I see they're putting ranting juice in the water again. But, oh, this amused me very much. The Cowley Road is actually one of the few areas of Oxford I've contrived NOT to live in ... but I always presumed it was a haven for second student year students, fool that I am. God the man sounds incredibly patronising and almost Victorian in his attitudes. Surely the best way to preserve the small businesses of that area is to throw some money at them. And, you know, if they had sufficient room in the shop they wouldn't need to pile their crates on the pavement...

No, you don't understand! It's an important part of their culture to sell fruit on the street and pile crates up there. We can't ask them to change that, especially not for the sake of people who lack the aesthetic vision to not be in a wheelchair.

I had a bitingly ironic comment but my session expired while I was talking to someone else. I really must do something about that!

Ugh. I can't stand the changes to the layout of the Cowley Road -- I was living down there while a lot of them were being made, and I progressively saw it becoming more of an immense pain to travel up and down (on foot, by bike or by car). And Attlee's opposition to those changes was for such brain-dead reasons I'm wondering if he didn't actually end up helping push them through... With people like that on your side, who needs enemies?

He was, if you believe the book, largely responsible for shouting down the idea to have "gateways" at either end of Cowley Road, like you supposedly have in Southall and places like that, and he essentially harasses a councillor and makes enough of a fuss at the meetings that the plan is dropped. His impact on the pavements and so forth (aside from hitting his head on kerbstones) seems to be negligible.

I remember the last time we tried to drive down there, we hit a huge traffic snarl around the Roundabout mainly because they'd added *a second roundabout* to the first one. What the hell? I genuinely thought the city council had noticed that the one big roundabout wasn't working and decided to replace it with several small ones instead. I don't know why I bring this up; just a general comment on the madness of the Cowley Road I suppose. And the fact that although it's an exciting and vibrant place, for town AND gown alike, it also bloody needs some proper thought and renovation.