which way around you put the bed; if there are bars on the window there’s probably a good reason why; 15 minutes walk from the tube normally means 15 minute bus ride.

But most entertainment has come from dodgy ads on Gumtree, where property marketing through exquisite photography is the name of the game. These pictures represent just a few of the classy pads on offer in London this August.

Being an estate agent places stringent demands on the memory – it’s a job where the turnover of faces is high. But our charming, gelled-up letting agent Dan should really have realised that when I’m about to part with a large wodge of cash I’d rather not have my hand shaken by someone who calls me Peter.

Luckily we’ve found somewhere a little more inspiring than the above. And this post is the sole result of acute procrastination from packing.

• Check out more bad property listings…
• I customised a basic Yahoo! pipe to filter Gumtree rental ads by location. With a bit of tinkering it should work for whoever wants it. Unfortunately their RSS feed isn’t sophisticated enough to also filter by price – if anyone knows how to do this I’m all ears!

• Johnson vs Livingstone: it’s now on a knife-edge
• Stop Boris

If you’ve a spare tenner next weekend get your ass along to The Factory theatre company’s Hamlet. It takes place in a different London venue each week with cast members playing different characters. There are no props other than those provided by the audience, which on my visit yesterday included a barbie doll, sponge, mop, water cooler bottles, a glow stick, a giant leek and rubber chickens, among other things. I took along a recorder which ended up being Hamlet’s sword.

It was a really engaging couple of hours – I spent the whole time on the edge of my (constantly moving) seat.

More praise:

• A very different version of Hamlet – Times online
• Richard Godwin getting his plays muddled up – Evening Standard

The Fourers

Sing-along pop/rock – Next To Nothing has me adding my own questionable vocal harmonies. In the shower. Whilst my housemate’s friends cower in the bedroom next door. They do fall into the indie four beats / four chords trap occasionally but hey, they’re called The Fourers, and they normally manage to save themselves from oblivion with unexpected synths and the odd melodic turn.

Thomas Truax

The whole world should go and see Thomas Truax. With some unlikely raw meterials such as motors, spoons, wheels, spokes, a comb, some strings, ducting, dogs and moons, this man creates nothing short of a genius. He’s playing around the UK in March and April. Book it, book it, book it now. Diddly-do.

The Feeling

What’s their new single about, exactly? The thing I liked about The Feeling last year was that they had an instant, viral appeal. I couldn’t stop listening to the ebola-esque 12 Stops And Home, but it really wiped me out after a few weeks. On this single, they’ve pulled out considerably more than 12 stops: more is more, apparently, and I personally think they could’ve done with paring things down a bit, and perhaps lending a few of the extraneous leftovers to…

Hot Chip

…, who have really excelled themselves with the yawning void that is Ready For The Floor (listen). It sounds like exactly the sort of thing you’d be stuck in front of on the nightbus when trying to sleep. Not really a desert island disc (though it’d be fun to watch Joanna Lumley reprise her role as Girl Friday with this as a looping soundtrack).

Rod Thomas

Repeaters have more fun with Rod Thomas. First heard at Glastonbury last year, you can often hear him around various underground stations putting his Welsh-valley lungs to good use. His voice is incredibly strong, and he’s a master both of layering up great pop songs and making his audience fizz. Great stuff.

Wandered up to Primrose Hill to watch some good old Guy Fawkes remberance last night – not expecting a display up there, but hoping to get a good vantage point over the rest of the London’s displays.

All in all it was grand – bottle of port, couple of mugs, some good-natured, like-minded scarved folk, and a couple of distant, muted displays from (we think) Blackheath, St Paul’s, and others. There were also a couple of teeny back-garden fireworks in the park which were greeted with amusing over-enthusiasm.

Battersea’s display looked like the most impressive though – at one point it looked like Tina Turner’s entire head of hair was in the sky, so that’s my tip for next year…

So I put my GCSE French to good practice by asking for the bread in (crap) French, asking how much it was in French, and thanking them for the bread. In French. And every single one of their responses was in ze finest English.

Fair enough, thought I – perhaps they’re just trying out their English on me. Until, that is, housemate Jess visited the same stall separately to buy pastries and conversed cheerily French with the ladies! I guess I just don’t look or sound like a linguist. This does not bode well for a planned 10-day stint en France next month…

That’s all. It’s been a hectic month, and more interesting, word-worthy things have happened, but I have a bee dans ma bonnet about this one…

Conversely, apart from a quiet mention of the new logo in the news section the main London 2012 site fails to have any serious, strong branding anywhere in sight.

Slightly related:

• Guardian (2004): Olympic games may not benefit London
• Guardian (2007): Olympics are costly, but regeneration is priceless
• Diamond Geezer: “Don’t worry, we’ve checked that the final logo passes all known quality thresholds”
• B3ta: It’s amazing what you can do with no proper image creation software

Things I noticed whilst buying my sugar high:

• A medium 99 with a flake and a little bit of strawberry goop now costs £1.60.
• Ice cream men all look the same: curly mullet and massive hands.
• Strawberry goop still not on sale as a delicious treat by itself apart from in supermarkets (where it’s not the same anyway) Darn.

Many a happy Monday evening was enjoyed until the pub introduced a league. A bloody league. The smell of competition drove the hardcore regulars wild: they started sneaking home from work at lunchtime in order to bag a table before the points-hungry masses turned up, leaving us tardy city-types scrabbling for discarded barstools at 8pm. Alas, this week the pub reached capacity, and we had to settle for a non-trivial pint a few doors down instead, where the barmaid was mostly absent and the seat in the corner smelt of sick.

It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part that counts, eh? Right. Whatever.

According to Robyn, “floompchk” is officially the sound that snow makes underfoot.

Kinky.

• Newsreader: You’re a weatherman, why didn’t you tell us this was coming?
• Weatherman: ummm…

I suppose the newsreader then went on to ask the weatherman if he could conjure up a lightning strike to punish him for the error of his ways…

Hoorah Simon Amstell. I wish I’d shaken you by the hand that one time I bumped into you and Miquita in Wagamama…

Incidentally, I’ve been tinkering with Google blog search to find more reaction to last night’s NMTB:

• Naked Blog – “My God how Amstell has revitalised that show, so turgid under Mark (Brylcreem) Lamarr.”
• Rosie T – “How am I supposed to indulge my fantasies of whisking the skinny little indie thing away and englightening him to the benefits of the love of a good woman when he is so flagrant in his gayness? I ask you!”

In unrelated TV news: The IT crowd has been commissioned for an 8-episode second series, and the DVD of the first series has l33t subtitles. R0xx0r!!11

Yet more joyous TV news: Dark Season is available on DVD! Thankyou, BBC for inadvertently answering my prayers.

(Journeys such as these have been made more bearable with a gripping novel or two…)

Carrots in the sunshine, on Flickr.

So my 23rd birthday will forever be remembered as the one in which four larger-than-life fruit & veg stall workers boomed out Happy Birthday at the top of their lungs at me. I was red as beetroot for about an hour afterward…

• Stealing: Mary‘s ’3 things at the bottom of a post’ thing
• Munching on: toast with redcurrant, rhurbarb and vanilla jam (mmm)
• Revelling in: three-day-weekend goodness

I’d forgotten about the wonder of the Y-front-shaped 3D glasses and the resultant action scenes which occur in your face. Brilliant. The music was rousing, Lois was a bit of a feisty madam, and clever with it (except that she’s still fooled by Clark’s not-very-convincing glasses), and the kid – despite having two of the sexiest citizens of Metropolis for parents – still ended up looking like a mini Mark Owen. How did that happen?

Which leads me to another thing – when did Superman have the time between saving old grannies to get Ms Lane up the duff? I know he’s a speedy guy, but surely if he’d been too hasty there’d've been chafing? Either way I’m glad we didn’t have to see the deed. I bet it was all awkward with Superman getting his cape caught on the doorhandle whilst fumbling with Lois’ bra, and Lois struggling with his sewn-on outer pants. And I bet she was a complete skank and had a quick ciggie afterwards too. Bleurgh.

Despite these distressing thoughts, I really enjoyed the film. Every single role was cast perfectly in my eyes, and though it wasn’t particularly mind-shattering, I’m definitely looking forward to the next instalment. I might even go back and watch all the originals again and overcome my paralysing fear of the robot woman in Superman III…