I travelled to Dalston last night. On the Silverlink platform at Highbury I became irritated by the Oyster card, the piece of plastic that enables you to swipe your way through ticket barriers across London, in exchange for hard cash. London Transport has been forcing people to migrate to using the Oyster card by making single tickets expensive in cardboard format, but cheap if you load up cash on the Oyster card and swipe away your balance. Fine by me. Thing is, this Oyster pre-pay method isn’t valid on Silverlink. (This is tedious for anyone not living in London, I know, and pretty boring for people who do, but stick with it, if you like, or if not skip to the next paragraph.) You might have swiped your way up to the daily price cap (the cost of a travelcard, basically) so you have, in essence, bought a daily travelcard with your Oyster card. But you can’t use it on Silverlink, whereas people who’ve bought a crappy pink cardboard travelcard are fine. This is really, really stupid. Could someone sort this out? It’ll mean I don’t have to vault the barrier at Dalston Kingsland station. Thanks.

Many hours were whiled away in the company of Andy, egremont and mrscomedyarms. Notable recollections:

egremont recounting the tale of him going to see a Schooly D gig, and Schooly D shouting out to the crowd something like “Let’s make like it’s 1987!” and someone shouting back “All right then, you wally.”

egremont becoming irritated by memories of surly, rude and condescending staff in record shops, and recounting the tale of a woman going up to the counter in a Manchester record shop to speak to a member of staff who was wearing a Cramps t-shirt, standing in front of a Cramps poster and other Cramps memorablia, and saying “I’m looking for a Cramps record –” and receiving the snarled reply “We don’t sell that shit in here.”

I’ve probably ballsed up both of those anecdotes, sorry egremont.

Have any readers heard any excellent heckles or encountered unpleasant record shop staff? No, thought not.