The big sleep is over and now we begin to take stock of the year ahead. And for Londoners the hardest thing to come to immediate terms with are the usual high price rises on the tubes, trains and buses. It now being cheaper to travel in London by car! Honestly I worked it out. 2 people in a car popping across to say Camberwell (not of course via the congestion charge zone that’s only for the super-rich and white van drivers). Not very green I’ll grant you but very nice. Comfortable and clean. You get to listen to your own music and not the tinny wasp farting noises from the headphones of the JB sports clad gimp in the hoodie glaring at his iphone from a seat saying for pregnant ladies and the elderly. In an average sized car you shouldn’t use more than a fivers worth of fuel per trip. Cheaper than two Oyster card worth of trips. Of course there are a few drawbacks to this concept. Thanks to Camden and Westminster Councils whose Chief Executive Officers are more like Afghan warlords than public servants nowadays you can’t stop easily. Not without facing the ludicrous parking charges and restrictions they so delight in inflicting on us AFTER public consultations. Where are these public consultations? We had one in Camden once about the greatest con trick of all – the dreaded Residents Permits (or a tax to use your own street every year). The Council sent out a questionnaire using hysterically loaded questions. DO YOU WANT STRANGERS FILLING YOUR STREETS AND RAPING YOUR FAMILY? Tick A or B. You know the sort of lies they use. A bit like the new green re-cycling madness. I now have SIX bins. I’m not making this up. Everyday some trucks trundle up and down my street taking away stuff. It’s getting very specific. I saw a bin by a bus stop that said only suitable for 18th century manuscript paper with a picture of Jane Austen on it for the hard of hearing.

But in an Olympic year my favourite new London game is spotting the very tenuous Olympic links everyone is using to push prices up. Of course top of the charts are those soulless parasites the London estate agents. Every borough I’ve been in recently apparently is perfect to access the Olympic stadium from according to estate agents boards and ads. Including far flung spots like Barnet, Roehampton and Ilford presumably viewing the Olympic Park by radio telescope. Of course there are those local areas directly around the stadiums who are also twinned with Helmand Province in the safety stakes which they handily fail to point out! I’ve also realised the prices going up now will presumably not fall afterwards despite the fools and suckers buying an overpriced flat to see a waste of money that only lasts a month. That’s property in London I guess. But many new terrorized folk will at least be able to shuffle around the Stratford Westfield shopping centre or take in the empty velodrome. The great legacy is getting vaguer. But the areas are certainly being built up. Mainly ‘so called ‘luxury’ apartments with names like The Point, The Wave and The Shoe Box (I made the last one up) But take a wander around Canning Town station to see the ghastly rabbit hutches being thrown up left right and centre. With ceiling heights too low for the average hobbit and walls thinner than a cream cracker these ‘architect designed’ monstrosities will presumably fill up quicker than Cheryl Cole at her next sacking. And bizarrely they all have tiny balconies allowing them to see other people on their tiny balconies. Just a sample of the new examples of the wonderful ‘design’ we can expect over the coming property developers feeding frenzy Olympic year.

And on the subject of London’s ever changing design I have to say the new layouts around Exhibition Road in South Kensington are just very surreal. Apparently it’s all based on a Dutch concept of ‘space sharing’. In plain speak it means ripping up the pavement, covering the surfaces of the roads and streets with curious red and white flat cobblestones and then letting pedestrians ‘share’ the road space with cars. It’s akin to the way that South Africans ‘share’ the coast line with Great White Sharks. I was having tea in Le Pain Quotidien amusing myself by watching baffled tourists soiling themselves as various Buses and cars apparently mounted the side streets they were walking along and chased them. Window shopping suddenly stopped being ‘charming’ instead becoming a kind of game of chicken. It’s a very nice concept. A bit like socialism. But in practice it turns a quiet stroll into a dice with death. Very exhilarating I’m sure but not great for the terminally nervous. And as for the locals do they like it. No not really I was told. But did they care? No not really. It’s a London thing.