hot and cold

The previous post was rather positive and cheerful, much to my surprise.  It took me a while to recover from that.  The post did not exactly mirror my state of mind in the hours leading up to the delivery of the oven and during its installation.  I feared the worst.  I don't expect anything good when it comes to workmen, repairs, or anything to do with building infrastructure.  Things are oftentimes not done as I would expect them or in ways that make sense to me.

Take my place of work as an example.  The lifts are regularly out of order, as if they were there to provide backup for the stairs.  Steam leaks that take down heating, the hot water supply and sterilization facilities occur regularly.  At least once a month, there's a building-wide email warning of an impending emergency steam shut-down so another leak can be patched.  It would certainly be better and in the long run cheaper to install a new reliable system instead of patching the old one again and again, only for new leaks to break open only weeks later, but no one seems to take this option into consideration.

That is because doing it right is not how it's done here.  Making things work is usually the goal, fudging things to arrive at a temporary solution, to give the appearance of a solution, in other words.  Most external building work is done with a brush and a bucket of thick paint.  Coat after coat is applied until the paint itself provides structural stability while the walls below are rotting away.  Indoors, duct tape, glue and putty play similar roles.

I expected the oven business to go along those lines, and initially it did.  When the technician unpacked the appliance, the first thing to tumble from the box was a handle that had broken off from the oven door.  That's how the thing had been delivered.  Behind the door were a number of trays that made sense and various implements that didn't.  There were grips supposed to clip to the trays that I still haven't figured out how to use and a floppy piece of aluminum that looked as if it had fallen off somewhere.  The technician explained that it was a guard to keep the oven door open while using the grill.  This seemed strange to me.  Why would I want to keep the oven door open?  Was the idea to use the grill as a fireplace and warm the kitchen on cold winter days?  There was no good answer, but it didn't matter.  Even though both of us tried, we found no way of locking the guard in place.  It might have been too bent out of shape before its first use already.

It's entirely possible that the thing was bent out of shape by design.  It's not always easy to tell function from design.  I was reminded of this the other day when washing my hands at Imperial.  Washing your hands in the UK is often a journey into the dark past.  Many homes have separate faucets for hot and cold water.  They are called period fittings by estate agents as if functional moribundity were something to be proud of.  I've never understood the appeal.

In many homes, mine included, appeal plays no role in their continued existence.  It's simply a question of money.  If a fifty-year old faucet works, why replace it?  I understand this.  What I don't understand is why you would replace it with something equally obsolete.  This is what I observed at Imperial the other day:  Two faucets controlled one spout, but the hot and cold water weren't mixed.  Instead, two parallel streams of water exited the spout, scalding my index finger while chilling my thumb to the bone.

Hot and cold

Three sets of questions are in order.

1. Who invented this and why?  What problem is this a solution for?  When would you ever want hot and cold water separate?
2. Who built this?  Who thought money could be made from not mixing hot and cold water?
3. Who bought this?  Who decided it would be a good idea to install this idiocy in the bathroom of a university that carries in its name the word technology, referring, presumably, to the cutting edge of it?

There is so much that I will never understand about this country.

new cooker

The cooker was a legal requirement.  So many things are legal requirements in this country that it's impossible to keep track.  Even so I was surprised when I got a call the other day from a number unknown to me.  The man at the other end of the line inquired when the new cooker could be delivered.  I hadn't ordered one.

What I had was a gas safety inspection only days earlier.  The engineer, a slight but energetic woman in her late twenties, didn't waste much time on my flat.  She bounced up step ladders to check mains valves and ripped out the plasterboard behind which the boiler was leading its rather uneventful life.  It all took just a few minutes.  She set the pressure a notch higher – to make sure the hot water's always hot – and stuck her head into the oven.  When I demonstrated, after she had taken her head back out, that the flames of the grill won't stay on, she marked down my report, and that was that.

Next thing I knew was a new cooker waiting on my landing a week later, tall, white and still shrink-wrapped, its cardboard box in tatters around it.  It's a mystery how the thing made it up the tightly wound stairs.  For delivery and installation, rather ambitiously, a two-hour window had been scheduled.  As the original gas inspection had been half an hour late, I anticipated a similar delay.  But when I arrived home with a backpack full of work, the first part of the deal had already been done.  Drilling and hammering in the flat upstairs indicated that the installation part would not be long in coming either.  I propped open the door to my flat and started reading a paper.

Not much later, the gas engineer was back in my flat ripping the wrapping off the new cooker with one hand and the old cooker from its fittings in the kitchen wall with the other.  It was a sight of focused frenzy much at odds with what one usually associates with those occupied in various trades of home maintenance and improvement in this country.  Plumbers, builders and electricians are considered slow, careless and unreliable – unless they are foreign.  A Polish plumber is apparently the best you can get.

That point was, somewhat obliquely, illustrated when the old cooker was picked up a few days later, by a gang of three migrants whose leader wore a yarmulke and curly bangs down his temples.  My narrow mind places Jews into the high-tech industry of Tel Aviv or the fruit orchards of the occupied territories, but that's not the story.  The story is that when I told him to grab the cooker and pull it out of the flat instead of delicately dancing with it as he did, he refused in accented English, saying he didn't want to damage the carpet.

The engineer in my flat was English, but before I could get too worried about this, my attention was diverted to the cooker.  I had never heard of the brand and dismissed it outright.  A Chinese manufacturer in European guise, with a name I was sure the vice president for marketing had chosen for sounding vaguely Dutch.  To me it sounded pound shop.  I wouldn't give it a second look if it came up as an option on my favorite e-commerce site.  It turned out to be Slovenian, made in Europe, its purchase by the landlord an act of Continental patriotism.

The installation was finished before the allocated two hours were up.  When I had been made familiar with the safety features of the new cooker – the flame on the hob stays on only when the regulator knob is held down for a good ten seconds after ignition and a wobbly sheet of aluminum has to be wedged between door and oven when the grill is on – the gas engineer asked for hand broom and dust pan and went on her knees to sweep up the Styrofoam beads scattered throughout the hallway.

I had just got back from a trip.  The flat hadn't seen a vacuum in weeks.  I told her not to worry.  I'd take care of it on the weekend.  "Aren't you supposed to leave a mess behind?" I asked.  We argued back and forth playfully while she continued to clean, catching defiant foam fragments in mid-air.  "We were told to do it, even if the customer insists otherwise."  Even the best stereotypes are far from universally true.

confrontation

The other day, my landlord sent me a letter inviting me to sign a new tenancy agreement.  Rent would be a few quid higher each week.  For the privilege I was asked to pay the same few quid as a one-off renewal fee.  This struck me as a bit over the top.

My rent is below average; I would stomach an increase without suffering too much indigestion.  Even with the new numbers, I'd be getting a good deal.  When I walk by estate agents, this plague of the high street that has overtaken pound shops in severity, flats similar to mine go by far higher amounts than what I pay.  How anyone in London can afford that is a question that won't be addressed in this post, but it's worth keeping in mind for anyone considering buying into this city.  There's only one way for prices to go, and it's down.

For the moment, all they do is go up, though.  The landlord has caught on and sees a chance of increasing his return.  There is no financial justification for this; it's pure greed.  Interest is so low that it's only a theoretical consideration.  The flat has benefited from no improvements at all over the last four years, all the while I've diligently increased the landlord's equity in the property, decreasing the principal and thus the interest paid each month on the mortgage.  I should be paying less, not more.

I understand that this reasoning does not fully reflect the reality of real-estate investing.  As I said above, I'd be quite willing to accept a small increase.  I'd pay it from next week without discussion if the landlord just asked politely.  What he does instead is get on my nerves about a new contract and about a contract renewal fee.  He sends me forms to fill in my personal details, banking and job information, and next of kin, as if I were a new applicant, not a tenant of four years.  What a waste of paper and time.  And even if there were the need for a new contract, which there isn't, a copy of the old one with a new number inserted would do just fine.  Nothing that would require a fee.

To battle what I couldn't agree with, I chose to engage in a passive aggressive confrontation.  Thanking him for his kind offer, I told the landlord that I was quite happy with the current tenancy agreement, and that we could all save ourselves a lot of trouble if we just kept it as it was.  If there was anything that needed attention, it was  gas safety.

The gas I considered a stroke of brilliance.  By law, landlords have to have rental properties inspected by a Gas Safe registered engineer once a year.  This ensures that the boiler won't explode and the cooker set the kitchen aflame.  Such an inspection had taken place once, but it was many years ago.  Mentioning this would keep the landlord occupied for a while, I reasoned.  He's not evil, just incompetent.  The outcome I was shooting for was a delay of the new tenancy agreement so I'd save the renewal fee by paying lower rent for enough weeks.  A month or two was all I needed.

It worked brilliantly at first, and then it didn't work at all.  Or maybe it did.  The story is so hot that I haven't made up my mind yet.  What's clear so far is that the new cooker I got as a result of the gas inspection works better than the old one.  But I might not have much time to enjoy it.  Stay tuned.

new clothes

The best operating system in the history of computing, by life span anyway, is about to be disowned by its maker.  In April, Microsoft will stop providing security updates for Windows XP, effectively pulling the plug on it.  Most people who use Windows XP don't know why, which is why they're still using it, almost thirteen years after it was introduced.  XP is a fine thing indeed.  But happy consumers (as in consumers happy with what they've purchased) aren't lucrative consumers, and thus Microsoft keeps flogging new versions of their OS.  They're always advertised as upgrades but turn out to be anything but.

My mom's Gateway (boxy cows anyone?) isn't quite as old as XP but almost.  I purchased it in desperation in 2004 when my Thinkpad went blank just days from dissertation deadline.  When the Thinkpad came back a few days later, happy as a bunny, the Gateway in turn looked old, but my mom looked happy when it was hers a few months later.  That was, a quick dive into arithmetic reveals, more than nine years ago.  The computer was never top of the range, and outside a larger hard drive, it never enjoyed an upgrade.  It just got slower and slower until even my mom, a rather modest consumer, spoke up and inquired whether ten minutes was normal for the web to start.

The new computer runs Windows 8.  No need to be timid, I thought.  The interface is radically different, but mom's gonna figure it out.  First I had to, though.  Here are my conclusions:

Windows 8 is rubbish, not for what it is but for what it isn't.  It isn't innovative where it counts, it isn't novel, and it isn't progress.  It's XP in new clothes, garish and ill-fitting.  The radically new interface is, depending on how you look at it, either a telephone GUI that's utterly unsuited to the operation of a large-screen laptop or a revival of Yahoo! Widgets.  In either case, it's a layer of obfuscation on top of the clarity people are used to.

The widgets are also not as you would expect them, nimble jiffies for specific tasks.  Most widgets are nothing more than data hoovers.  Navigating them feels a bit like walking down İstiklal Avenue with touts at every corner, trying to drag you into club or bar.  The widgets try to get you to sign up for a Microsoft ID.  They won't run if you don't sign in.  I spent an hour removing widgets and installing proper programs with the same name, Skype for example or Microsoft Mail, that work just fine.

Some widgets work without registration, maps for example or a little calculator.  Nice, I thought, as I opened them.  I use the Dashbord calculator on my MacBook a lot.  Then the Windows widget opens – in full-screen mode.  I didn't find out how to make them smaller, to see the content of other windows for example.  It's like being in the stone age, on a Mac II, before the invention of multitasking.  You can also not close the widgets, short of hitting Alt-F4.  Instead they populate hot corners and do things that make no sense.  More than once I couldn't help but exclaim "Ooops, what was that?"  Something had happened on the screen that I might have triggered, but I had no idea what was going on or why.

Besides widgets there are Windows programs – this is XP in fancy dress, after all – but they can't be launched from the Start button.  The simple reason?  There isn't one.  Imagine Windows without a start button.  How do you operate it?  Everything that matters is there.  The first major update reintroduced the Start button, but only as a pacifier.  It doesn't do what it's supposed to but takes you to the widgets.  They tell you whether the sun's shining outside your window but don't list the most frequently used applications.  Many programs show up among the widgets (duplicating what's already on the Desktop) but they're hidden among crap and stretch off the screen.  Firefox, freshly installed, was nowhere at all.

Windows 8 is a spectacularly misdirected effort.  There is no end to the inanities.  As there's no start button, there's no obvious way of shutting down the computer.  Digging around a bit, I found it, hiding in a menu called Settings in a mobile element called the Charms bar, unrelated to anything else in appearance and experience.  Adding fog and creating confusion seem to have been major driving forces during when the new interface was thrown together.  Who puts the power button inside Settings?  (Alt-F4 off the Desktop does the trick as well.)

Another idiocy is the startup screen, entirely superfluous.  It shows a cartoonish picture of the Space Needle and tells you the time, but it doesn't let you log on.  You have to click in the startup screen to be taken to the logon screen, and it is again opaqueness that distinguishes Windows 8 from Windows XP, not innovation.

After a weekend of tinkering, the computer was running fine.  It starts wicked fast and shuts down as if dropping dead.  Mom's pictures are in place and all the software she's used to as well.  Another ten years of happy computing have just begun.

odd and ends

On the train to Portsmouth this morning, I started reading Nicholas Shakespeare's biography of Bruce Chatwin, one of my favorite writers, as percipient readers of this blog might recall.  The journey being short, I didn't get very far.  Chatwin is still at school.  But some defining characteristics have already been elaborated.  He's a collector of the unusual and happier alone out in the world that at home.

I don't know how much I will be able to identify with him, but I share his urge to see new places and the quest for the unknown.  On the other hand, my collector's drive is poorly developed and entirely immaterial, restricted to countries visited (32) and airports traveled through (76).  But I do like the unusual, quirkiness, efforts that have never seen the inside of a box.

Wherever I go, I seek out oddities rather than attraction.  Oftentimes, I walk in the opposite direction from the one indicated by the guidebook or dive into a dark alley just to see what's there.  I took this approach in Portsmouth and promptly got lost for an hour and a half.  In return, I saw a lot of grey and a lot of dilapidation, but nothing glorious, just general shabbiness.

Then I got to the Southsea neighborhood from where I felt it mandatory to travel to the Isle of Wight.  What's on the Isle, you might ask.  I couldn't give much of an answer.  Paul Theroux rode a train there during his royal encirculation, but I don't remember if he liked it.  For me, the island was only important as the endpoint of a ferry crossing of the Solent.  The journey was the real destination, a journey by Hovercraft as it happens.

Hovercraft are certainly on a special shelf in the cabinet of technical curiosities.  They are also amazingly fast.  Hovering, they are not impeded by the friction/drag/viscosity of water.  For three decades, there used to be a regular service across the English Channel.  A crossing took half an hour.  When I moved from Grenoble to London, this had been discontinued.  I crossed the Channel on a catamaran, which took 50 minutes.  The operator went out of business about a year later.  These days, service is safely back inside the box of tradition and takes two hours.

One has to travel to the Isle of Wight to experience hover travel in the UK.  The first thing I noticed was thunder.  The top speed of over 50 mph is achieved by 3 MW of air for lift and thrust.  A strategically placed fusion reactor would be most beneficial, but the boat has to make do with two pairs of diesel engines that are so loud I heard them before I even knew I was near the terminal.

When I got there, I noticed a second thing: there's no pier.  The craft hovers as easily over the pebbles of the beach as over water.  They just push a ladder to where it comes to rest.  You clamber in, the engines are thrown into gear and the boat (cause that's what it should be when you're crossing a waterway) roars, shudders, rises, turns and then takes off like a speedboat.  It takes waves rather smoothly, despite the idea that a simplified picture of the machine – world's largest outboarder strapped to a bouncy castle – gives, but the noise is furious.

Late start but fast

On the way home, my thoughts bounced around another technical oddity, not exactly related to hovercraft but also a way of getting across water without touching and highly unusual.  It's much to my dismay that I haven't collected a single transporter bridge in all my years of traveling.  Here's a list of those that exist with brief notes:

• Pont Transbordeur, Marseille – Destroyed by the Nazis when they retreated.  I only saw the foundations on one side.
• Rendsburger Hochbrücke, Germany – I learned about this when I researched this post.  A friend of mine lives nearby.
• Rochefort-Martrou Bridge, France – I drove by, completely oblivious.
• Vizcaya Bridge, Bilbao – I knew it was there but not why I didn't drive down there when I visited.
• Aerial Bridge, Duluth – This is one that I actually saw, but when I was there, it had long been converted into an aerial lift bridge.
• I also saw and even crossed the Royal Victoria Dock Bridge, London, but this isn't transporting and probably never will be.
• Newport, Middlesbrough and Warrington Transporter Bridges, UK – Two within easy reach.  The third is disused.
• Puente Transbordador, Buenos Aires – Rather far away and not transporting since 1947.
• Schwebefähre Osten, Germany – For tourists only, though who's to say?

There's quite a bit to see left in this world.

year in books

Here comes the fifth installment of my "last year's books". I'm not obsessed enough to count, but I'm pretty sure I haven't reached 100 yet. Nevertheless, going back through old installments, I'm sometimes surprised at what I'm supposed to have read. Who knows how much gets lost in the time between I read a book and write down my thoughts on it?

Never mind, here goes it for 2013:

• A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul – This is a spectacular book, a foreign resident's increasingly alarmed observations in an unspecified African country. Despite its age (25 years), it's fresh and relevant. My favorite of 2013.
• A House for Mister Biswas by the same author is much weaker. The novel details the life of the author's father, which is uneventful and centers on a quest for house ownership, a passion I can't share.
• The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall – A humorous novel about a plyg family, written by a Mormon. How could I not buy this book? It's often hilarious but never demeaning. If you have spent time in Salt Lake and can picture Southern Utah, you must read this book.
• A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li – I first encountered Li's writing in The New Yorker, melancholic stories of displacement and loss. The stories here are in a similar vein, though the migrants are different. Some come back to China or look back on it, but most have lost their familiar ways in a country of enormous changes.
• Me talk pretty one day by David Sedaris – This book provided sustenance on an epic train journey to Germany where I went to return it to its rightful owner. I realized that there is such a thing as too much Dave Sedaris.
• In Morocco by Edith Wharton – When I traveled to Morocco last May, I exasperated my companion with warnings about the mystery and peril of her country quoted from this book, written in 1920. The bits on culture and history are still relevant, though, and astutely observed.
• Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid – Published before The Reluctant Fundamentalist by the same author, this book is not quite as snappy, but the story of desire, injustice, duplicity and bitterness is vibrant throughout. The end rattles out of predictability several times to leave the reader dazzled.
• Was wir nicht haben, brauchen Sie nicht by Dieter Moor – The author, a rigid Swiss straight from the freezer, bought a farm in an unimaginable backwater between Berlin and Poland and slowly, very slowly warms up and connects with the locals. Funny if you can relate to the history and geography of the place.
• Open City by Teju Cole – A Nigerian grad student walking the streets of New York to find himself and his place could have been really good, but a lack of emotional connections between the protagonist and his surroundings makes the book deeply unsatisfying. It's just babble.
• Letter to Daniel by Fergal Keane – Collected posts from a time when there weren't blogs, only From Our Own Correspondent on Radio 4. Quiet but powerful missives from a changing world, Hong Kong, South Africa and Ireland.
• The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker – A glorification of OCD that came into being when the author got worked up about the new paper towels in the toilet that weren't quite as nice as the old ones.
• The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie – Mandatory reading, given the overreactions from all sides that its release triggered. I didn't think much of it, but it's important for the violence, cowardice and vice it exposed in so many.
• The Living Great Lakes by Jerry Dennis – Most unusual, a rumination on the Great Lakes region performed while afloat. Concerning for the most part the transfer of a concrete-hulled boat from Lake Michigan to Maine, the book strays from its topic towards the end, but that's not to its detriment. A most unexpected delight.
• The Road from Damascus by Robin Yassin-Kassab – A good read, but what does it matter? There are infinitely more pressing issues on the subject of Syria these days. The author knows this and tries to do something. Follow his blog and engage.
• London Orbital by Iain Sinclair – I had earlier discovered what kind of writer Sinclair is, and that I didn't like it at all. This book is more of the same, and not just more but way too much. I struggled halfway through and then gave up, much like with Downriver.

Fourteen books, not bad for a year when I was often distracted and my mind rarely at home.

in a bubble

Because of homosexuals, those invidious sinners, Britain is drowning. That's what some nutter in politics was claiming, though it's unlikely to have garnered him votes. Despite his idiocy, he was right on the second part of his statement. The southwest of England and a bit of land called Wales have been battered by violent storms for weeks. Whenever the winds calmed, buckets of rain filled the void. Large parts of the country are disaster zones.

A bit of scenic railroad has fallen into the sea in Cornwall, and the Somerset Levels are a vast lake. The latter shouldn't surprise. The Levels are below sea level, land impoldered over centuries in gross contravention of divine purpose. Evangelic simpletons must see a connection. The more practically minded called for the dredging of rivers. But how could even the best-dredged river take water away from the Levels? It won't flow uphill to the sea.

Nearer to home, there are severe flood warnings, the meteorological equivalent of a red terror alert, in the Thames Valley. It was at this point that I started listening. I consider myself living in the Thames Valley. I go running by the river on weekends. It's not that far. What I heard when I opened my ears wasn't encouraging. Many names were foreign to me, but there was flooding near Teddington, which is one of my favorite walking destinations just upriver from Richmond, at the end of the District line. Teddington has a wonderfully intricate and ancient lock-and-weir complex designed to stop the twice-daily insurgency of the tidal river.

These days, the menace lurks upriver. With the wildest winter rains for 250 years washing into the Thames from a vast catchment, the river is expected to rise by inches every day. It's double jeopardy for London. The full moon brings spring tides, exceptional amounts of North Sea pushing up the estuary all the way to the lock at Teddington. The Thames Barrier, London's primary protector against the forces of the sea, has been closed 33 times since December, as much as during the first 17 years of its existence.

The curious bit about all this is that I could be excused for not noticing. London has been spared the worst excesses of nature. It rains almost every night, and two weeks ago something that could almost be called a tornado ripped through the market on North End Road and scattered bowls and produce all over the street, but the days are relatively dry. My lunchtime runs at work, shockingly numerous for no particular reason, have been held up by rain only once. Hyde Park is a bog, but the footpaths are mostly dry.

It's hard to comprehend why London is an entity apart meteorologically, a dry city rising mightily from inundated fields, but one can't say it's inconsistent. The city is already culturally and economically apart from the rest of the country. Everyone's talking about the upcoming referendum on Scottish independence. For London, independence would make much more sense. Crazier things have been suggested.

tube trouble

Last night, tube drivers walked off their mobile places of work, leaving the city increasingly immobile as a result. This is how I heard it on the news this morning. However, when I walked to work, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Lillie Road was clogged as always but traffic wasn't immoderate further into town, and there weren't any more pedestrians on the sidewalks than usually. For a while, I thought I had got my dates messed up.

It wasn't supposed to be any old strike either. Drivers belonging to the two biggest unions would jointly walk out for 48 hours, longer than the usual but infrequent 24-hour strikes. Thinking back to my two years in France, I can't even remember a strike that went on for more than a day. This shows how working conditions have improved, but takes away from the heroism this story could contain.

Back in France, the only effect strikes, even the infamous general ones, had on me was an obligation to sign in at work, to prove that I was there and deserved to get paid for the day. It didn't exactly feel like crossing a picket line, but somehow a sense of moral failure was contained in this furtive signature.

Today, I didn't have to sign in. Many commuters, none of them on strike, would have been unable to do so. Transport for London had warned of severe disruptions to their services (though they also boasted of Olympic volunteers flown in from 2012 to keep things moving) and advised people to work from home. The labs at Imperial were consequently rather quiet. That the canteen was heaving doesn't fit the narrative, but there you go.

The strike, by the way, was about the proposed closure of ticket offices in most tube stations. The unions are worried about job losses while also flogging their favorite slogan - this will make traveling less safe. Proponents of the changes claim that ticket office staff will be redeployed to where they're needed, to provide advice and assistance by the entrance barriers and the ticket machines. No stations will be left without staff.

This sounds reasonably to me. Locals don't use ticket offices. Oyster cards are recharged on machines or online. And for tourists to ask questions, it's easier to approach someone standing there with a recognizable uniform and a big smile than leaning into a hole in the wall with a thick glass window making communication difficult.

From what I can tell, most stations already operate like this. My mom, for example, once complained jokingly that she tried to top up her travel card, but even before she could set the language of the machine to German, an attendant had walked over, figured out what she wanted to do and done it for her. It was a bit frustrating because she wanted to figure it out herself, but this is the kind of service that makes London such an easy city to navigate.

No matter, the strike was on. On the way back home tonight, I walked by the shuttered entrance to Gloucester Road tube station. No one was working there and nothing moving. That gave me an idea. I hopped into the Waitrose next door, not needing much but with some curiosity. The shop is usually full with people on their way from work and is a bit of a zoo. The aisles are bumper car tracks and waiting time at the checkout is long. Tonight it was rather pleasant, as if the unions had decided to improve the shopping experience of a clientele that's rather removed from the concept of militant industrial action. The walk-out will continue tomorrow.