Ceridwenscauldron

There were some interesting statistics in this morning's Metro from a University of London study.

Under the big shock horror headline Cocaine deaths jump by a fifth the story revealed that there were 235 deaths attributed to cocaine last year. That's a full 39 more than 2007. How many of these were due to the crap it was cut with the study does not say.

Even more shocking (to Metro readers anyway) deaths from cannabis abuse shot up from 12 to 19

However only a mere 9000 people died in 2008 through alcohol abuse, but that's fine since its not illegal and the government makes loads of cash out of tax.

Despite the government claims about record seizures the price of coke on the streets according to the paper has dropped from £77 a gramme in 1998 to £40.

Coincidentally the worst hit part of the UK is Scotland where the government is pushing through legislation to make drink more expensive.

I'm not condoning drug taking, its a pretty stupid, but what does this tell us?

Clearly the government's tough stand is not working if the street price is that low. Also if drugs are so cheap, but as I have said before many times, people who can't afford to get twatted on booze will use coke or heroin or whatever they can get their paws on.

I think its time for a bit of a rethink on drug laws. The authorities clearly can't control supply so why not make drugs legal, taking control away from criminals and making sure that drugs are not adulterated by poisons, talc or brick dust. They can then be taxed and sold in controlled doses from authorised outlets.

Idiots will still get twatted, but hopefully more safely.

Spotted this in the supermarket car park last night

Its a Rolls Royce Silver Spirit which I believe dates from the early eighties, much more elegant design than the present rubbish being bought by people with more money than class, though still not as nice as those made in the 1950s.

Having come back from Edinburgh with some Scottish banknotes I thought rather than have an arguement with some idiot who thinks its not real money in a shop or pub I'd just pay it into the Building Society, makes life that much easier.

So I decided to go a different way and see what took my fancy along the way.

Bedford Square is one of the best preserved bits of Georgian architecture in London. It was built between 1775 and 17783 and is home to lots of University of London departments and the Embassy of the Turkish Republic of Cyprus

The Bedford comes from the Duke of Bedford, who is the landlord, well I guess he needs the rent with all those lions and wifelets to look after. Anyhow as I entered the Square the crows were going nuts and I soon discovered why, there was a fox about. Sadly he was too fast to get a snap of him. I'm used to seeing the little sods out here but have never seen one so close to the centre of town before.

In the corner of the square is this structure

This is Driftwood a kind of summer pavilion constructed from layers of plywood over a spruce frame. According to designer Danicia Sibingo its inspired by images of the ancient Nabatean city of Petra in Jordan, don't quite see that myself as Petra was carved out of rock not formed over wood, but there you go.

Anyhow on my way back I thought it would be a good idea to capture some shots of how the Tottenham Court Road area was changing with the construction of the new Crossrail station.

As you can see lots of stuff has gone

including the Astoria

which means that for the present you get a much better view of Centre Point from Oxford Street

there are also some new buildings going up like Central St Giles here

doubt that it will be there as long as Bedford Square though.

was the best missed headline according to Marcus Brigstock and company at Saturday morning's performance of the Early Edition at the Edinburgh Fringe referring to the Athletics gender testing issue. I also liked the idea of Susan Boyle's eyebrows being rented out as a comedy venue, but the best laughs came from the papers themselves. We were lucky as aside from Brigstock and his usual sidekicks the special guest was Jason Byrne, the Irish comedian who isn't Ed Byrne, but still blisteringly funny though.

Other highlights included a visit to Mary King's Close, the preserved remains of the old Edinburgh under the City Hall, lots of foul murder and plague but deeply fascinating to think that people used to live in such squalor until so recently.

Hayton and Homicide was a play featuring four actors playing five roles at the Surgeon's Hall. This was recommended to me by my friend Helen as one of her pals was in it and she knew I would be hooked by a paranormal detective drama set in Victorian London. Fortunately it was a very good show and I enjoyed it very much, so I won't have to politely fib about it when I get back to work. It still has some time to run so if you are in Edinburgh give it a go. For more see http://www.haytononhomicide.co.uk/

We also caught a crap show called Tight Women by two female comedians known as the Muffia. Basically a parody of Loose Women it might have worked as a five minute sketch rather than an endurance test of 55 minutes. In that way it reminded me of those awful French and Saunders sketches that just don't have the decency to end when they stop being funny.

Later by the Udderbelly Old Nick and I were stopped by an Australian comic who does a show based on a waxing salon, I recommended she should go see the Muffia, but I don't think she got the joke.

One of the great things about the Fringe is the number of free shows and we wee lucky enough to catch Mike O'Donovan and Daniel Simonsen's Off Kilter above the Meadows Bar (known as the Moo to the Moff and her student buddies) two very funny standups one from Australia the other from Norway.

There was also plenty of street theatre, I was transfixed by this woman

who first poked a sword through her tongue and then suspended a hanging basket from it, how do you become aware of possessing such talents?.

Ship'scat One here

They haz jus got bak from Edinburger, jus wait till they cum dahnstars with their bare feet.

I know the daily commute can be a grind but here is a small plaesure to be taken from it in the summer

I think its great that station staff are taking pride in brightening up their environment for everybody who uses it, well done chaps I say.

I had to go to London's Docklands today. Lots of banks and finance companies have relocated there and the place is full of huge glass fronted buildings like this, which look very smart looking up from down below, but at street level are surrounded by the smokers who work inside them puffing away at fags.

I was visiting the Barclays Bank Building. Apparently the staff at the nearby HSBC Tower call it the bungalow, because its so titchy compared to their own gaff. So getting out of the lift at the 22nd floor I was confronted with this view

of Docklands and the O2 over the river and then on the other side a panorama of East London

the white structure about midway across the back is the new Olympic stadium being built and looking down the Dockland's Light Railway became a giant's train set, click on the image to make it bigger then you can actually see the train.

Walking home from the station today I was nearly run over by an idiot in a silver Mazda convertible. As I was crossing the zebra crossing on the access road to the station and local supermarket car park, this lunatic could not be bothered to wait behind the car that had stopped at the crossing, drove around the traffic island and nearly run me down on the crossing on the wrong side of the road. As he sped into the station car park I shouted "Fuckwit" at him, hardly surprising given the circumstances I thought.

Anyhow as I carried on towards the supermarket the idiot came to the car park fence and hurled abuse at me telling me to "button it" I guess this may have been due to my blatant disrespect for his obvious safe driving skills.

Realising there was no point in engaging in pleasant conversation with the psychopath I called him an idiot and walked away towards the nearest large group of people as quickly as I could.

Once home I rang the local police where I spoke to a very sympathetic officer who explained much as I expected that there really wasn't much they could do even if the incident had been recorded on CCTV.

This leads me to wonder what is the point of all these cameras if the police are unable to do anything with the evidence gathered. This individual was quite clearly driving dangerously and presumably should be easy to identify from his car reg plate. Sooner or later this idiot will kill or injure someone, where will his respect be then?

Funny how you can be in a busy restaurant when all of a sudden its plunged into silence.

I was in Charlotte Street's Chez Gerrard with some work pals at lunchtime, all very jolly when the background noise fell away except for one solitary voice that exclaims

"I'm wearing my red underwear"

It must have matched her face the poor woman.

In the wake of some of my Shipscook's London pieces some of my readers have been kind enough to suggest I should do some professional travel writing, well I have just had a piece published on the travel website simonseeks.com about the happy crew's visit to Glastonbury.

Don't worry its not going to be the end of travel stuff on my blog.co.uk site though.

You can see my travel guide here

http://www.simonseeks.com/simon-ball/3327

I have often said that you miss lots of interesting things if you don't look above the level of the shops in central London and this vision from the window above the Cafe Nero in Oxford Street tickled me

Mab and I had a meal in a very nice Thameside bistro on the South Bank tonight to avoid traveling with all the people chucked off National Express East Anglia. Its quite funny to think back at how grim the area was when I was a kid, it being full of run down warehouses and the river being so noxious that hardly any fish lived in it by the time it passed through London. Now its very trendy with plenty of shops, restaurants and wine bars.

anyhow as we were having a drink on the the Terrace of the Horniman at Hays Mab spotted this

which is an old sailing barge, now these predate even me, but at one time they would be the principle means of transporting goods on the river and some were still in use up to the 1950s. Nowadays they are quite rare and mostly converted into pleasure craft. shame it wasn't under sail, but its a pleasure just to see one of these in use.

I have seen some stuff posted recently claiming that the Apollo Moon landings 40 years ago were just a con trick perpetrated to make the Russians think that they were a bit rubbish at rockets and space and stuff during the Cold War. The sort of daft reasoning employed includes stuff "like how come no one ever went back there" and "today's digital watches are so much cleverer than NASA's computers back in the the 1960s."

Well I think these arguements are a bit dodgy. I mean the Russians would have to have been pretty daft to believe that just because they saw it on TV it was true when they had radio tracking devices used for monitoring their own space programmes and spying on all of us, not to mention pretty powerful telescopes.

Imagine the scene at Baikinur Cosmodrome

"Hey Ivan the Amerinskis have landed on the Moon, it must be true its on TV"

"Da and they have traveled through a time warp to a world where apes are the dominant life form, while in Britain that Carlos the Chef has just left the Crossroads Motel"

Clearly the Russians would have monitored the whole operation and given the Cold War belligerence piped up had the Moon landings been faked.

As to the nonsense about computer technology, I do appreciate that many people today are unable to go out and buy a paper without GPS mapping technology, but back in 1919 Alcock and Brown managed to find their way over the Atlantic in a plane made out of little more than string and brown paper without much more than a sextant for navigation. Then Werner Von Braun, who was a major architect of the American space programme, pretty fatally demonstrated just how rockets could deliver payloads to predetermined targets in 1944 and many Londoner's including my parents can testify that the V2 bombings definitely were not faked. Hostile environments, we'd been there already with submarines in the 19th Century.

Why have we never gone back there? Well once it was done what was the point, it had been done, Uncle Sam had shown those pesky Commies just how clever he was and it had cost a bloody fortune to get there. More value could be obtained from space missions to evaluate reusable vehicles and space stations in near Earth orbit that were less difficult to keep supplied.

As far as I'm concerned saying it never happened is just daft

One of our little trips in Ibiza took us to the paaarty town of San Antonio where we boarded a whopping great big catamaran and set sail to watch the sunset. On the way we passed a small bay frequented by nudists. You'd have though nobody on the boat had ever seen a naked body before, the boat nearly capsized as the passengers flocked to the side to gawp. Funny thing is when we first went to Ibiza nearly twenty years ago naked people would be seen on most of the beaches and no one thought it was that unusual, now its starting to get rare to see women without a bikini top. Funny how things change.

The highlight for me though was watching the gulls

who soared effortlessly on the thermals

when they were not stealing the Powder Monkey's Monster Munch.

Having left the boat we had time to enjoy some people watching from the comfort of a little bar in San Antonio's marina. As you can imagine our attention was immediately drawn to the woman on stilts wearing nipple tassels and a g-string who was leading a coven of similarly clad young ladies striding towards the town centre. Still no chance they were going to catch a chill with the weather we had.

Shock horror I have gone brownish. This is very strange for me as I spend most of my time on holiday in the shade smothered in Factor 30, but I guess the reflected glare of the Sun from the tiles and the water in Ibiza crept up and got me. I also forget to pack a hair brush, but somehow managed with just fingers. Here I am looking windswept and interesting on the rooftop terrace of Sandy's in Santa Eulalia's Calle de Saint Vincent.

The barkeeper here makes exceptionally good cocktails, I recommend the Manhattan, made correctly with Angoustura Bitters not bloody Campari like that idiot in Tenerife did, while the Bloody Mary left as satisfying a burn as a good Vindaloo. Clientele are an interesting bunch too, burnt out rock chicks enjoying white wine and fags and monster big dogs.

Our apartment was on the other side of the marina to the main town and there were some seriously big yachts in there

One of them was bigger than the Formentera ferry. The marina was also home to some huge gray mullet which went loopy when we fed them with our left over bread.

Just beyond the marina before the beach proper was this outcrop of rocks which was the favorite fishing place for this cormorant

Santa Eulalia is famed for its many restaurants on the Calle de Saint Vincent (also known as Restuarant Street)

and we ate lots of smashing food so a full Ibiza restaurant report will be coming soon as will furthur tales of our adventures.

Yes we are back and there is nothing quite like waking up in Ibiza to the first really overcast day in two weeks to come back to the UK on what people tell you is the first sunny day for ages. Naturally despite the weather the Daily Mail UK Border Farce people were still dead miserable and made us all wait for ages, despite the lovely new white shirts we have bought for them with our tax money.

Sorry that I didn't get to post while I was away, could not find an internet caff and the hotel charged a rip off €1 for 10 minutes, about enough time to sign in and out again.

Off to the shops now to get chili peppers, kidney beans and more Canadian whiskey.