How to make someone enjoy a mediocre curry

The other day I found myself needing a late lunch near St Albans City station. (This is what will sometimes happen if you go for bike rides on your days off.) I went into a nearby pub that had a big menu outside.

"Hello. Is the food still on?"

"Ye-es. Until three." (It was quarter to.)

"Thank you! I'd like the chicken curry and a pint of the Tribute."

"Would you like chips with that?"

"Um. Can I have rice?"

"I'll call the kitchen. We ran out the other day."

So she called the kitchen and they did have some rice, and I found a table and she brought over the cutlery, along, separately and unasked, with the ketchup, the mayonnaise and the malt vinegar. The curry was all right but oversweet - after its build-up, however, it tasted like a miracle. I didn't try it with the vinegar.

Bicycles, snow

This isn't the kind of place where people buy - or, so far as I've seen, sell - studded bicycle tyres. The few days a year of proper winter weather mean moving from seeking quiet roads to seeking busy ones, where there are gritters and hot-bellied cars and the ice doesn't set in so much. It also means avoiding hills, so that if the ice has set in I can be relatively under control when things go wrong. Peckham is better for this than Sydenham, which was the far side of a very big hill. The problem is that any weather bad enough to make cycling on main roads really unwise will probably also stop the trains and buses, and my boots aren't great. Tomorrow will be the test. Wish me luck.

Theatre note: Blind Summit's Nineteen Eighty-Four

Last night a friend's spare ticket took me to an adaptation of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four at the Battersea Arts Centre. It was sold to me as a puppet version, which sounded irresistibly unwise. In fact, although there are a couple of puppets, what you mainly see are people, in overalls, performing the story as Brechtian didactic theatre - as if Brecht were a member of the Ingsoc Inner Party. Chunks of the original narration are delivered with a sort of ironic sarcasm, which I suppose cancels out to sincerity. The framing device works brilliantly in the first half, sinister and funny; it helps that you're not wholly certain at first it isn't real bad Brechtian theatre. In the second half, when the company are required to evoke soul-annihilating terror, the frame starts to get in the way. But if soul annihilation isn't your idea of a fun night out, that might be just as well.

Weather note: when I came out of the BAC, the saddle of my bicycle had a thick coating of frost. Not lock-freezing cold yet, though, thank God.

Road-testing

I cycled out to the Museum in Docklands today, and was surprised to find myself in the future. Here's what it looks like:

That, reader, is a wide, continuous cycle lane for segregated two-way traffic, with dedicated junctions (and, you'll notice, dedicated lights that let bikes set off before cars); in other words, a Ken Livingstone-style cycle corridor, as conceived of by the journalists who have written them up as bike motorways, superhighways, &c &c. It runs from Tower Bridge to the Isle of Dogs (Isle of Dogs to Tower Bridge in the picture above, which was taken on my way home) and it offers a fair preview of both the attractions and the disadvantages of this kind of scheme.

Plus points

1) It feels incredibly swift and non-scary. This would be a wonderfully soft introduction to cycling in London.

2) There's usually a kerb separating you from the pavement, which stops pedestrians wandering across and eliminates the live-Frogger aspect of your standard London off-road cycle path, which is either officially shared use or effectively shared-used because the only segregation is fading paint, making it slow and tricky for cyclists and scary for pedestrians.

3) It's pretty much impossible to get lost once you've found the path. None of your usual chipped-paint-splodge-to-indicate-sharp-right-down-otherwise-unmarked-side-road nonsense. This is a cycle route you can get right first time without going at walking pace or developing psychic powers.

Minus points

1) It still does the classic cycle-lane thing of forcing you to ride dangerously close to junctions, so that you can't see any traffic approaching from the side and the approaching traffic can't see you. The markings give the cycle track priority, but cars were coming through without stopping anyway; that enthusiastic novice cyclist I was imagining at point 1) above might well end up as a kebab.

2) You can definitely still get lost on your way to the main route: rejoining the track from Limehouse meant navigating a complete mess of "CYCLIST DISMOUNT" signs and apparent instructions to ride on unmarked pavement; I ended up walking my bike back up the one-way street that comes off the track to Limehouse. Ken's superhighways will only be as good as the connections to them; which, on past evidence, means not very good at all.

3) It's no use making something a cycle highway if you're going to let highway engineers treat it like a pavement. On the way back, a hefty chunk of super-cycle-route was simply closed, with no diversion marked; with no obvious place to turn off, even. The solution taken by all the cyclists I saw was simply to use the part of the road dedicated to cars, which meant cycling the wrong way up a one-way street. That was what I did, too, because there were so many people doing it that I thought at first I must have misread the markings, and I got too far to turn back. (Cycle routes in general go from being moderately helpful to catastrophically unhelpful when they have roadworks and no suggestion for a quiet way around them - and a hell of a lot of routes seem to be in that state at the moment.)