When I was entering the job market in early 2023, I caught up with my friend Fadeke. She had just started a really good job at DigitalOcean. She shared her process with me, and let me know that she did fewer than 20 job applications. This quantity was a really helpful anchor for when I […]

I'm off on a long-distance trip today, one I bought a ticket for several weeks ago. I have thus become very invested in what today's weather might be because a miserable outlook can wreck a good day out. My visit to Durham in 2015 was destroyed by heavy rain all day, my 2024 trip to Rugby left me soaked through and my 2018 spring break in Cornwall annoyingly coincided with The Beast From The East. What weather would Saturday 22nd February 2025 bring? BBC's weather website provides a forecast up to 14 days in advance, so on Sunday 9th February I refreshed the page and went "oh". Cold and wet, no sun, not ideal. And then it changed its mind again on Tuesday (full-on sunshine) and again on Wednesday (wet). Here's a summary of how the BBC forecast for today's weather changed over the space a week. That was two weeks ago. I then carried on checking throughout last week. Obviously it's a lot easier to forecast the weather as the day approaches, but to have got it right six days in advance is pretty good going. It's particularly good given that today is a brief sunny respite between two wet days, with yesterday seeing a heavy band of rain cross the region and tomorrow promising the same but with gales. It would have been all too easy to get the precise timing of these frontal systems wrong, but the BBC weather forecast has correctly identified 'Friday wet, Saturday dry, Sunday wet" since five days ago. Met Office weather forecast for today at my chosen destination. They don't provide the BBC's forecast any more, theirs is separate and has been since 2018. They also don't provide a forecast until one week before a particular date, not two. So consistent has the message been, from both the BBC and the Met Office, that I've known since Sunday that I'm in for a dry mild day trip today. Hurrah! It isn't always this cut and dried, nor are both forecasts always in agreement, but they've both played a blinder over the last week in getting today's weather right. Indeed if I were to draw your attention to just one fact, it's that long-range weather forecasts are usually bolx. This is especially true if you work for a clickbait website and spot that some unreliable forecast has promised a slight snow flurry in six weeks time - please put your keyboard away and stop trying to hoodwink us with ill-judged certainties. But even the BBC's weather forecast can't be trusted two weeks out, it's just a low-probability best guess, which'll be why they never ever look that far forward on TV. One week ahead, though, might just be spot on... which is why I'm currently speeding out of London towards sunny and mild, hurrah!

When I told a good friend of mine I wrote a blog every day while I worked a full-time job, they responded, “I don’t know how you find the energy.” I actually generate energy from writing the blog every day, I tried to explain. If I didn’t write the blog every day, I would have […]

As an East London resident I've received a 20-page booklet through my letterbox about the opening of the Silvertown Tunnel in April. If you didn't get a booklet you can download one here. Eight pages are given over to information for drivers, which makes sense given most of the tunnel's users will be drivers. The eight pages are mostly about what you have to pay and whether you have to pay it. You might therefore expect that one of the maps in the booklet would be aimed at drivers. Not so. There is such a map, it's on the TfL website and you can see it here. But it never made it into the booklet because someone thought two maps aimed at bus passengers and cyclists would be sufficient. Let's Make This Bus Map Unnecessarily Complicated department has been at it again. It shows the three routes which make up TfL's commitment to running 21 buses an hour through the two tunnels. One is the existing 108 through the Blackwall Tunnel, one is the extended 129 and one is the new Superloop SL4, both of which will use the Silvertown Tunnel. LMTBMUC department is obsessed with routes rather than stops. • I don't care which bore of the Blackwall Tunnel the 108 will use, nor all the ridiculous twiddles the 108 and 129 have to make to enter the bus station at North Greenwich. I might care that the 108 makes several extra stops northbound on its detour to the tunnel but the map doesn't show where they are, nor does it have arrows to show which way the loop goes. • I don't care about the twiddles on the 129 either, whereas I would really like to know where the first stop beyond the tunnel is going to be and how far it'll be from anywhere useful. I'd also quite like to know where the 129 goes next but the next four miles through Newham are not shown, only a box saying that the route terminates at Great Eastern Quay. I bet most people have no idea where that is and the booklet doesn't enlighten them. • I can see where the SL4 runs but because it's a limited stop route I really need to know where I can catch it, and on that there's nothing. That's key because on the north side of the tunnel it won't stop anywhere in Newham, only in Tower Hamlets, and heading south it won't drop anyone off in North Greenwich, only two miles away up the A12. The next page of the booklet does at least say "Express service stopping in key town centres between Westferry Circus in Canary Wharf to Grove Park via Silvertown Tunnel". But it doesn't say what those key town centres will be, nor does it mention the three-mile non-stop section, and you're not going to attract any passengers like that. Cyclists don't care what ridiculous one-way circuits the shuttle bus has to make, they only need to know where to board and where it'll drop them off. The red blobs alas get somewhat lost amid the red lines. What is it with TfL and overcomplicated underinformative maps? Drivers, bus passengers and cyclists who might use the Silvertown Tunnel would really like to know.