Broken British Rail

I am very sorry, but this is a railfare booking rant.

Everyone knows that the UK rail service - staffed by hardworking people with an occasional urge to strike - is a good one. But, thanks to successive butchering by Tory and Labour governments, and despite a heroic-but-failed effort to produce a web booking system that makes sense of it, it suffers the somewhat-critical problem.

It is, in a nutshell, Impossible To Use.

Everyone has an illustration of what this means is in practice. I don't think mine will add anything, but I'm just putting this down out of sheer disbelief.

I'm travelling to Canterbury with my three daughters one day this week. We're leaving from Herne Hill, and changing at Bromley South. So I decided to buy tickets.

1. I went to the National Rail site, looked up train times, and clicked for a price. £42.20 for the four of us.

2. When I clicked to buy the tickets, I was sent through to the booking pages at Sutheastern where my details were already in a "mixing deck", which offered ma a price of £84.40.

3. Trying to tweak the price by applying student cards and reminding the system that we had one child in the party, produced a welter of different prices, some as low as £66.70

4. Southeastern does not encourage phone calls, but there is a number for Web Support on the site, so I call this. I suspect there is a Web services problem in the communication betweeh the sites.

5. Southeastern's Web support tells me that National Rail does not have live information, so it may be selling me something which has sold out on Southeastern's site. This does not sound likely, as the price has remained on National Rail's site.

6. I decide to try buying by phone, but Southeastern does not advertise a phone number to buy on so I ring National Rail.

7. An Indian voice from National Rail's call centre tells me the trip will cost £42.85 (which turns out to be the price of three Student cards and one child).

8. National Rail's phone service can't sell tickets - same as the web site - so they transfer the call to the operator.

9. The operator tells me that I must click a different - and very mysterious - option on the mixing desk, which specifies travel by one specific operator, and the prices will be cheaper. Only when we find the option does not exist do we realise, I am talking to the wrong operator. National Rail has transfered me to Southern Rail , not Southeastern.

10. Happily, Southern Rail knows the customer service extension at Southeastern's Customer Service centre (you have to choose a customer services option to actually get customer services).

11. Someone at Southeastern's Customer Services has a mysterious knack for making me not want to murder people, and checks through a lot of options, eventually assuring me that the cheapest way to do this is to use two 16-25 Rail Cards, and the tickets will cost £49.10. This turns out to be wrong, but she's so helpful, I don't mind, even when I find out a bit later on.

12. Unhappily Sotheastern Customer Services can't sell tickets themselves. However, the do have the secret of buying Southeastern tickets on the phone. It is not, as National Rail thought, through Southern rail. Oh no, of course not. It's through Southwestern Rail. And she has the number - a closely guarded secret not revealed on Southeastern's phone lines, or (anywhere I could see) on the web site.

13. So I ring Southwestern, and yet again give all my details of travel (I have lost count of how many times I've given them so far) and yet again, a computer works out what I should pay, under the guidance of yet another different person.

14. This time round, it looks like we are going to pay something fairly close to the £49.10, when the Southwestern chap discovers a 2 for 1 offer on adult tickets, which means if Kitty travels as an adult, two of us can go free and the price is two adult returns.

15. To my utter astonishment, the price is the original £42.20. No rail cards required.

16. I pay online and can - I hope - collect the tickets from Herne Hill.

If anyone has read this far, I'm sorry to have put you through all that. I wound up wondering

• Why are there multiple prices from multiple sources?
• Why, despite automatic ticketing on the web, did I have to make five phone calls to four different companies, and give my travel details five times on the phone, as well as multiple times online, before I could actually buy tickets?
  
• Why does a Southeastern ticket cost less bought on the phone from Southwestern, than it odes bought online from Southeastern?
  
• Is Southwestern even selling the correct tickets?
• What is the point of having any sites or call centres that can quote a price, but can't sell a ticket?
• Why is anyone involved in setting up this nightmare still employed at all?
  

Varifocal Contact Lenses - How Do They Work?

Just before Christmas I got put on a contact lens trial. My eyes have a very difficult prescription, and I've been told that, as middle age progresses, I will eventually need both lenses and spectacles. Now my optician has put me on a commercial trial of varifocal contact lenses, and they seem to fix the problem.

The only trouble is the very existence of varifocal contact lenses seems to contradict a lot of what I thought I knew about optics and vision. And I can't find any good explanation of them anywhere.

I'm sorry this post itself seems to have more type sizes than an optician's chart. That's the Blogger GUI. I know I could sift the HTML to get it straight, but I do that for a living and can't be bothered with it here.

My eyes

My eyes aren't the easiest to work with, but opticians usually get interested when they see them. Their strange prescription has pushed me towards contact lenses instead of glasses - but in recent years, I've been told that eventually lenses alone won't be enough.

I started out with short sight in both eyes - a prescription around -4.5 in both eyes. I also have a coloboma - a birth defect that gives me a great big triangular pupil in my left and a tiny pupil in my right. I've been told the right pupil stops down as small as possible to compensate for the left, but I've realised that actually does not make any sense. Whatever the reason, it's tiny, and never gets very big.

About twenty years ago I had a recurrent corneal erosion problem. I was told I'd never wear contact lenses. Luckily contact lenses got better, because what happened to my eyes ten years ago meant I needed them.

I had cataracts in my right eye lens, so I had it removed, and an implant put in. It's a standard procedure, but - maybe because of the difficulty of working through my tiny pupil, maybe because of some other bit of birth defect - it didn't work too well for me. The old lens came out, but the implant fell from the pocket left for it, and I was left with no lens in the right eye.

That's better than it sounds - an eyeball with no lens in it can still bend light - most of the focusing is done by the cornea - and a short-sighted eyeball will do better in this situation than a long-sighted one. I came out with a very long-sighted right eye, with a prescription of about +5.

The two eyes had such different prescriptions that correcting both eyes with spectacles wouldn't work. The left eye needs a concave lens, while the right one needs a convex lens; put them in glasses, and there's a distance between the lenses and my eyes, so they act as a reducing and a magnifying glass, respectively.

The result is two images which are so different in size, that my brain can't put them together. I tried it in the optician's shop, and it really, really didn't work.

So I tried a pair of glasses with plain glass in the left lens, and then moved onto contact lenses, when daily disposables became gentle enough for my previously-t00-sensitive corneas.

That has been excellent. The combination of my two eyes corrected has been better than any vision I had in my life, including before my cataract problem.

Recently, my eyes have been changing, apparently, and I've had to have the prescription changed - the left eye gets a 4.0 lens, leaving it slightly short-sighted, so it can compensate for the right eye. I've been pushed towards monocular vision - the right eye most of the time and the left eye for close work.

(I guess this is like the problems most people have as their eyes age, except I wouldn't have thought I'd get presbyopia - age-related-shortsightedness caused by stiffening of the lens - as my left eye is already short sighted, and my right eye is no longer using its natural lens.)

Whatever the caue of my changing prescription. I've been warned that as it progresses, the current set-up will stop working eventually, and I'll have to have glasses and contacts. After ten years with no glasses, I'm not looking forward to that.

Varifocals

I was interested to be offered varifocal contact lenses (fortnightly Acuvue lenses using the Oasys material).
- it sounds like a way to avoid glasses
- it's a commercial trial, before the full launch, so very few opticians can offer them
- it's a concept I'm having trouble understanding.

A quick Google search gives us an explanation of varifocal spectacles work. On the Specsavers site, you can see that they have different zones for different distances. For any given thing, you look through the part of the lens you need.

So far I haven't been able to find an explanation of how varifocal contacts work. Sites offering them tend to follow up the question "How do they work?" with non answers, like this "This means that the wearer does not have to change lenses when switching between reading and driving, but care should be taken when driving in bright sunlight."

Varifocal contacts don't make sense to me, because you can't choose which part of the lens you look through. It's stuck on your cornea, and you're using all of it, all the time. You can't choose to use the long-range part of your eye for one thing and the short range for other things.

In simple optics, a lens gathers light and focusses an image, by taking all the light it can from a certain point in the object you are looking at, and gathering it onto one point in the image.

I was told that the varifocal lens would have different zones with different focal lengths. That should mean different images on the retina at the same time, some in focus, some out of focus, depending on the distance.

How is that supposed to help?

And yet, it works!
Just try them, said my optician. So I put them in, and went for a walk round Brixton market. I crossed a road, bought a newspaper and read the front page.

After a quick check to see how I was doing with them - and yes I could read the bottom line of the chart. I was having the odd bit of blurring, but already I could see the improvement in my depth perception - so I cycled off home. And since then, I've been (mostly) stunned by how good they are.

It's sometimes patchy, and the picture improves (and sometimes gets worse again). My first stint at a screen was horrible. I had multiple images and couldn't get them under control. But I broke off from that, spoke to someone in the room for twenty minutes, and when I looked back the screen was perfectly readable.

I've found my office screen is hard to read for the first twenty minutes of the day in the office - after I've cycled there in cold weather.

Sometimes, after looking at something for a long time and having trouble with it, it springs into focus.

So what is going on? Well, I'm still frustrated by that fact that I have seen no proper explanation how this works, but I'm guessing it might be something like this. Suppose the varifocals do indeed create multiple images in each eye, and then the two eyes work together to choose the best one?

That's a new way of working (and one that is completely different from the way normal degree-level optics pictures images forming on the retina). That would explain the way my eyes sometimes cope, and sometimes seem to go backwards.

My right eye is still the strongest - and with its tiny pupil has a nice depth of field. So in many situations, I can still try and do things in the monocular way. The sudden blurring is when the information from the left eye starts to look useful, and my brain has to work to put it together.

So the first day I had the lenses, when I sat at my screen, I was so used to working in a monocular way, that I automatically tried it again, and was confused by the multiple images in my right eye. Looking round the room, and talking to someone got me back into using both eyes again, and that helped when I went back to the screen.

I've found night vision is much better from the start, and I see further in the distance, right form the first.

Does that explain it?

That seems to explain some of it. By this explanation, I should find that the first few days are a process of acclimatisation, and I get more used to the lenses thereafter. Certainly, I've noticed that I settle into the lenses much quicker in the mornings now than I did in the first few days.

I've tried looking at things with one eye, too, to see if I can see the sort of multiple-focus images I'm talking about, and I'm not too sure I can. I certainly see better when I use both eyes - and I'm less monocular than in the past, but I'm leaning heavily on my right eye.

So I've tried things my optician says would be wrong: one day, after a week of the varifocals, I put a pair of the old lenses in, thinking I might find the old way hard to do after I'd got used to the varifocals.

In fact, the monocular vision struck me as easy, and very clear, and in some ways a relief. There was no effort to keep the screen in focus, I was just using my right eye. However, I didn't have such good depth of field, at all.

After a couple of hours, I switched to the varifocals, and again was surprised by how easy the transition was. I just went back to the screen and moved around the house as before.

I did have another bad time acclimatising to the screen - but that was the next day, after a whole day wearing the varifocals.

I've also noticed a couple of other things. Driving on a sunny day, I realised my left eye was closed - it dazzles easily - but the right eye, with its varifocal lens, was making out just fine. It seems that with practice I don't actually need to use both eyes to get benefit from the lenses.

Later that day, I focussed a telescope on the moon, and saw a lot of detail in the craters. Again, that was with one eye at a time. I realise now that I only used my right eye. It's a reflex as it's been my best eye, but I should have had a go to see how the left eye did!

Conclusions

My ideas about how this works don't really stand up, and I want to know more, but it seems that people making varifocal contact lenses don't put information on the web about how they work.

I know my prescription is fairly unusual, so I wouldn't expect other people's experience to match, but I'm interested to hear any other thoughts on varifocal lenses.

Flying The Flag

A couple of months ago, a lamp-post appeared outside our house. But one with nothing on the top.

I asked the guy working on it - he came from Thames Water, and was putting in a smart water-meter to monitor the new water main on our street. the meter is in the plastic bollard next to the pole.

The meter is supposed to signal back to Thames Water HQ any leaks or problems - but we have poor mobile phone signal in my street.

So they put up a tall antenna, using a normal lamp-post stem.

It looked sort of unfinished, so I put a flower-pot on the top sith a hook in it, and now we're flying a flag (it's the Cornish flag).

We'd like to fly different flags - any suggestions or offers?

Raise The Roof Singers, Horniman Museum

Raise The Roof practices at the Horniman Museum in South London. This is from their public concert, which we stumbled on, on Sunday (5 April 2009).

From the balcony, I couldn't see the choir well, but I had a good view of the energetic leader and conductor, Melanie Harrold, and couldn't resist taking a video.  

The video isn't here or on Youtube any more. Melanie got in touch to say that a film of her conducting an invisible choir didn't really get the event across properly. 

Comics: Ex Machina, Fables and Promethea....

I've been reading some comics lately. I have missed so many, and Lambeth Libraries has such a good selection - at Brixton, Streatham and West Norwood at the very least.

So, what's good?

Ex Machina, written by Brian K Vaughn, and drawn by Tony Harris, is very nice.

Like Paul Chadwick did with Concrete, Vaughn leaves the details of where Mitchell Hundred's powers come from a mystery. The main story is the politics, but the super-stuff is central to what happens.

"How would it be if you had that power?" it asks. The answer is, if this particular man could talk to machines, he'd be a rather average superhero, and then a much more interesting mayor of New York - one who says "Up and away" to lifts, and "Jam" to guns.

There is more than a nod to Paul Chadwick - Vaughn names Hundred's friend Bradbury after a science fiction writer, just as Chadwick's Concrete has a friend called Vonnegut. The drawings lose by comparison with Chadwick's style - Harris is determined to be real, making Hundred's outfit lame, and basing everyone on photos (the models get credits in volume 1). I'm three volumes into this, and want more.

Fables is a winning concept: Fairy tale beings live in exile in the Mundane world - mostly, as tends to be the way, in New York.

The good here is the way Bill Willingham plays with the characters. Prince Charming is (as we should have realised) a serial charmer, divorced from Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, but still working his charm. Beauty and the Beast live happily ever after - except he is only human when she loves him, and tends to revert when she's cross. That's not convenient after hundreds of years, when you are living in hiding...

There are at least 11 volumes of this saga apparently (and I only just heard of it!). The two I've read are pretty good.

Finally, Promethea is Alan Moore's take on myth. The other two series are comics for entertainment's sake. This one has ambitions and Moore's mighty writing mojo pulls it off.

Promethea is a story - she's from the realm of story, the Immateria. In our world, she is embodied by writers and artists. Literally embodied. Student Sophie Bangs "becomes" Promethea by writing a poem.

When people say comics are mythic, they are saying what they wish was true. In fact they are normally debased, broken myths. This one is the real thing. Moore plays the metaphors brilliantly, nodding to all the misguided pretension about images and ideas in comics, but doing the only thing that should be done: telling a story.

On one level, Promethea is as fatuously simple as Billy Batson shouting Shazam to invoke Captain Marvel, or Diana Prince turning into Wonder Woman. But in Moore's hands it's way better, with multiple threads of woven with the complexity of his Watchmen, and a contrast between reality and the unreal that owes something to Joss Whedon's Buffy. Characters dance in and out, from fairy tales and comics - to take one example, "celebrity omnipath" the Painted Doll is a better, scarier Joker.

And, magically, by taking this story so very seriously, Moore turns it into something far, far more. In volume two a goddess has sex with a magician. For a whole chapter (a whole issue of the original comic series). Before our very eyes. For me, that is a high point in comics - and fairly unusual in any sort of literature. What follows reminds me of the psychedelic comics Marvel tried to do for the whole of the 1970s (Steve Gerber and Jim Starlin, from memory), only done right.

Watchmen is a great comic from more than 20 years ago. It may also be a worthwhile movie (but Alan Moore doesn't want his name on it). Now's a good moment to see what else Alan Moore has done since. We're amphibious creatures, living in the worlds of mind and body, he says. In Promethea (up to ten years old), we're swimming in the deep end.

What are my friends like?

A bit stereotyped from the look of this...

I won't be at MWC

I'm starting full time on eWeek Europe, there's a soft launch happening, and it's half term. Have a lovely time, everyone who is in Barcelona for MWC09. I just cancelled my hostel booking.

A water rail in Brockwell Park

How rural was this? I needed to read Lark Rise to Candleford. Why? Well the series is delicious, and I love to drool over the hats and late Victorian ladies. But there is actually more to Candleford. The book is a living breathing social history. Every so often a spark of the real thing livens up the TV series, but the mother lode is essential reading - or so I've been told many times.

Lambeth Libraries has a copy, and it's in the Carnegie Library. Like so many of Lambeth's libraries, this is a beautiful Grade II building, built with late 19th century charity, generosity and style. It has a calm light atmosphere and a reading garden out the back.

On my way home through Brockwell Park, our local bird watcher is transfixed, peering with her binoculars at the lower frozen pond. "It's a water rail," she says. "You won't see one in London again." She shows me a picture on her camera and I wait.

Soon enough, a dainty little bird (like a moorhen but more sophisticated looking) emerges and shily potters about, pecking seeds from the ice.

Back home after that, to enjoy the rural rememberances in the book.