Richard’s Blog-o-Shite

Thank you very much indeed, Norfolk Constabulary. Thank you for costing my company a day’s lost fees. Thank you for wasting £60 of my money for the hotel room I’m in now. Thank you for doing absolutely sod-all to help the hundreds of motorists your incompetence incovenienced.

What am I talking about?

Today I had a dental appointment in Wymondham at 11.15am, so I left London in plenty of time. By 10.50am, I was 20 minutes away (maximum) on the dual carriageway section of the A11 Thetford By-Pass between the Brandon and Watton interchanges when I had to come to a halt. Why? Some dickhead driving a tractor and towing a trailer of vegetables had managed to turn the whole thing over and blocked the southbound carriageway. Remember, I was heading northbound.

Like a well-oiled team of professionals, the police’s traffic division and the Transport Agency’s Incident Support Unit had mobilised to get things sorted out.

Between then and 11.45am, I sat in stationary traffic and watched as most of the police vehicles drove off having done … er … nothing at all. One police motorcycle went down the southbound carriageway, around the roundabout and then back up the southbound carriageway the wrong way for no good reason at all. Maybe he was getting a bit warm in the summer sun and just fancied going for a spin to cool himself down. Bless!

Traffic announcements confirmed that the southbound carriageway was blocked and that there were long southbound queues. Apparently the traffic going north was slow as people were slowing down to take a look, according to the AA team.

Obviously that was as far removed from reality as the Labour Party are from unity. As I discovered when I did eventually get past the next roundabout, the southbound lane was actually flowing pretty well. And no-one was rubbernecking in my lane – we simply couldn’t get past the roundabout because of the southbound traffic effectively turning it into a lane of southbound traffic.

In the olden days, a policeman or policemen would stand there directing traffic like human traffic lights to ensure that traffic flowed as freely as possible every way, but instead this bunch of lazy idiots just wanted to sit around with their thumbs up their arses doing absolutely sod-all.

And as a result, all the northbound traffic had been at a standstill for almost an hour.

So I missed my appointment thanks to their complete lack of any positive action. Well done you! It’s really no surprise I have absolutely zero respect for them. They always set low standards and consistently fail to achieve them in my mind.

I won’t even start to go on about how South Blunderside Humberside Police have failed to take any real action against a harassing, violent and abusive drunkard (with overtones of child abuse)…

And thanks to the AA’s radio traffic reporters for rubbing it in by reporting absolute crap and insulting those of us who were stuck in the jams the police had caused.

Hmm. Well that’s interesting. I’ve just received a junk e-mail to an e-mail address set up specifically for use on the William Hill website some months back.

So does that mean someone’s hacked their customer database or is it just a bizarre coincidence that someone has managed to combine their site name with one of my domain names? Hmm…

According to the BBC News website, the Metropolitan Police says it has spent almost £8M monitoring the Tamil protest at Parliament Square – this was up to 19 May 2009. According to the TV news tonight, the cost is now £9M and this is being used as the basis for reviewing allowing peaceful protests.

ORLY?

So it cost £8M for 43 days. Or £186,000 a day. For what?

Looking more closely at the report, they claim that:

“About half of the total spent policing the demonstration – £3.72 million – was from additional policing costs, including overtime, the Met said.”

So that’s  £86,500 a day on overtime. Nice litttle earner, eh? I mean, how many policemen are on duty there every day? 100? 200? That’s a lot of overtime or a disproportionate number of policemen.

And that leaves a balance of £100,000 a day for … er … um … doughnuts? Bacon rolls? Who knows? The policemen are already employed, the vans are already bought and will just be parked up there most of the day. So what – precisely – is this claimed additional expenditure on? Mind you, when they closed off Weston Street after a stabbing for a day or two, one of the few police vehicles on the scene was a Met. Police burger van. I kid you not!

Sounds like bollocks to me…

I took the opportunity of a warm and sunny day here in London to wash and polish Wilf with car shampoo, wax and a high gloss protector coat for the tank.

Then I fitted some R&G fork protectors before taking the camera out to take a few photos:

Wilf in London

One of the adverts over on the right of this site from time to time is for H&R Insurance, peddling their bike insurance online using Google Ads.

In order to get a quote, you have to agree, amongst other things, that:

“5. The motorbike has not been modified in any way.

6. There are no accessories fitted to the bike.”

That must mean they insure very few bikes…

Another gesture that Roger made when he sold me Wilf as the alarm was fecked was that he’d send me the rear hugger and throw in a carbon end can. These arrived at the office yesterday and I brought them home today, along with the replacement Meta alarm I’d bought.

Turns out it’s a Micron carbon can which looks like it’ll be fairly loud, but also is smaller and much lighter than the OEM can. I fitted it in minutes and fired up Wilf to be greeted with a much deeper exhaust note which wasn’t that much louder after all. We’ll see what it’s like on the road in due course.

Second accessory was a satnav mount that fits into the stem, the “Telferizer”. Using this, the TomTom Rider v2 can be fitted either up in front of the instruments or - better still - just above the tank indent. Now all I need to do is sort out the power lead to the battery and I’m good to go without worrying about the batteries running out. A really nice bit of kit and recommended.

Well that was annoying.

This evening, I drilled four big holes in the garage wall and screwed on the Abus WBA 100 Granit Wall Anchor and then screwed it all to the wall. So far so good. Final touch was to screw in the bolts that hold the plastic cover on and … the screws are too short! Grr!

Still, it’s sturdy and will be excellent to chain Wilf to when the trailer and ZRX are back in Norfolk or elsewhere.

Oh dear!

The Meta M357T-V2 alarm that had once been fitted to Wilf was removed by Roger when he got the bike. He had tried to refit it before selling Wilf to me but failed. And apparently if the wire telltales that identify the leads when the alarm is new are missing now - as they are - then it’s pure guesswork as to which of the black wires is which.

So I’ve now had to order a new one from elsewhere and I will have to arrange for the alarm to be fitted when it arrives.

So after a bit of a nightmare journey to get to Birmingham, I did the deal and Wilf was wheeled out of Roger’s workshop. At which point it began raining…

We’d fixed the TomTom Rider’s RAM mount to the clutch lever bolt and I plugged in the address in Grimsby and off I went. A couple of coffees later and I set the TomTom to my home address. One annoying thing was that when riding, I was not allowed to change my destination to a previously stored one, no doubt due to some idiotic ’safety’ feature. No doubt they’d want me to pull onto the hard shoulder to do this … where a number of accidents happen!

Anyway, on arrival home, I checked the trip statistics and discovered that my moving average speed for the 380 mile journey had been xxmph. Oops! Best not put the number.

OK, my back ached a little but having spent five hours in the saddle, it had turned out to be a remarkably good high speed tourer. Maybe I need to rethink my choice of bike for the RBLR1000, a 1,000 mile ride in 24 hours I’m doing for charity.

I recently booked a seat on a train from London Euston to Birmingham New Street. It was for the Bank Holiday Monday yesterday. Now travelling by train and Bank Holidays usually mean engineering work, but there was not a hint of anything wrong when I ordered the ticket through the Virgin Strain website.

I wanted to book a particular journey at a particular time so as to arrive before 10.00am. A bloke I know was collecting me from the station to take me to complete a deal to buy his Suzuki GSX-R750K4 and I was then going to travel a good many miles to see friends in North East Lincs. before heading back down to London. A long day. And as I would be riding a new sports motorcycle, it was a no-brainer that I should wear full leathers and boots, etc.

So I booked a ticket on the 8.23am train and got an e-mail confirmation through the e-mail address I registered with them. The ticket arrived by post a few days later and it was ‘open’.

Come the day, I got on a bus at 7.20am to London Bridge followed by a tube to Euston. Once there I looked at the departure board. No sign of the 8.23am. I asked at the information desk and was told that it had been cancelled. Nice of them to announce that, eh? And no e-mail to let me know. Nothing. So off I went to the information/ticket office. The next train would be after 11.00am and would take the best part of three hours as it would be part train, part bus! So much for letting Virgin get me there on time. She did say I could get a Chiltern Trains service from Marylebone that would get me there earlier and I asked how to get there. She suggested a couple of underground lines, so off I went down to the Underground.

The lines I needed were suspended for engineering works!

When I eventually got to Marylebone Station – complete with a massive blister from walking part of the way to find a taxi – it transpired that I had paid more for this ’service’ than if I’d bought it from Chiltern Trains. Great…