Time for Starmer to do one last u-turn, for old time's sake, and tell the pubs they have to go back to their normal licensing hours. www.bbc.co.uk/sport/footba...

I love the absolute zero sense of camaraderie between some parents. We've been to probably 20+ birthday parties together, this year. Drop our kids at the same spot every day. Still blanks you.

On Wednesday morning, I was sat at my desk rapping my fingers waiting for the words to come. 1000+ words to the good today. The words always come eventually.

I have opinions... and if you don't like them, I can have other ones too!

2. Is definitely true. But I think 1 is only half true. Sure, we'd sooner die than see the next town over do well for itself, but we can all agree that we hate the South more. For my money, 1. is we hate each other in the way you "hate" your brother/sister.

Given this looks mikely to pass, there's a cold reality check here: if the roads are too dangerous for big business to use it in this way, cyclists who have always been treated like lepers are going to be pushing water up hill for a long, long time to come...

Really interesting stats - I'm going to be as lazy as the reporting (reporting of reporting, of reporting - which is paywalled, and in Danish) and ask if anyone has the actual link to the original study? road.cc/content/news...

Want to motivate me to do a peer review in 7 days? £220 will do it. Like the journal owners themselves, I like money and the way I can exchange it for goods and services.

Good article. Great charts too. I haven't taught that part of our first year economics module for a few years but the charts are a great and really detailed update of this.

Today's rejection warrants tapping the sign again... 7 days is an unacceptable turnaround time for a review. I emphasise with editors who can't get reviewers, but you behave like this, and it's no wonder why.

There's no price quite like free. The big one was nearly empty this morning, and half full after an afternoon of storms.

This point is almost more important than scratching around for more 'powers' to devolve. Mayors have a decent range of legal powers already: what they need is the resources to exercise the powers, and for other public bodies to step back or be merged into them and the money to follow accordingly

I once had a puncture probably 2 miles from the finish of a 50 mile time trial. I'd gotten up at 5am to get there, and was cruising towards setting a course best by about 10 minutes. I dread to think what that feels like when it's the pinnacle of your life's work.

I came back yesterday post-heatwave, and after a fortnight of conferences really keen to get cracking. Doing the second coding on this really knocked the wind out of my sails.

Sorry about that.

I can't wait for the fight between delivery robots, pavement-parked cars, A-boards and utility works. 🍿

Chances are I'll be on telly later talking about the Burnham speech. Tune in. Or don't. I'm not the police. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpVP...

With more devo on the news agenda today, I'm reminded of the letter Keva Coombes wrote to the Government following the dissolution of Merseyside Council in the mid-80s. The last sentence is the heart of devo, for me. A lack of trust to do things right, but to let local areas make mistakes.

There is a "Number 10 Wales". It's called the Senedd. You run it.

With more devo on the news agenda today, I'm reminded of the letter Keva Coombes wrote to the Government following the dissolution of Merseyside Council in the mid-80s. The last sentence is the heart of devo, for me. A lack of trust to do things right, but to let local areas make mistakes.

Posted without comment

All for it, as long as it's backed by cold hard cash, and not just shifting more statutory responsibility onto authorities that are already crushed by adult social care etc.

My old man was given a ~£300 Tissot watch when he retired from his last job ... as the janitor in a data centre... 10 years ago. It ain't a Casio, but it also isn't that weird.

Thanks to the smart meter, I know that this week's heatwave cost us an additional £4.50 in electricity (fans and dehumidifier, no air con) We talk often enough about heating or eating in the winter. Plenty of people are going to face an equally horrid choice in the summer.

Lots of people kindly making suggestions for alternatives. You should know I was, in equal parts testing one of the only untested (for me) "routes" in a bit of the world i know like the back of my hand, and sniffing around for trouble with the awful routing it can give you.

🪭 As the UK faces another record-breaking heatwave and #LCAW events are cancelled, a disrupted content schedule is the least of our worries. Extreme heat is a social justice issue & it is the most vulnerable who will bear the highest costs unless climate mitigation and adaption happen in tandem.

Also, I just rode past a fire that had broken out on a grassy bank behind some houses. Fire brigade in attendance, but it's a stark reminder that this heat is no joke.

I'd like to work with someone smarter than me to understand why Google algo does this for cycling, and to make it stop.

When I was a lad (!) this was a cut through for a housing estate. When it expanded they shut it with modal filters and it's gone back to nature. It's also weird riding past all the houses where my mates used to live.

I made this *exact* point at a conference I was speaking at last week. The solutions we need are the same ones I learned about as an undergraduate *twenty years ago*. They've not fundamentally changed, and in almost all instances have become more viable.

Locking in land for use as a car park for thirty years when we're all trying to change how and what we drive or travel in sounds like a great idea! This is a 1990s idea masquerading as the future with absolutely no reason to do so.

I'm not saying I'm infallible, but...

Maximum temperature anomalies over the UK for the last two days. If you're wondering whether we need a new colour scale... you're not wrong. These anomaly maps are relative to the 1991-2020 average. (Based on HadUK-Grid dataset and produced by the Met Office National Climate Information Centre)

A bit of nice work news... It only took me 18 years to do it, but I've passed my professional accreditation, and now I'm a Chartered Member of the RTPI. Pretty pleased with that, and it's the first substantial 'output' of my research leave to come to fruition.

Spot on. Good insulation cuts both ways... Blue is our kitchen which gets the sun, green is the internal thermostat at the heart of the house. That said, you can see how as the week goes on it gets harder to cool it back to the mean...

I'm going to have to stop work soon. I genuinely feel a bit sick. This is worse than sat in the blazing sun all day...

The storm. It did nothing.

Every now and again I go down a dual carriageway way where I used to race time trials. Every time I ask myself what I was thinking. (I set a PB for 50 miles on the course I saw today... on a road bike with clip ons. I couldn't even get within 15 minutes of that time on any other course.)

This is a struggle on a few fronts, to be honest.

As i was saying...

Urban street trees. Bike infra. The urban heat island. That's the skeet.

It's nice to see our research feature in the Indy's 10 year on brexit coverage. If you want me to be honest, it'd be nicer if northern towns and cities had access to billions and billions of pounds of investment over the last decade... www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

That was/is delicious.

Guilty. Though I feel it's not so much a "you can't win anything with kids" and more a "Lads. It's Spurs."

I'm in this picture and I don't like it.

I've been looking forward to today since I first learned i was going on research leave 18 months ago. Instead of chairing the Board of Examiners, I got to do 70 miles through the Cheshire lanes. I had the occasional independent thought whilst doing so...

There's something comforting in the pattern of: get approached to go on telly, panic, panic more about having a face for radio and a voice for written media, calm down, producer tells you they've got someone else (i.e. someone better!)

Undertaker. Long career, with multiple successful reinvention. Universally well liked, despite not being the best technician. Understands their gimmick.

Starmer is Big Show. Great potential, but nobody was ever that excited about him. Never had a *great* match. Gassed too early.

Me, today, with older relatives coming round who like opening windows and "breezes"...