tomroyal.com

About a week ago I wrote to SouthEastern Railway's Public Affairs Manager, asking him two questions that could be answered with a simple yes or no. I didn't get a yes or no answer to either, and when I pushed for a straight answer to one of them the gentleman in question simply stopped replying to my emails. I'll publish the whole lot, names redacted, after the jump – but in summary:

A) SouthEastern Railway receives a huge subsidy from the Government in order to provide a rail service to the public. In January it failed to provide a proper service, slashing trains for three days, but it will not return an appropriate proportion of said subsidy. Nor will it donate the equivalent amount to charity, which is a shame – the DEC could undoubtedly use a few extra hundred thousand pounds right about now.

B) By cutting its service to an emergency timetable before a flake of snow had fallen, it seems* that SouthEastern ensured that its reliability would be measured against this reduced timetable. As this reliability statistic is used to calculate refunds, this gives it a fighting chance of avoiding the need to refund season ticket holders.

The downside, of course, is that many of its customers get left out in the snow, unable to use the train tickets they paid for. Fans of the absurd will note that the company has since published figures claiming 97.5% (Mainline) and 97.3% (Metro) reliability for the December to January period.

Or, to put it another way:

• The taxpayer pays SouthEastern via a £136m subsidy
• We, the customers, pay SouthEastern for our tickets
• SouthEastern decides not to run a service
• Most customers are left stranded
• Neither the taxpayer or the customer gets a refund

And it's important to note here that, under the National Rail Conditions of Carriage and the Passengers' Charter, this is all perfectly legal.

Evidently some kind of political action is required to ensure that this kind of debacle isn't repeated every time the weather forecast looks unpleasant, so I wrote to a few politicians: my MP, my AM and the Transport Minister.

My AM, Len Duvall, didn't reply – I received a response from his assistant promising a "considered response", but none came. My MP, Bridget Prentice, did contact the company on my behalf and put up with a flurry of CC'd emails from me, for which I'm thankful. As for the Transport Minister, like several people I received a response that in parts bore an uncanny similarity to the documents issued by SouthEastern itself. Nonetheless, it also said:

".. we will be conducting a review of the experience of the service that was provided between the 6th and 8th January 2010. This review will cover all aspects of service provision. Where any areas for improvement are identified, we will ensure that proper action is taken to deliver the required improvement.

Your email has also highlighted the difference between services provided across Sussex and Wessex despite simiar forecasts. We will be seeking understand (sic) from all parties involved the reasons for this. Until this review is complete, I cannot comment on how appropriate Southeastern's response was when compared to the actions taken by other operators."

So there's some hope for the future, and I await the findings of that review with interest. In the meantime, I'm sure our beloved Mayor will sort it out at the Emergency Rail Summit he promised to hold within a few weeks of his election.

* I say "seems to" because when asked whether this is the case the Public Affairs Manager stopped answering my emails. I've waited a week and re-sent the email, but to no avail. If he'd care to get back to me and assure me that this is not the case, I'll be happy to correct this immediately. In the meantime, a parliamentary answer from the 25th of January confirms that, unless SouthEastern should choose otherwise, this is the case.

For the sake of completeness, my full email conversation with SouthEastern is copied after the jump.

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Too cold to run this weekend, so I took a walk up to Greenwich Park instead. The paths were treacherous, but the rose garden was pretty – a few flowers had survived, and a robin even popped in to complete the scene.

A few more here.

An incomplete assortment of things I like:

1. Ascending really tall buildings in cities to gawk from the top
2. Taking photographs from said tall buildings
3. Playing with expensive cameras and lenses
4. All of the above in one morning

Today I was lucky enough to achieve #4 on that list, as Nikon announced its new D5000 DSLR* in the Paramount private members' club on the top of Centre Point. It was a bit gloomy outside with lots of cloud, but the views were still great. A handful more are on Flickr; I'll dig through the rest at the weekend.

* In a nutshell: 720p video, D60-like body, swivelling LCD, no AF motor, 11-point AF, £720 or £800 for the kit. I'll reserve judgment until I give it a proper try.

There's something strange about sitting in an office all day, knowing that not far away there's much newsworthy action taking place. We were going to press today – by the time I escaped with a camera the West End was quiet and, save for a few discarded placards and dozens of police, much the same as ever.

I'm not generally a fan of snow. Too cold and, you know, wet. But when you get a pristine covering like this (spot the animal tracks):

Then you just have to go and stomp in it, even if it is 7am. So we did:

Also, there are snowmen everywhere. Here's the best I saw up on Blackheath:

Of course, the whole capital ground to a halt, all the trains broke, etc. But not such a bad day.

Thursday was one of the good London days: it started with the view above, was followed by a great bit of publicity for the magazine and ended with dutch beer and discovering soup-filled dumplings at a great Taiwanese restaurant. Fantastic.

On the minus side, karma dictates that Monday will be a bad London day:I will almost certainly be rained on, stressed at work and assaulted by a drunken tramp. Ho hum.

When I first moved to The Big Office In Soho I was taken for an induction meeting. After all the usual office stuff (lift with your knees, don't try to repair the copier with sellotape, don't sell your security pass to tramps) we inductees were given a warning about working in this part of town. It could be roughly paraphrased to "we have security staff for a reason, so be careful when you're outside". Those new to London might well have come away terrified.

By and large, though, this slightly porn-y end of Soho is a good place to be during the day. We're surrounded by excellent, cheap restaurants (whether Cali-Mexican, Japanese (especially Ramen) or just great sandwiches), and the only near death experience I've had so far involved a reversing courier van attempting to smear me across the road in front of the John Snow pub (it turns out my "fight or flight" response is rubbish: all I did was bang on the back of it as I was pushed along, shouting "fuckingshitfuck" – "stop" would probably have been more useful).

Walking south to Charing Cross means crossing through probably the single dodgiest part of Soho, surrounded by brothels and hugger-muggers, but between the hours of 7am and around 8pm there's really no cause for any great concern as long as you stay the hell away from the public toilets (side note: some of the tramps appear to even have keys to the toilets, although where they got these from we have no idea).

The area is changing, too. It's not exactly gentrification of the "Daily Mail readers eye property prices" variety, but over the past year a few of the dodgiest places, including the one really visible clipping bar, have finally been closed down. You have to wonder what'd happen to the place if the sex industry left, though – maybe the streets would be subsumed into the Carnaby Street Tourist Hellhole (TM), or maybe they'd just become empty backroads. For the moment, though, everything's becoming slightly festive, albeit in a slightly unusual way. Merry Chrimbo, Soho.

These are the Merchant Taylors' Almshouses. They are in Lewisham, and normally strictly closed to the public, but this weekend you can visit them as part of the London Open House initiative. Just off the A20 behind the (also open) Boone's Chapel.

Two more horrible murders up the road in New Cross have once again brought out the worst in the internet's commentators – see the remarks under this Times article, for instance:

You guys don't get it. We are laughing at you for banning guns and a whole host of other forms of defence. If these two frenchmen had guns they would be alive, period.

I don't know about you, but when I hear of a nasty crime in a foreign country my first impulse isn't, generally, to laugh at the circumstances that might have caused it. Also, I'd suggest that anyone who's ever picked up a pen or sat down at a keyboard to type an idiotic comment or equally idiotic article on how the UK's gun control system encourages crime rather than preventing it should take a look at the Baltimore Sun's interactive murder map:

Each red dot denotes somebody shot dead in 2008.

Incidentally, the Telegraph article linked above concludes with a fairly typical prediction of the "crime may be lower in the UK now, but just you wait for the surge that's around the corner" variety:

In 1981, the US [murder] rate was nine times higher than the English. By 1995, it was six times. Last year, it was down to 3.5. Given that US statistics, unlike the British ones, include manslaughter and other lesser charges, the real rate is much closer. New York has just recorded the lowest murder rate since the 19th century. I'll bet that in the next two years London's murder rate overtakes it.

This is quite a clever move, as at the time of publication there's no way to refute the argument other than to say "we'll have to wait and see". Fortunately this article was written in 2003, so we're now in a position to find out if the author was right.

Murders in London, 05-06: 168 (source: Met Police). Incidents of "murder and nonnegligent manslaughter" (please read and digest the definition of manslaughter in English law before complaining about this) in New York City, 2005: 539 (source: FBI). London population in 2005: 7,517,700 (source: GLA). New York City population in 2006 (2005 figures not listed): 8,214,426 (source: NYC city planning). So, estimated murder rate in London, 2005: one per 44,748 people. In NYC: one per 15,240 people. Or to put it another way: the murder rate in the major city without gun control is 2.94x higher.