Have you been out today?

So on Saturday I went off to smelly London to a housewarming party thrown by my good friend Paul Peart-Smith and his good lady wife Yolanda. And I drank some wine and ate some very lovely food and I talked a lot of nonsense with some old friends and some people I'd never met before and it was hugely enjoyable. But that's not what I'm here to write about.

On the way to Paul's there was an announcement on the train P.A. apologising for a lack of service elsewhere due to "planned engineering works". Now, this is a phrase I've heard before and it always makes me wonder just how much engineering work must go on on our railway's infrastructure that isn't planned that the announcement has to make this distinction. Is there a lot of spontaneous engineering work being done just for the sheer hell of it? Are there gangs of workmen doing improv? I suppose they do often work in the early hours of the morning, maybe it gets a bit like a jazz club or something. "Well, we'd finished the repairs to the line outside of Clapham South and, man, we were just flying. So we jammed until 5a.m. Put in a lovely little loop the loop outside of Balham."

If you start to see signs saying "You must be at least this high to take this ride" at tube stations then you'll know I'm right.