'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

Hypothesis: the reason the very rich did more interestingly insane things in eg the eighteenth century than they do today is that cocaine had not yet been discovered, and so could not sponge up all the excess.

Yesterday I went on a Tubewalk which was actually a DLRwalk, where we found a beach! From which we skimmed some stones. I then proceeded to skim brick, glass, metal and wood. I rule at skimming. Some distance from the beach, or indeed any water, we found an inexplicable and inaccessible derelict lighthouse on some waste ground. Then we went to the farm where there were sheep and cows and the hill on which that Fad Gadget video with the skyscrapers behind the field was filmed. 10/10
Subsequently: pub, pizza, and eventually making it to Balham in spite of an arsehole under a train. Once in Balham, I played some truly lamentable pool.

'The Sontaran Stratagem': better than one might expect from Raynor's prior Who scripts, of which we do not speak. But given all of the components, it should still have been better than it was. And surely the Sontarans weren't always that short? I remember them as squat, but big with it. As for the cliffhanger - breaking car windows is fairly easy, Doctor.

My Tube home hit someone at Euston last night. Now, obviously given I live in London, I've had transport disruption down to this sort of thing before, but I've never felt the crunch, never been (through momentum as a product of mass and velocity) some small part of the killing. Now, I've long felt that suicide as currently practised is more often than not an incredibly selfish act, and suicide by train perhaps the worst of the lot, but there were details here which really brought that home. The driver's faltering voice as he announced "a very serious incident at the front of this train". The realisation that a friend of mine was on the platform - we attempted some gestured communication, and even managed a few words once I detrained, but given he's an off-duty police, he was really obliged to go up front and lend a hand. I mean, that's not what you want on your way home of a Sunday evening, is it? And as ruudboy has noted, it was late enough to screw up the last Tubes. I was on my bus routes home, though I ended up walking to Camden through simple impatience, but a lot of people were going to be left stranded far from home. I'm not that bothered about the delay to my own journey, given today's a day off and I've been sleeping better than I do anything else this weekend. I'm certainly not that bothered about my small part in killing this dick, because as outlined above anyone who's prepared to act so bloody selfishly and obstructively amply deserves to die. But I am bothered about the driver, my friend, those other passengers, all of whom have had their evening (and in the driver's case especially, perhaps much longer) tainted by one inconsiderate little toerag convinced that his own problems were so much more important than everyone else's lives.

In an effort to keep myself vaguely calm, I've written this entry to the soothing strains of Anjani, a member of Leonard Cohen's band who's now done an album with him producing and co-writing, It's very good - sort of Norah Jones without the distressingly dinner party moments, or a less Teutonic Ute Lemper. Normally I'd consider it strictly late-night music, but it's keeping me on an even keel at the moment.