People do like a good whinge in this country. I think that’s why we put up with a second-rate train service: it gives us something to complain about.

So it’s not entirely surprising to see that the announcement of Crossrail’s final go-ahead hasn’t been universally acclaimed. The service, which will link Shenfield in the east with Maidenhead in the west, and spurs running off to Heathrow and the Docklands, will be Europe’s largest civil engineering project since the digging of the Channel Tunnel. It’ll see a major new tunnel bored under London, several central underground stations upgraded as mainline rail termini, and places like Bond Street and Slough become an easy no-change commute from Essex.

24 trains will plough the east-west route every hour, with capacity for 160,000 passengers. In the words of the London Paper, ‘packed trains could be a thing of the past’ when the £16bn project, which will no doubt over-run, over-spend and end up opening 100% overdue and 100% over budget, finally opens some time after 2017.

But there are problems about which nobody seems to be talking. The Shenfield to Liverpool Street line is four tracks wide, with no room to expand. For much of its length it’s squeezed in between densely-packed urban housing, shops and office blocks, meaning the Crossrail trains, which will be metro services stopping off at pretty much every station, will have to run alongside and among the existing commuter services. How they’ll do this without either cutting current services or blocking the path of faster commuter trains has yet to be fully explained, at least in the popular media.

Then there’s the timescale. Crossrail was proposed in 1989, has taken 18 years to get fully funded and already cost £400m, yet it’ll be at least another year before the building work begins. That means much of it will be taking place at the same time as construction of the Olympic Park in Stratford, through which the route will run, inevitably leading to further delays, both in its construction, and to the services already using the lines.

Crossrail is an excellent idea that will do much for London, but the benefits for those who already use the lines on which it will run are negligible at best. Far better would be to invest in the infrastructure, build the necessary tunnels under London, and then allow the existing services to use them, rather that crowbar a new service into an already bursting commuter system.

Unfortunately, to do that, it would probably be necessary to crate a new super-operator that would run services right across the London commuter belt, taking over from the present operators. It would be a fabulously lucrative, and so eye-wateringly expensive franchise to win. But it would probably also give one single operator far more power than is good. Perhaps that’s why we’re destined to see dedicated Crossrail trains clogging up our crowded suburban lines still further.

So whether in the future you’ll be a Crossrail rider, or cross rail rider will seemingly be determined by whether or not you use a future Crossrail line already.

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Senate House, from he BT Tower

Today was a strange one. I’ve been invited to three Christmas ‘do’s in the last couple of weeks, but BT trumped them all but holding its one at the top of the BT Tower.

I’ve been up before (see here for a description of the inside of the tower from my last visit), but as it’s not open to the general public, the chance of a repeat visit isn’t something you turn down. Plus it’s so close to the office that if it ever fell down the top of it would land on my desk.

So I wandered down around lunchtime and rode London’s fastest lifts to the 34th floor (1400 feet per minute, with sounds to match) where everything had been coated in fake snow, Christmas carols were tinkling gently, and a dozen serving types were wandering around with mince pies and turkey. All quite surreal with the sun shining brightly on London almost 600ft below.

Anyhow, Will and I duly walked a complete circuit around the tower’s top floor, asking the necessary questions and scribbling notes, and then gave in to the fantastic views through the windows. It really does give you the best possible view of London - far better than you get from the top of the London Eye.

Regent’s Park looks beautiful, and it’s clearly so close to Hyde Park that you have to ask yourself why you never realised just how green London is. In the opposite direction is the city, and beyond it Docklands, and it’s clear how all of London’s tallest buildings have been corralled in the east, in much the same way that the Parisians have put all of their tallest buildings to the furthest west of the city in La Defense. The only exception is the sore-thumb Montparnasse Tower, which clearly sprung up rampant bramble-like when they weren’t looking.

Dotted here and there on all sides are the arch over the new Wembley Stadium, the revamped Eurostar terminal at St Pancras, the British Museum and Senate House, Battersea Power Station, the Houses of Parliament and a healthy cluster of masts, towers and television antennae.

Sadly they don’t give you a certificate to prove you’ve been up there any longer, or the chocolate BT Tower they gave us last time I went up (although from memory that was quite nasty, so it’s perhaps not a bad thing), but it is still the best thing you could ever hope to do in London.

Although most people can’t do it at all.

Centre Point and the London Eye

Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill

Stratford is grim. Actually, it’s a dump. What a shame it’ll be the transport hub of the 2012 Olympics, and visitors from all over the world will have to walk its dirty, grimy streets and shelter from the rain in the depressing, limp shopping centre.

It’s also, unfortunately, the easiest place from which to start a walk around the Olympic park before it’s all boarded up for development. So we went there this morning, and did indeed shelter from the rain in the depressing, limp shopping centre, and walked its dirty, grimy streets.

Then we cut off onto the Greenway, which I’ve seen every college and working day for the last 14 years from the windows of the train, and we walked along a scrubby, overgrown path that probably counts for ‘countryside’ and comes nowhere close.

Already the developers had moved in and erected blue wooden walls to block some of the paths, and tacked up cropped print-outs from Google Maps, annotated with inadequate directions.

We did, eventually, find the site of the Olympic stadium, after picking our way through piles of discarded tyres and junk from scrap yards liberally scattered across the roads, and were presented by an unlabelled mound of earth supporting a small crop of pylons.

What a dump. I can’t believe the Olympic committee wanted to send the games here. They must have got mixed up with Paris.

Ugh.

So tonight’s entertainment was all the more enjoyable.

We walked along the South Bank, which is always the perfect spot for a warm summer evening, had pizza under the ITV Tower, and then wandered up to the sparkly fresh Royal Festival Hall for This is Tomorrow.

This is Tomorrow is a film about the Hall itself, so it’s somewhat bizarre to be sitting in there watching it, seeing how the seats, boxes, walkways and balconies all around you came into being. It’s also momentarily uncomfortable when they explain that each of the panels above your head weighs the same as a small family car.

But at the same time it’s endlessly diverting, helped no end by the fact that the soundtrack, which was scored by St Etienne, was played live by the band, a choir and an 80-piece orchestra for this premiere showing.

Of course, you keep forgetting that, and you have to keep reminding yourself that what you’re hearing is being played right there and right then by the people spread out on the stage below you.

It was highly evocative, and made me quite sad that I never saw the Festival of Britain site (of which the Hall was a part) in its full 1950s glory. For that reason - and that reason alone - I’m glad that we slogged our way around the dirty, battered and ugly Olympic site, if only so we can say we remember when it was all just rubble and dirt.

The Evening Standard: grammar’s not an issue. Looks like spelling could do with some work, though.

Visit London has grassed over Trafalgar Square. It’s really quite lovely. A bit damp where the fountains are being caught in the wind and blown onto the turf, but quite lovely. So much nicer than the usual grey slabs, that are temporarily hidden underneath.

Of course, London is filled with parks, squares and gardens, but there was something special about this. Perhaps its transience. Perhaps the fact that it’s in the middle of a big sweep of roads. Perhaps the fact it was sunny, and that by tomorrow it will all be gone.

Whatever it was that made it so nice, the crowds there certainly approved. I wish they’d dig up the square permanently and do this full time.

There’s a leak in Nandos on the South Bank, somewhere above table 23. That’s where Rich and I sat on Monday night, after a trip to the Design Museum to look at organic cars, boats and planes fashioned after manta rays, flames and enormous boomerang-style mono-wings.

It was only when the drips started working their way through the railway arch in which the restaurant is built that we noticed the intricate system of copper gullies, ducts and channels built around the upper reaches of the place, which presumably move an almost constant flow of water around and around and down to the drain. It’s really quite impressive.

So was the exhibition we’d been to see. Translating Nature profiles designer Luigi Colani, one of the most influential designers of the last 60 years. His work spans the whole gamut between vehicles and binoculars; furniture and cameras; concepts and reality.

Much of his work is way ahead of its time, and very little of it would look out of place in the cinema, where designs for enormous high-security oil transporters would be the perfect complement to a typically exuberant Bond plot.

A small, but worthy exhibition, it runs until 17 June.

County Hall

I’d suggested we head out to Canary Wharf to take pictures of London’s tallest buildings before winter is gone and the darkness comes later. I wanted to catch the steam coming off the top of One Canada Square before winter is behind us and it turns too warm.

So, we met in front of Bush House and walked along the river as far as the Millennium Bridge, where we crossed over and took pictures on the South Bank. It was a perfect night for photos. Enough movement on the water for long exposures to freeze the motion and give the surface a glassy, reflective quality. Sufficient people passing by on the banks for them to soften the hard edges of the architecture as they swept by as blurs on each frame.

But it was so very cold. We spent a couple of hours taking pictures as the skies darkened and the temperature continued to drop, and I wished I’d brought my gloves.

By the time we got to Bermondsey, our fingers were stiff, and we jumped on the tube, to cut off the corner to Canary Wharf, the station whose design was apparently inspired by Stromberg’s Liparus. You can certainly see its influence in the shapes of the support columns, which look like submarine conning towers.

We never did get those pictures, though. We had some food and drink, and sat looking up at the buildings, but it was still too cold to stay still for long, and so we drifted off to warmer spots and eventually, as the cafes and restaurants were turning out, towards the station and home.

So they stay on the photo to-do list, but I’m still quite happy with what I got. The South Bank - even on a cold winter’s night - can put on a good show when it must.

HMS Belfast

Lots and lots and lots of things happening, including big (but good) changes at work that have made for some very busy but enjoyable days.

Last night, though, was time for a change of pace and a slow walk from the office, through the dusky and eventually dark night-time streets, along the side of Regent’s Park and up to the top of Primrose Hill with Rich.

It’s a long time since I’ve been there, and the last time was at the height of summer - August 2005 - when I walked there in a lunch hour to have a look at the view. I was bowled over by it that time, but it’s even better at night, when the whole London skyline is lit up and laid out before you, from Canary Wharf in the east, through St Paul’s, Parliament and the London Eye and out to the western suburbs.

You can see why it was so busy up there, and people sitting on the benches at the very top were popping champagne corks to celebrate Valentines’ Day.

We followed their lead, but instead of champagne had steaming hot tea from a flask down at the foot of the hill, out of the eddies of wind, in a pool of light cast by one of the black iron lamp posts.

It was a beautiful evening, and I didn’t really feel the cold until the very end; my scarf, hat and gloves kept it out as we sat for an hour or more enjoying the view, and watching the dog walkers and their hairy little pets pass by on a never-ending loop.

The London Paper runs a column every day, where city singletons who glimpsed someone on the tube lay their hearts on the line and pop out a free ad to see if they can make something meaningful out of a chance encounter. They’re about as specific as a horoscope, so to test our theory that anything, no matter how random or general could bag itself an entry, Paul Nesbitt and I came up with the androgynous name Sam Tressle and wrote our own. Rich spotted it printed in last night’s edition.

Theory proved.

My goal for the night was not to fall over on the ice at Somerset House. This is much more easily achieved if you’re not trying to skate on it. But that’s precisely what I was doing.

In the event I actually did much better than simply not fall over - I managed two whole laps without touching the edge. This surprised even me as, for the first 20 minutes or so I’d been waving my limbs in all directions, like Bambi on two pairs of roller skates, while Rich zipped around like a flea on speed.

I think it was a confidence thing, really, as once I realised the secret was just to lean forward a little, keep your knees slightly bent and go for it, it wasn’t actually so difficult. It would have been a lot easier if everyone had been going at the same speed of course - all either fast or slow - but instead they seemed to come slicing in to the edge, where I spent a lot of my early minutes, at a whole spectrum of unpredictable speeds.

But despite this, in a whole hour of cruising around the rink, first slowly but eventually at a fairly respectable speed, I came off with a sense of satisfaction and pride and not a single bruise.

We celebrated with the season’s last two cups of mulled wine.

^{* Credit for the title of this post must go to Private Eye.}