These scary-looking fish are wrapped around many of the lampposts on the South Bank. I walk past them on my way to work, and often wonder who on earth thought they added to the aesthetic!

This is Queen Victoria at sunrise this morning, overlooking Whitehall from her throne atop the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. She’s flanked by an absurdly tiny lion and unicorn, and four more reasonably sized classical figures.

I went back to London bright and early this morning, arriving into King’s Cross station bathed in brilliant sunshine!

When Wendy is on nights, she’s so focussed on work that she sometimes becomes a little forgetful about the more everyday things in life. We have ended up with something of  a surfeit of tea after she bought it when it wasn’t really needed… repeatedly. But with Wendy’s tea consumption, it’ll be gone before long!

Wendy and I went to Newcastle’s new Za Za Bazaar for dinner tonight… The decoration is certainly unique, and the food was delicious!

One of the particular frustrations of working on Whitehall is that, every so often, I’m evacuated from my office while the police investigate a suspect package. Still, better safe than sorry, and I’d far rather be one of the people leaving the building (or sheltering in a safe zone) than one of those heading in the opposite direction to investigate!

Regular readers will know that I love a contrarian column, and Laurie Penny’s piece for the New Statesman is a corker of an example. In it, she argues that marriage is an archaic minority interest, and asks

Why should I subsidise other people’s weird lifestyle choices?

I suspect that Penny’s intention may have been to generate heat at least as much as light, but it’s an interesting (and somewhat convincing) argument nevertheless. It’s well worth reading this weekend.

Photo posted on Flickr by Lee J Haywood and used here under Creative Commons sharealike licence.

View from my hotel window (almost…!)

The best I’ve come up with today is this blurry picture of the arch where King Charles Street meets Whitehall. I thought it looked quite pretty lit up, but the detail is lost in the blurriness. Here’s what it looks like when competently photographed in daylight (from the other side)!

You’ll also notice the bollards lining Whitehall in this photo – they look sort of dainty and decorative, but whenever the pavement is dug up for maintenance, one can see how far down into the earth they go, and the size of their impressive below-ground hulk. They’re also quite a bit wider than they appear to be at a glance – I assume their taper is designed to induce that optical illusion. Essentially. they are absolute beasts of bollards in iceberg-style decorative clothing!

I think, like me, many people will have noticed an increase in the price of e-books in recent years. A subset of those people will be, like me, vaguely aware of an antitrust case around the selling of ebooks, involving Amazon selling below cost and Apple trying to disrupt the market. There was news last year that a court had declared that ebook purchasers were due a partial refund, and I felt some excitement at the prospect of a fat Amazon gift voucher (that hasn’t yet materialised). That was about my level of understanding before I downloaded The Battle of $9.99. It was a story that I felt I should know more about, and so I picked up the book to learn.

In this short book, Albanese outlines the revelations from the antitrust court case against Apple. It’s a factual account that seemed fairly balanced in its assessment, and contained some genuinely surprising revelations along  the way. For example, publishers whose books were previously sold below cost-price by Amazon now net a lower revenue per title despite increased consumer prices. Indeed, publishers were willing to accept that deal on the basis that the perceived value of books would not be eroded further, on the basis that it protects their profits in the long-term.

It’s only a brief book, so this can only be a brief review, but it was nonetheless interesting. It was well-pitched, introducing economic and legal terms as necessary without either patronising or befuddling me as a reader with experience in neither. I would have liked a little more discussion about why this story had so little traction with the public at large, particularly compared to similar financial scandals in which consumers felt “ripped off”.  I’d also be interested to read a similar account of iTunes disruption of the music market, but I guess without a antitrust suit, similar revelations are unlikely to meet public gaze.

Back in the autumn, I reviewed Burning the Page by Jason Merkoski, which examined in much more detail the way in which technology has changed the reading experience. The Battle of $9.99 makes an interesting business-focussed supplement to that book. It’s well worth a read.

The Battle of $9.99 is available now from amazon.co.uk in Kindle format only.