I got home yesterday after watching the eclipse, put the kettle on and opened up my laptop. No internet. Well that's annoying, I thought. My BT Hub was displaying the dreaded red ring of doom, a bit like an eclipse in itself, and rebooting it didn't help. OK that's more annoying, I thought. I hoped it would sort itself out because it usually does on the rare occasions it ever happens. I gave it an hour but no, the red ring remained. Annoying! I gave BT a call to see what was up and they sent me a text message which led to a website, because that beats employing people. We're aware of a fault, they said, which was annoying. We're working on fixing it, they added, which was somewhat reassuring. But then I saw the "estimated fix time" and clocked that it was Tuesday evening. Annoying doesn't even cover it. Not Saturday evening or Sunday evening or Monday evening but Tuesday evening! It might be an overestimate of course, but they were suggesting I faced three whole days without the internet, so you can imagine my annoyance. My laptop was suddenly an isolated computer like it was 1995 or something. Also I could no longer do any streaming, so my TV options were live only or anything I'd recorded, ditto 1995. I turned the radio on and read the paper again, somewhat annoyed. I could of course take my laptop to a cafe and use their wi-fi, but that's not especially realistic on a Saturday evening. Usually I try piggybacking on a neighbour's wi-fi but those are all secure connections these days so annoyingly that no longer works. They switched my landline to 'Digital Voice' a while ago so that's gone down too. I do at least have a smartphone which'll keep me connected and online and everything, but it's not the same as a laptop, it's annoyingly inefficient. In particular a smartphone may be good for accessing written content but it's hopeless for generating 1000 words of thoughtful comment with links and photos. You would not believe how long it's taken me just to write this much - it's been frustratingly annoying. So you're not getting a proper blogpost today, nor probably tomorrow, nor likely again until BT fix whatever's wrong. Sorry, I had today's post all planned but it'd be far too complicated to actually write so all you're getting is this annoying apology. I hope normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. I'll probably come back later and fill this gap in with the missing post, hopefully. In the meantime I'm rediscovering all the things I can still do without the internet, and you can go away and do something else too. Don't be annoyed. You all lost an hour overnight what with the clocks going forward, so if nothing else I've just saved you five minutes.

45 45 Squared 11) BALGORES SQUARE, RM2 Borough of Havering, 110m×30m Romford Garden Suburb was the brainchild of Liberal politician Herbert Raphael who in 1909 offered up his estate at Gidea Hall "to provide families with a well-built, modern home regardless of class or status". To encourage interest he established a competition to create 140 fully-furnished houses in the Arts and Crafts style, then invited the public to walk the streets as part of a domestic outdoor exhibition. A new station called Squirrels Heath & Gidea Park was opened to service visitors in 1910, and if you walk out of that station today and cross the car park you find yourself in Balgores Square. It's long, thin and conveniently located, with a short parade of shops in one corner and a rim of large desirable homes. The first unit is occupied by a pleasingly retro dry cleaners, then a luxury dog groomers and a filler-friendly salon, as befits the denizens of pseudo-Essex. The original plan was that Balgores Square would be the estate's retail heart, entirely surrounded by arcaded shops with flats above by, but demand never quite materialised. A couple more commercial blocks were added on the north side, one with a splendid hare motif dated 1912, but the gap between them had to be filled by flats in the 1930s. this rather lovely postcard of Balgores Square circa 1925, but eventually a few municipal tennis courts were added instead. More recently the council has shoehorned in a narrow car park instead and surrounded it with a hedge so neighbours can pretend it's not there. The majority of spaces are reserved for season ticket holders, and if you manage to grab one of the four others you've got 30 mins before charges kick in and rise steeply. orange three-piece suite on the crazy paving outside number 8 was for sunbathing purposes or about to be chucked. Architecturally the only duff note is the postwar office block at the southern end, occupied by a longstanding firm of Romford solicitors. But outside is an excellent double-sided map board provided by the Gidea Park and District Civic Society, which was erected to commemorate the centenary of Romford Garden Suburb. None of the Exhibition Houses are in Balgores Square but several lie along Balgores Lane, Squirrels Heath Avenue and Crossways which head north, and with the aid of these maps you can pick them out. Those maps are also on the excellent GPDCS website along with a full back history and two suggested walks and heavens look, here's the original 180 page exhibition brochure. If you like walking characterful suburban streets Gidea Park will not disappoint, perhaps all the way up to the 1930s Modernist houses and back, especially at this time of year when spring is at its most colourful. You're only one purple train away from Balgores Square.

The TfL website last underwent a thorough design upgrade in 2014 and hasn't changed much since, template-wise. But times move on, not least the increased necessity for accessible responsive design, so a change is arguably long overdue. And here we go... I think it's just the one main page so far - the Tube, Overground, Elizabeth line, DLR & Tram status page, i.e. tfl.gov.uk/tube-dlr-overground/status. It's gone big, it's gone narrow and it's got an awful lot of white space all over it. It is of course optimised for smartphone usage, where it looks quite swish and scrolls down smoothly with all sorts of additional information opening up if you touch the screen. It works less well on anything landscape, like my laptop screen, where information that used to be visible in one glance is now too large to fit. The key difference is that TfL's new website has been designed with smartphones in mind. Text links have been replaced by buttons that are easier for chunky fingers to push, and the layout of pages is mostly portrait rather than landscape. For those out and about with a mobile device the design will be more intuitive, whereas those at home with a computer screen should expect more white space and more scrolling. And I'm complaining again. As is so often the way the laptop/desktop experience gets worse when the mobile experience gets better, because programmers never seem to include platform-responsive formatting or the ability to tweak the layout somehow. "We think this is better for you" is their watchword even when it patently isn't, "so this what you're getting". a map of disruptions on their website, copping out with an instruction to use the TfL Go app instead. Forcing users off one device onto another is never an accessibility plus. I understand that coding such a map is difficult, or maybe just expensive, but it's truly galling that we will never again see a pictorial disruption map online, only a less helpful list of atomised bits. Other changes are lovely, like the summaries of line closures using endpoints and arrows, also the graphic depiction of future disruption over the upcoming week. And other changes are frustrating, like the list of affected stations which appears in alphabetical order rather than most serious incident first, and where 'part closed' is given undue prominence. Board Meetings section of the TfL website but it looks like this is the beginning of changes on pages people actually use. Look out for further sequential metamorphosis as things you've got used to disappear and things you'll soon love magically arrive. I'm pretty disappointed so far though.

Tomorrow is partial solar eclipse day, peaking at 11:03am in London. The eclipse will be visible across northwest Europe, peaking in eastern Canada where 92% of the solar disc will be obscured. In London it's 31%. Nova Scotia 80%, Reykjavik 68%, Stornoway 47%, Glasgow 42%, Dublin 41%, London 31%, Paris 24%, Rome 2% You might not think 31% is great, and it is indeed low enough that most of the population won't notice anything eclipsy is happening. But solar eclipses are so rare that only four in the last 25 years have been better, as seen from London. All the solar eclipses visble from London during the last 25 years 31st May 2003 (52%) 3rd October 2005 (57%) 29th March 2006 (17%) 1st October 2008 (12%) 4th January 2011 (67%) 20th March 2015 (84%) 21st August 2017 (4%) 10th June 2021 (20%) 25th October 2022 (15%) In good news the next 25 years are better, indeed the next 12 years are particularly good, kicking off with a monster obscuration next summer. That'll be 91% covered in London which is the greatest extent since 1999 and won't be exceeded until 2081, so for most Londoners the last significant eclipse of their lifetime. Plymouth'll do even better with 95% and the Scillies 96%, but if you can get to Reykjavik or northern Spain you could see the magic 100%. All the solar eclipses visble from London during the next 25 years Wed 12 August 2026 (19:13 BST) 91% 42% 51% 48% 60% 46% 63% 62% predictably irregular. tomorrow's eclipse, which in a clear blue sky means using eye protection or projecting shadows rather than staring direct. I have eclipse glasses leftover from the 1999 event and they're excellent, so through those I hope to see a bite of sun missing from the top of the disc, starting at 10.07am, ending at noon and peaking at 11.03. You don't get many chances, and for once the weather is playing ball.

From Monday e-bikes will be banned from TfL services because they pose a fire risk. From next week that won't be allowed and e-bikes will have to stay at street level, protecting passengers from the dangers of potential conflagration. It's bad news for Londoners who've bought e-bikes as an integral part of their commute, whose sustainable micromobility travel options are about to be expunged. But as Charlie Pugsley of the London Fire Brigade says, "we welcome this move by TfL following their detailed safety review as it acknowledges the risks that we know e-bike batteries can pose." And this exclusion of certain e-bikes has forced TfL's messaging to be awkwardly complex. All folded and unfolded e-scooters and e-unicycles are prohibited on all TfL premises and services. E-unicycles are hardly common, and folded e-unicycles so abhorrently unlikely that the fact they need to be mentioned is absurd. But this is what happens when you decide to mention subcategories of wheeled transport - the complexity of the phraseology ramps up and dilutes the safety message you want everyone to hear. How succinct can you make it without losing sufficient clarity? None of these quite work... e-bikes, e-scooters and e-unicycles are not allowed on tubes and trains Non-folded e-bikes, e-scooters and e-unicycles are not allowed on TfL services Only folded e-bikes are allowed on our trains e-bikes are not allowed on this train unless folded comments if(postComments['52911519'] != null){document.write(' (' + postComments['52911519'] + ')')}else{document.write(' (0)')}; n.b. Please only post potential announcements in this box. If you think someone else's message is pedantically inappropriate don't tell us, just come up with something better! For all other comments, whether about e-bikes or linguistic suitability, please use the normal comments box below. Please don't whinge about other announcements that peeve you - today is e-bike day. A pedantic apology: When I said bikes were currently allowed off-peak I was being over-simplistic. At present bikes are only allowed on some parts of some tube lines, not the whole network. Basically trains in deep tunnels are excluded, so for example Edgware to Golders Green is fine except between Colindale and Hendon Central, which makes the whole thing so complicated that TfL have to provide a map. Also bikes are allowed at peak times on certain lines if travelling against the flow, for example out of Shenfield in the evening, and these complexities require an entire page on the TfL website. This is how difficult it is to be simple, clear and precise!