Our sports correspondent confirms...

Yes, there is a classic England batting collapse so it must be summer

Our climatologist speaks

It must be summer, there's a test match at Lords.
[Is that it? Ed]

A spot of breeze

Spring seemed to have passed rapidly into summer just a few days ago. We basked in beautiful sunshine and calm, clear skies. That was then. Today we seem to have lurched back to the fag-end of winter with gales and rain. On my homeward journey on the Met the train made an emergency stop near Northwick Park where workmen were on the Chiltern Line track alongside us removing part of a tree that had fallen over the rails. You don't see that too often and you certainly don't expect it at this time of the year.

And on arrival back in beautiful Ruislip, Mrs. Commuter greeted me with the news that a fence panel between us and next door was blown down - it belongs to my neighbour so he can have the pleasure of trying to stick it back.

Two or fewer wheels

My trusty bike developed a slow puncture at the weekend. As it is some 40 years since I last messed about with basins of water, chalk, rubber patches and that horrible glue, I invested in a new inner tube, only to be embarrassed to discover I was not certain how to put it on to the wheel. It seemed to be too big and as I inserted one end into the outer tyre, another section flopped out. Never mind, a return trip to my friendly local bike shop with the wheel, the tube and the outer,  and a freshly pumped wheel was to hand. Only for me to find I now could not refit it back on the bike because the brake blocks were in the way and it had to be deflated again.

They say you never forget how to ride a bike. What they don't say is that you can easily forget how to fix a flat.

The power of the net

In the bad old days when I commuted daily, I often moaned about the problem of what strategy to adopt when faced with delays. And by delays, I don't mean actual gaps in the train schedule but the word itself. When you enter a tube station and see on the electronic displays (or the trusty old hand-written white board) that there are "delays", or, God forbid "severe delays" on your chosen route, what should you do?

Well, we now have ways to beat the system. The combination of the net, a tube app and a smart phone equips the traveller in a way undreamed of just a few years ago. So this morning, on my way from beautiful Ruislip into central London, and faced by those dreaded words "severe delays" and "no service between Baker Street and Aldgate" I made a cunning plan. A Piccadilly came in almost at once - fine, I took it on the grounds that if things looked bad I could stay on it pretty well all the way. But this is a second-best option, it is way slower than the Met and nothing like as comfortable. Decision time was four minutes away when the lines divide at Rayners Lane. By then I could see on my phone that Mets were running in good numbers and some were going through to Aldgate. So I debarked at Rayners to take the Met that I knew was a couple of minutes behind. Arrived at Harrow to find the train on the adjacent town-bound platform was out of service and lots of evidently disgruntled and just-turfed-out passengers waiting for us. Naturally my train was a slow one and we were quickly overtaken by a fast Aldgate that was almost empty but that is pretty well par for the course in these parts. My point is that on arrival at Finchley Road my phone told me there was another through train behind us and once more I debarked and changed trains.

Not too long ago this would have been too much of a risk. I would have remained on the Picc and emerged much later to change at Kings Cross with my back aching from those low spongy seats.  So thank you for the modern communication systems that empowers us hapless commuters in these difficult times.

Official: We will not be censored

A headline on the BBC news site today - Blogs with turnover of less than £2m will not be subject to new system of press regulation, government says. Well the good news is that Ramblings does not quite achieve this particular target so we will continue to bring you hard-hitting, up-to-the-minute journalism of the highest quality [cough. ahem. cough: Ed].  And the bad news is that because this blog is not pulling in a lot of cash, the funds available to bring you this hard-hitting etc. etc. are somewhat depleted and this may result in a bit less of the hh stuff than you might wish.  Sorry.  But these are the facts.
 [There was some talk a while back of a Xmas bonus - is that still on by any chance? Ed].
No.

The nutters of Pyongyang

North and South Korea have been in a state of war for sixty years. Military hostilities ceased in 1953 but only because of an armistice. No peace treaty has been signed. Recently the unbelievably weird lot who govern the North have been making the most incredibly belligerent statements about the ghastly things they are going to do to the South, to the USA, to their allies and to anyone else who gets in the way, and anybody else on the planet who they may run into during that process, plus any stroppy inhabitants of the solar system and visitors from the planet Tharg for good measure. Even Millwall supporters must be impressed.

But today, reports the Guardian, they are terribly upset and crying and saying "it's not fair" because some demonstrators in the South had a go at the nutter-in-chief Kim Il-Sung. They are demanding - and get this, irony-lovers, - an apology. Yes, they are on the verge of deploying missiles and threatening invasion but first they want someone to say sorry. Ah, bless. It's a scene straight out of Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy - this one, in fact

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... distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.
The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time. A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jeweled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.
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If it wasn't for the fact that the North Koreans do possess weapons that they seem keen to use, gales of derisive laughter would be sweeping the world.