This is for health and safety reasons following complaints from customers who have tripped on the ends of their dressing gowns and hurt themselves.

I travel by train to work and am daily regaled with automated announcments while waiting at the platform, particularly at Clapham Junction. These announcements are rather good, and cleverly seem to be on a separate system to the display boards, so that if one fails, the other will continue to function. Normally the announcements consist of something like

The train on Platform 13 is the Brighton service, calling at East Croydon, Gatwick Airport, some other place or other and Brighton.

in an extremely realistic voice, presumably by an actor who must have spent several weeks reading out the names of stations and numbers and pieces of sentences to be joined together later by computer prior to announcement.

What tickles me is when there is a delay and the voice says something like

The train on platform 13 is the delayed 7:23 service to Brighton. I apologise for the late running of this service.

How can a machine apologise? It feels no remorse at all that my journey has been delayed and so the apology is meaningless. Now, if the announcement passed on the apology from the train company, or the driver or something, that would be different.

So today I was doubly puzzled while waiting at Epsom station for a train to Ashtead and I heard the announcement say

I wish you a Merry Christmas.

Note, it didn’t say “The staff and management of South West Trains wish you a Merry Christmas”, or simply “We wish you a Merry Christmas”, but “I wish you a Merry Christmas”.

To me, this is just as meaningless as an apology for a late-running train. The machine isn’t passing on the expression of a human feeling (”sorry” or “Merry Christmas”), but is attempting to express it directly itself. Surely that just doesn’t make sense.

So, in the spirit of automated announcements, this blog wishes you a Merry Christmas and apologises for being the cause of any delay while you read this drivel instead of getting on with something interesting and fun.

I passed the site of my grandfather’s building in Fenchurch Street last week. It was built in 1969, and it broke his heart when he learned that they were going to demolish it.

He passed away in July, and now all that remains of his beloved building, one of the first skyscrapers in the City of London, is a rather sad stump that will soon disappear.

We are passionate about the game; in fact I play it and would like nothing less than to help grow your business for the future.

He would like “nothing less”? That suggests there is a vast swathe of things he’d rather do more than help grow my business.

My grandfather passed away this morning, aged 94. One of his proudest achievements was the construction of 20 Fenchurch Street in the City of London, of which he was the architect. The building was occupied by Kleinwort Benson from 1968 to 2006. It is somehow poignant that his life has come to an end at the same time as his building is in the final stages of being demolished.

I walked past the spot last week and stopped to gaze at the progress of demolition.  Because of the nature of its construction, they are having to dismantle the building floor by floor from the bottom up, with a gigantic steel structure in place to keep the whole thing supported.

20 Fenchurch Street is destined to become the site of the new landmark skyscraper known as the Walkie Talkie.

Apparently I can look and feel better for less by eating baby food.

I spotted this after Lorenzo’s even more hilarious look and feel better for less — with Coke.

The Putney gang celebrated Matthew’s 40th birthday yesterday starting off with drinks in Red followed by a meal in Pizza Express.

Matthew turns 40 in a couple of weeks, and used his thirtysomething status to chide the oldies into drinking faster.

Meanwhile, earlier on Natalie and I enjoyed lunch with William in Epsom.

William had great fun with his Uncle Tim on Sunday.

It was William’s first birthday party on Sunday. Thanks to his cousin, Katya, he had plenty of fun with some helium balloons.

The story goes that the Clyde chairman did not like this footballer, and to spite him paid his money in pound coins. The poor guy was obliged to hire a large lorry to collect £30,000 in pound coins and transport the money to the bank.

Tony and I then decided to work out how much space exactly £30,000 in pound coins would take up. Would the guy have been able to get away with a transit van, or would he have needed a huge 40 tonne articulated lorry driven by someone from Holland?

It has been 23 years since I got an A grade for ‘A’-level maths and won the maths prize at school for my paper on prime numbers, so my memory of the tools to use to solve this problem was rather hazy.

Clearly the first step was to ascertain the dimension of a pound coin. A search on Google returned the answer: diameter: 22.5 mm, thickness: 3.15 mm and mass: 9.5 g. So the weight of 30,000 pound coins is easy: 0.0095 x 30000 = 285 kg, light enough to be carried by a transit van. I remembered that the volume of a cylinder is the area of its cross section multiplied by its length. So the volume of 30,000 pound coin is π x (0.0225 ÷ 2)² x 0.00315 x 30000 = 0.0376 cubic metres, which doesn’t sound very much. Tony and I wanted to visualise that. What would be the length of a side of a cube with a volume of 0.0376 cubic meters?

After much experimentation and scraping the maths rust from the inside of my brain it dawned on me that the answer is simply the cube root of 0.0376, or in other words 0.0376 to the power a third. This is because what the answer is, raised to the power three (the three sides of the cube multiplied by each other) would give the original volume. Doing the calculation 0.0376 to the power a third yields a side of just 33.5 cm, easily enough to fit in a transit van or, for the matter, the small boot of a sports car.

So to cut a long story short, the footballer in question would have been given a cube of pound coins 33.5 cm x 33.5 cm x 33.5 cm weighing 285 kg. OK, he would have needed a couple of strong mates to help him lift it, but he could probably have fitted it in the boot of his car, and certainly would not have needed to hire a lorry.

Afterwards I realised that strictly speaking the side of the cube of pound coins would be rather more, because the calculation above assumes that pound coins are melted down into a solid block, and does not take into account the gaps between the coins. Further, the side of the cube needs to be a multiple of 2.25 cm (the diameter of a pound coin)

So rather than multiply the area of the coin its thickness to get the volume, the total area (including the space around it) should be used. This, conveniently, is a square. So the volume taken up by one of 30,000 pound coins stacked into a cube is 0.0225 x 0.0225 x 0.00315= 0.0478 cubic metres, the cube root of which is 36.3 cm. This is the space for just over 16 pound coins. So the cube of coins would actually have a base of side 16 x 2.25 = 36.3 cm, containing 16 x 16 = 256 coins. A cube of 30,000 coins would have 30000 ÷ 256 = 117 complete stories, plus one more incomplete story containing 30000 - (256 x 117) = 48 coins giving a height of 118 x 0.315 = 36.9 cm. So the true dimensions of a near-cube of 30,000 pound coins are 36.3 cm x 36.3 cm x 36.9 cm, still small enough to fit in a car boot.