Telephone conversation this morning:

Caller: Hello, my name is Mr -----, I want to complain about rubbish collection in Wembley.
Me: I'm afraid you need to call Brent Council about that, this is a private house in the London Borough of Hounslow.
Caller: But I dialled the number for Brent Council.
Me: No you didn't - if you had, Brent Council would have answered the phone. Instead, you called me, possibly because you're stupid. *hangs up*

I know I should be more tolerant with these callers, and back in the days when we used to get 15 calls a day like that I was. Usually.

But now it's something like five years since the phone codes changed and people started to make the mistake of calling us when they actually wanted the Streetcare Department of Brent Council, and I figure if you can't work it out in that time, you don't really deserve to be treated with kid gloves.

If you've Googled this page looking for how to actually contact Streetcare, the trick is to just add 020 to the start of the eight-digit number - if you add 0208 you get us.

And you don't want to do that, okay?

For reasons that make a long and not very interesting story, I had to travel into work by train on Tuesday instead of driving.

This was wildly inconvenient, as a 20 mile / 30 minute drive north west was instantly transformed into a two hour marathon that took me eastwards right into central London before I could head out beyond the M25 again.

So, to commemorate that strange day where a straightforward journey was transformed into a tangled meander, here are some photos of lines and curves.

March of progress
The M40 motorway stalks on stilts over an industrial estate car park.

Blue barricade
The freshly-painted fence at Beaconsfield station vanishes in the distance along the platform.

Wembley rising (perhaps)
From the train window, cranes surround the arch of the new Wembley Stadium in the week that its finances collapsed.