Joe Dunckley

Bicycle on the CTW scheme: £240/m, Brooks saddle: £140, new shorts to constantly replace the ones destroyed by the Brooks saddle: £3,600, someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this.

Could we replace South Gloucestershire with AI? I tried out generative AI, and it seems quite capable of doing away with South Gloucestershire. And think tanks. I don’t think I have an easily pigeonholeable position on generative AI. My pr…

Could we replace South Gloucestershire with AI? https://joe.dunckley.me.uk/uncategorized/2026/02/could-we-replace-south-gloucestershire-with-ai/

But this reset of the reorganisation timeline is also a good thing, because it allows the government to do the right thing and abolish South Gloucestershire.

Cancelling the local elections for councils that were about to get reorganised was obviously a sensible idea, and the people attacking it did so in equally obvious bad faith and they would have just as enthusiastically attacked elections as a waste of money if they hadn't been cancelled...

Personally, I think Matt Goodwin is a hero for giving up all his old friends to go deep undercover for years and pose as the least electable candidate imaginable in order to discredit the far right.

Anyway, the fact is entirely harmless, and it's now verifiable in at least one serious published book and in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which go into far more extensive detail about the fact than my single sentence on Wikipedia did, so I think they deserve their festival.

Anyway, I moved away 2 months later and forgot all about it, so I hadn't noticed that the town's entire identity now seems to be built on one of those 'facts'. I just saw an A-list national treasure promoting an upcoming 3 day festival predicated on the 'fact'.

"You can say no and we will remember" would be a really sinister threat if it came from a man who could remember which country he was talking about when he said it.

Just looking back at the coverage to remind myself how the media responded 2 years ago when an "elderly president with a poor memory" made the "near catastrophic", "gaffe-laden" "disaster" of referring to one country when he meant another.

YouTube video by Google Play Books John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme: Series 2:… by John Finnemore · Audiobook preview

That was a John Finnemore sketch. youtu.be/fcDp74qm9gk?...

I felt certain I'd seen such things too, but every idea I get turns out to be like the Chiswick one - where a bidi path gives up and returns you to general traffic. The 2 ends of C4 - Tooley Street and Creek Road are the closest I've got.

(Or indeed, like the crossover from bidi to with flow on Farringdon Street... except somewhere that does that at a crossroads?)

You mean like C9 at Heathfield Terrace in Chiswick? (Except there the bidi cycleway gives up and the crossing is back into traffic lanes -- so you mean like that, except into proper tracks?)

(And yes, yes, I know, there's little point devolving the powers if there's no funding and capacity to do anything with them, but that's an issue in itself.)

Opinion that will apparently be unpopular this week: "postcode lottery" is a pernicious phrase that has contributed to Westminster's centralising tendencies. The pavement parking ban should have been opt-out rather than opt-in, but attack that rather than the principle of devolving the power.

Finally gave in to HMRC's hourly emails and did the tax on the non-PAYE part of my income, highlighting just how successful my cunning tax avoidance scheme was in 2024/25. (It was to just ride bikes lots instead of doing much work, it does wonders for your tax liability.)

Clipping from a newspaper of a photo captioned "Falmouth University student Anna Richmond inspects the damage to her car." Anna is crouched down looking closely at some scratches on the door of her car. The door is one of the least damaged parts of a car that has been completely crushed and caved in by a fallen mature tree.

I love the way the composition and caption make this look like she's taking a closer look in case it's not as bad as it first appeared.

There is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, important habitat for the Common Green Grassy Plant, you will never ever be allowed to build a road across it. But we built a road to each side of it anyway and put it on the map as a national route, you just need to carry your vehicle through the gap.

A typical English small convenience store called Regent Street Convenience Store.

In the great social media tradition of making the same mediocre joke every year, I have once again gone to glittering Regent Street to do my Christmas shopping.

Looks like a huge controversy in Corfe Mullen, where people are viciously polarised between pretending to be a town to take advantage of green belt rules, or pretending to be a village for estate agent purposes, when in reality it's neither, it's a dull suburb of bungalows on the edge of Poole.

so now loads of suburban commuter towns that spent decades pretending to be villages are very keen to make it absolutely clear that they are and always have been towns.

There couldn't be a finer demonstration of why we shouldn't have bothered with all the tunnels and landscape mitigation on HS2. Tens of billions spent trying to appease people who were never arguing in good faith to begin with, and now still complain about it anyway.

A man taking a selfie with 2 other men standing in the background beside a dismal bit of wasteground, all in varying states of gurning while trying to do angry people in local newspaper faces.

A photograph taken from standing height looking down at a man kneeling on a newly built path holding a tape measure while he looks up awkwardly into the camera.

Some fine specimens of @apiln.bsky.social in this classic "everybody involved in this dispute comes out of it looking bad" story. road.cc/content/news...

Put the 100k South Glos residents who live in Bristol, but who get their bins collected by so-called "South Gloucestershire" because of a boundary that barely made sense when it was drawn 131 years ago, into Bristol proper. The rest can go to the 2 new unitaries.

Gloucestershire county has proposed replacing itself with 2 new unitary districts, but each of them is 100k residents short of the devolution policy's half million population target. Baffling that nobody has spotted the obvious solution is to abolish South Glos (pop 300k).

Any English local government reorganisation policy can be judged very simply by whether or not it proposes the abolition of South Gloucestershire, and this one has failed the test.

Catching up on the local government reorganisation proposals made in response to the devolution white paper and it feels like this entire policy is already a complete failure - not one proposal to abolish South Gloucestershire.

Most people overestimated by an order of magnitude or three - or perhaps that should be, they underestimated the driving emissions. They clearly don't know the rule of car-based carbon comparisons.

A table of the 31 quiz guesses showing the mean was 16,778 miles and median 1,200, with a range from 32 to 213,000.

A tweet from 2022 where I said: I love when ppl communicate climate solutions in the media & the go to comparison is cars & it's always something like "restoring all the peat bogs in the country would have a huge impact, to put it in context it would be equivalent to taking five cars off the roads for a year".

Nerds in the data analysis team at work are running their traditional advent daily guess the number quiz. Today's question was "the CO2 sequestered in the 9 year growing life of a Christmas tree is equivalent to how many miles of driving in a typical family car?" Correct answer: 140 miles.

A host of daffodils under some trees with the last of autumn leaves on with a canalised river and big buildings behind. It is the London Olympic park.

I always say it's not Christmas until the Christmas daffodils bloom.