06.03.2026 09:29
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🇫🇷 New route guide – Saint-Malo to Nice 🇫🇷
1000 miles/1600 km across France. Stunning gorges, medieval towns, brand new voies vertes, minimal traffic… from Brittany to Provence via the Loire, Lot, Tarn and Ardèche.
Full mapping, stage-by-stage guide, GPX and more: cycle.travel/route/saint_...
West Oxfordshire District Council set its budget this week. An interesting tale of two reactions. Cllr Ruth Smith, Labour: “This budget is a product of our successful Alliance. Can you imagine such a strong Nature Recovery Strategy without the Greens, or the visionary Carterton Strategy and investment without the LibDems, or the huge acceleration in social rent homes and emergency accommodation for our families in dire need of housing without Labour? We share responsibility but we use the talent and enthusiasm we each bring from our teams.”
Yep. A Labour councillor quoted in our local indie newspaper today: oxfordclarion.uk/clariwn-rhyd...
And here’s Manchester’s finest with Everything’s Gone Green. www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_gg...
Can guarantee it will be nicknamed “South Oxford Sewage Village” as soon as the first residents move in
* There will be mistakes and omissions! Do email me about them (nicely). “Every” excludes stations that were only open for a few years because, well, I’d go mad otherwise. I’ve marked Bedlington as open (because it almost is) but not Bicester–Bletchley (because who knows what’s happening there).
Extract from the New Adlestrop Railway Atlas covering Aberdeen
From Penzance to Thurso (and Marazion to Hoy)… it’s finished.
After 25 years, I’m delighted to report that the New Adlestrop Railway Atlas now covers the whole of England, Scotland and Wales in one big PDF. Every* passenger line and station.
Download it here: www.systemed.net/atlas/
And anyway, this is why cycle.travel doesn’t unthinkingly route over highway=track www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
The Green Party candidate has the right answer here
(although ‘Columbia’ would have been acceptable as Oasis’s one surviving baggy song before they embarked on the Beatles>dadrock trajectory)
News! streetmap.co.uk is back up, blaming Storm Goretti for a month-long outage, and is plastered with “Donate here” ads. They have launched a crowdfunder for £16,000 annual running costs. I am not entirely convinced this is a sustainable model. www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/streetmapc...
Jim Ratcliffe, owner of Ineos: “The UK has been colonised by immigrants”
Number of British riders in Team Sky, 2018, before it was bought by Ratcliffe and rebranded: 10
Number of British riders in Ineos Grenadiers, 2026: 6
Tell that to the owner of the yellow car at the golf course up Binsey Lane, which is currently doing a passable impression of a DUKW amphibious vehicle…
Lego One Piece set
what’s the point of that
Labour: we're banning asylum seekers from using taxis to get to medical appointments.
Also Labour: Greens should stand aside in Gorton and Denton by-election to prevent the horrible racist party getting in.
This is the correct way of dividing Oxfordshire up into three councils and I shall not be taking questions
A road falling into the sea in Devon. the A387 near Torcross.
With the future of the A379 / Slapton Line near Torcross in Devon uncertain following recent storm damage, here's a few other disappearing roads you may want to ride before its too late...
Labour FAFO vol. 234876
This week in “maybe we should have supported proportional representation after all” news
And I still have my Multimap mug! (with typo on the bottom)
Streetmap did have a small remaining following for its free Ordnance Survey maps. In later years it started using OpenStreetMap data for its street-level mapping, with a rendering stack I never quite figured out. Last year they tried to sell the domain but it looks like there were no takers.
streetmap.co.uk appears to have finally keeled over and died. In the early 00s it was one of the two big online map sites in the UK, but whereas Multimap smartly sold out to Microsoft, Streetmap ploughed on with its frankly antiquated tech, at one point suing Google for market abuse (and losing).
Keir Starmer’s chief secretary made a blame-the-civil-servants speech, praising “doers not talkers” and calling for “complete digital transformation”, at what3words HQ today.
what3words has lost £150m in ten years and is showing no signs of ever making a profit. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
180 pupils, 5 schools, 1 awesome concert! A little drizzle didn't dampen our thrill at hosting the Primary Schools Choir Concert in Christ Church Cathedral. Thank you to everyone who sang, listened, performed and directed - what a joyous way to spend a Monday afternoon! 🎶💙
#CCCSOxford #MusicMatters
* “average resurfacing cycle for all types of roads in England is every 103 years” factoid actualy just statistical error. average resurfacing cycle is every 12 years. Stonesfield megalosaurus pothole, which was caused by a 700kg dinosaur 166mn yrs ago, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
This is very neat: 3D city models made from OpenStreetMap data (inter alia) www.lichtbild-manufaktur.shop
For clarity, this government has so far:
- cancelled HS2 north of Birmingham (previous government hadn't actually done that formally)
- cancelled electrification of the Midland Main Line
- cancelled West Yorkshire mass transit
- cancelled the trans-Pennine high speed line
The Telegraph (usual fare: “The Car of the Year is the Mercedes CLA – here is why you should want one”) has an article on “Britain’s 20 prettiest streets”. _15_ of them are car-free (and 4 of the others are very quiet). Restricting cars makes for better towns. www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/desti...
Clarion news: We’re leaving Twitter (’X’). We can’t condone the objectionable content it now promotes, which goes against everything we believe and the Clarion tradition. Our live posting is now here on Bluesky, with all this plus much more in our email newsletter twice a week.
This keyboard actually _is_ an entire computer because, unlike the Spectrum, it has a mass storage device included
Excellent. Looks like I may not be on the S3 home this evening after all!
