At last it’s here.

It was complete and ready to go in September, but for some reason it’s taken until now to get Aaron’s Time Machine: London up on the iPhone Apps Store.

But now it’s here, and for only £1.79 you can download one of the most unusual apps ever written for the iPhone.

Basically it’s a huge, gigantic old map illustrating a non-linear ebook. It covers London from Primrose Hill to Chelsea, from Deptford to Victoria Park, and if it were printed out full size (as you can zoom into it on the iPhone) it would measure 8 feet by 6 feet.

It’s London as it used to be in the early nineteenth century — no Shaftesbury Avenue, no Charing Cross Road, no King’s Cross, Victoria, no Waterloo — in fact no railways at all, as they hadn’t been invented.

There’s more. Much more.

Wherever you scroll on the map, you’ll discover little red blobs. Click on them and the map will flip, giving you details of an event which happened right on that spot last year — or two thousand years ago. You just don’t know what you’re going to find out next.

There are over 160 of these Events, scattered all across London.

There’s more.

If you’re within the map area, the Locate Button on the bottom left of the screen will locate your position on the old map. You can walk down streets that no longer exist. 

There’s more.

The Google button shows you where the event happened on today’s map.

There’s more.

Click on the Info button on the bottom right and you can submit Events for consideration in future upgrades of the App. It’s a WikiApp.

There will be more.

We’ve almost completed New York. We’re working on San Francisco, Berlin, Rome, Paris, Chicago, Athens and maybe more. It depends how well you like it.

If you can’t afford £1.79 (what are you doing with an iPhone?) you can download the free version, Aaron’s Time Machine: London Lyte! from the iPhone Apps Store. It covers the City of London and only has 20 Events compared with the full version.

Even if you’ve lived in London all your life, you will discover something you never knew before.

A feature in today’s Daily Telegraph ‘reveals the medicinal properties of the bounties of the season’, offering hints on what can be done with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, holly, mistletoe and the gifts of the wise men — Gold, Frankincense and Myrhh.

Sorry, make that Myhrr.

On third thoughts, Myrrh.

The Telegraph used the word Myrrh five times in the article, and managed to spell it three different ways:
2 x Myhrr
1 x Myrhh
2 x Myrrh

Two correct out of five, then. Not very impressive for a newspaper which regularly excoriates the government for falling educational standards, is it?

OK, admittedly it is a tricky word to spell, but Google offers 1,400,000 hits for MYRRH, 255,000 hits for MYHRR and 21,400 for MYRHH. For each of the last two it cautiously asks “Did you mean MYRRH?”

Not too hard to check it out, then.

I see that poor simple girl with the golden voice has now been rechristened SuBo.

The Mayor of London is already referred to as BoJo, and it is clear that we Brits have enthusiastically embraced this strange American nomenclature.

It’s actually been around for years. London’s Soho district apparently got its name from an old hunting cry, but New York’s SoHo (note the camelcase ‘H’) derives from the geographical fact that it’s SOuth of HOuston Street (although Microsoft Word doesn’t like me typing that). TriBeCa is the TRIangle BElow CAnal Street. One rather desperate one is WaHi for Washington Heights, an obscure part of Manhattan where tourists seldom tread. There are many more examples, but the first time I heard it applied to a person was to the singer Jennifer López, who became J.Lo.

But what we benighted foreigners can’t quite figure out are the rules of engagement — what names are we allowed to truncate so brutally? It clearly helps if the second part rhymes with Joe. I don’t believe BarOb would get past the Académie Americaine.

And I don’t see the Mayor of New York referred to as MiBlo.

I guess it’s a NeYo state of mind.

I’ve had a tooth out.

It doesn’t hurt — yet — because my mouth and tongue are still numb from the injection. I didn’t feel a thing when the dentist removed it, and it took about 2 to 3 seconds.

My mouth is bleeding copiously. I can only eat mush for the next 24 hours so Von is off to buy some semolina and is planning a cheese soufflé for this evening. Yes, I’m spoiled.

The cup of coffee I’ve just had dribbled helplessly out of the left hand corner of my mouth. I can only speak indistinctly so please don’t try and ring me. This is not elegant or dignified. I guess I’ll just have to get used to it.

Simon Cowell must be quaking in his shoes. Today the Groucho Club Choir’s Christmas single “STOP THE CALORIES” is released. You can buy it from iTunes as from today, and all proceeds go to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children ‘Theatre for Theatres’ Appeal.
Here’s a foretaste: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpXPXnf8WRU
Tell your friends!

I’m a big fan of the supermarket chain Waitrose, part of the John Lewis Partnership. Nice shops, great stock, generally excellent food. And I love the business model of JLP, where the staff own the company. It really makes a difference.

I wasn’t quite so enthralled that they’ve opened up in Crouch End in the old Woolworths store, as we have an excellent Budgens right next door, with Paxton & Whitfield cheese, Dunns bread, an eager butcher and also generally excellent food. And it appears to be quasi-independent, run by a Mr Thornton. Waitrose will be in direct competition, and poor Budgens may not be strong enough to survive. I prefer independents to chains. But Waitrose is generally a Good Thing.

Then I read that Waitrose fared badly in the WWF’s league table of naughty palm oil users (Sainsbury’s wins with 26 points out of 30, Aldi comes bottom with 0 and Waitrose manage a sickly 8.5).  I went into our new Waitrose to scope it out.

On the shelves, with their bare faces hanging out, were 1 litre bottles of water from Fiji for sale at £1.25 a litre.

From fucking Fiji. Is this a joke?

I don’t know what the rainfall is like in Fiji, but I do know that it’s 10,128 miles away from London, where it’s raining steadily at the moment. The furthest distance I can possibly travel from here without starting on my return journey is 12,410 miles.

So someone has decided to bring water 81% of the way around the world and market it in Britain. And Waitrose has decided it would be wise to offer it to Crouch Enders.

Don’t be so bloody stupid, Waitrose. People read the Guardian here. We’re aware of climate change, and food miles. We want to preserve our planet.

And that means not buying products largely made with unsustainable palm oil, and absolutely certainly not paying the air fare for a bottle of fucking water from Fiji.

Why doesn’t Waitrose buy water from Wales? Or Cumbria? We have plenty. We do not need water which has literally been flown halfway round the world, for God’s sake. If you must fly something halfway round the world, why not try mangosteens? We don’t get those in Wales or Cumbria.

Get real. I’m not shopping at Waitrose again until those bottles of water flown all the way from Fiji at who knows what cost to the planet are removed from sale.

It’s unquestionable.

We in Britain have always laughed at fat ugly Americans, but I’m increasingly noticing that there are an awful lot of Brits waddling through cheap food malls who are a match for many folk in the Mid-West.

And looking through the new fotoLibra Historic Portfolios you can’t help remarking on the almost total absence of very fat people to be seen.

For the last week we’ve been living without central heating, after our 25 year old gas boiler died. We’ve been gathering winter fuel, sawing and chopping logs, wearing lots of clothes and not keeping still for long in case Jack Frost nips us in our buds.

We’ve huddled round the fire in the evening and rediscovered the delights of Hot Buttered Rum.

And I know I’ve lost at least seven pounds. I tend to avoid shopping malls because I don’t want to be lumped in with all the other fatties, but there is today a perceptible lightness in my step.

Looking through those old family photographs on fotoLibra (it’s free — anyone can join and upload as many pre-1980 images as they like) I’m amazed by how slim and trim everyone is.

They didn’t have central heating. If they wanted to get warm, they had to run about. If they wanted a fire, they had to go and find wood, saw it and chop it. I never really understood my father’s saying “The wood you chop yourself warms you twice” before, but oh how true, how true.

The conclusion is obvious. Central Heating Makes You Fat.

Thank heavens the boiler has been replaced and it’s now working again.