please empty your brain below

Right, let's see how many people take today's post seriously...
Get over it.
It is not the worlds most important clock.
I well remember in 2002 American tourists complaining bitterly when the tower was covered in scaffolding. The fact that the Statue of Liberty was similarly dressed when I went to NY on Concorde appeared immaterial to them.
Yes, 4 years seems a long project, but Remembrance Sunday the Army do a wonderful job with their guns at 1100 (much louder), and NYE you cannot hear the bell for the crowd noise.
If you want to know the time there are plenty of alternatives. Mobile phone,ask a policeman, or look at the clock hands.
I have a Westminster chimes clock in my hall.
As for the world's most famous clock there is a competitor now with a large clock at Mecca.
I'm in central London every day and haven't heard the bongs for years. What is the radius around Big Ben where you can actually hear the bongs?

Can't be large.
On a still night I can hear them from my home in Kennington, which is more than a mile from Parliament. But most of the time they'll be drowned out by traffic noise when you're at street level and more than a few hundred yards away.
The chimes of Big Ben never precede the Shipping Forecast - but they can be heard after the 1754 broadcast (daily on Radio 4 Long Wave, weekends only on FM).
Utterly baffled, people there for the sake of being there, filming it - it was the alternative eclipse.

Certain MPs have crawled out from under their stones to demand the bongs back, yet Grenfell Tower residents still lack permanent accommodation, shame those MPs don't devote the same energy to solving a real problem.
Scandalous! Join my petition to have the Olympic Bell moved to a new Flogging, Birching and Public Shaming area of Parliament Square where it can tolled on the hour and each quarter by "remain" voters as a penance for their act of treachery to our Great Nation. What with Big Ben and the Garden Bridge, am bereft.
BIG BEN
by W.T. McGonagall

Beautiful chimes that ring each day
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That mighty sound has been taken away
For reasons to do with Health and Sa-
fety, Which will be remembered for a very long time.

Oh! landmark of a million tourist trips
to London on trains, planes and ships.
No bongs while you eat your fish and chips
You'll have to listen to the Greenwich pips.
This is the biggest crisis of our generation! All political work must stop until this is resolved. This is bloomin' important. Why hasn't Parliament been recalled? Whitehall resources MUST be diverted to sorting this out NOW!

Thank goodness we can get rid of these namby pambying Health and Safety laws when we leave the EU (effing 'ealth and safety, so loved by those whining left wing liberals.) I mean if you go into the clock repairing business, you should expect - nay DEMAND - to be deafened by a 100 decibel bell being struck every 15 minutes. If you can't cope with that, what on earth did you go into the business for, you pinko whiner?
I had a scheduled meeting and tour at the House of Lords yesterday, so got to experience it a bit closer.
The riggers were getting ready to go up the tower before the last chimes, and had vanished upwards before the crowd had dispersed.
Nothing to do with today, but avid DG readers may wish to know that Geoff Marshall and his good lady were interviewed on BBC Breakfast c 9am this morning about their round Britain visiting all stations trip. Well worth a visit to iPlayer.
Andrew do you write for the 'Daily Mail' that beacon of truth?
Unbelievable, saw 2 (Pound and Bone) of the really silly brigade of MPs moaning about this on TV last night. I imagine that stopping and restarting the bell is slightly more difficult than throwing a switch somewhere so there is a significant cost involved, considerable if every day for 4 years, but reasonable on the designated special days. People in this country, especially our elected representatives, need to grow up.
Pathetic! Same as people crying over the US eclipse.
Provide earplugs for the workers?
I agree that some people are taking things too far when it comes to the bongs, but I think more should have been done to try and keep them going.
It seems familiarity breeds contempt with you, which surprises me.
You call it 'the truly ordinary.' To a lot of people it's not.
One of the tourist experiences is hearing Big Ben. Okay, no-one will cancel their trip because of this but it still seems a shame that it is now off the agenda.
Michael - writing for the Mail? Would be a dream come true ;)

Seriously I had an acquaintance who was quite centre-left. She got a job with the Daily Mail's parent company - not in journalism, but in the backend. I didn't see her very often but it was in many ways quite interesting to see how progressively more right wing she got whilst working there...
I used to think I could hear them over at London Bridge, but as the bells chimed for 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon, a signal for me to go and get a cup of tea, I realised that all these years there must have been another clock nearby with an identical striking pattern.
I like how DG is becoming ever more sarcastic these days. And seemingly fooling some people into believing it's true. Maybe it's time to bring back the irony flag?
(Not Big Ben)

The last few days this blog's text column has gone all wide on my mobile, so it's very difficult to read.

Is it just me or has something changed?

dg writes: That's probably down to "20 London Museums You've Never Heard Of", which is wider than your average post.
@GRUMPIEST EVER!

"I imagine that stopping and restarting the bell is slightly more difficult than throwing a switch somewhere"

Indeed. Apparently the process of restarting (and subsequent restopping) of the chiming mechanism takes the best part of half a day. Not a simple matter of turning it back on at the end of a shift.
There's always this 1890 recording to listen to...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz8fXbKrCno
Typically British. In some parts of the world, there could be an architectural competition to design the tower, followed by building it, manufacturing and installing the clock and bell, and commissioning the whole in far less than four years. We always seem to take forever to do anything!
Last night's Radio 4 midnight news had the Westminster chimes despite that news item. Oh, the wonders of sound recording.
Lucky me – I managed to accidentally hear the last two bongs of 10am yesterday from my desk in an office on Millbank. But mine too is a noisy workplace and I missed 11am and 12 noon, although it probably would have helped if I had remembered to listen out for them. Still, I’ll be able to tell my grandchildren that I heard the 24th and 25th to last bongs.
The world has gone bongkers.
Pass the bong.
I suspect that most, if not all, of the exaggerations, blatant untruths, instances of misleading wording, and pieces of gobbledegook/poppycock in DG's post, are copied from other news sources, including some that really ought to know better - such as the BBC. That is the real scandal here.
And that, folks, is how you blame the BBC for something they never said.
Great Tom at St Paul's was used as a BBC stand-in during previous down times. Tom's agent has missed an opportunity here but its ring was a gloomy one IIRC.

In-vision clocks on TV, that's what we need. In black and white.
I'm sure there was a good reason for not forcing those working on it to be so close to the bells, or otherwise they wouldn't have been stopped. How about we think of them?
I filmed it to accompany a whinge about snowflake MPs who fret about things like this while the world goes to hell in a handcart, so there.

As a further footnote, I draw your attention to John Eoin Douglas's latest effusion:
http://johneoindouglas.blogspot.com/2017/08/21st-of-august-2017-bell-end.html
>>What kind of country switches off its prime timepiece for four whole years?

Meanwhile the 90+% of the UK population living in the rest of the country yawns and gets on with their lives.... :)
It's not a timepiece. It is a clock. A clock rings out the time and a timepiece doesn't. Oh. Hang On. You are correct.
As a future visitor (2019) I was bummed to hear that this was happening...then I remembered that I heard the bell chime when I was there previously. So, crisis averted.
Very good, DG, especially then reading comments from people who thought you meant it :)
Is it really European H&S Laws which stop us doing anything? Or is it British H&S Laws?

From my (limited) experience of Europe, they don't bother with such nonsense over there ... for example spray (from spray-painting something) drifting across picnic tables at an industrial museum!
City Worker - for some people, everything they dislike is the fault of the EU. "Health and Safety" being one of them. I once saw someone (and thus sounds absurd but is true) rant about the EU after being given an information leaflet he didn't want, when he bought a ticket for the Bluebell Railway in East Grinsted.

Quite why some people dislike the notion of workers not being killed or disfigured in the workplace is entirely another conversation.
Indeed - in my experience of the continent, the amount of holes, poles and other things that would have been covered in tape or barriers here are largely ignored over there. So whoever blames our H&S on the EU probably needs to visit a tall building in Chiswick and see what they have to say about it.
I see Radio 4 is using recorded bongs. I find Big Ben's chime an bit overrated compared to Great Peter at York Minster, which is really spine-tingling stuff https://youtu.be/Kyh5yed8F0g?t=5m25s

As for hearing the bongs around London, I often hear them from my north facing bathroom in Brixton Hill, especially 11pm / midnight.

I also work on repairing historic buildings. They need to turn the bells off if they want to get the work done. Simple as that. H&S is there for a good reason.
I happened to be in Whitehall at 0200 on Sunday morning (don't ask) and heard Big Ben chime. I was rather surprised as I thought it had already been switched off for repairs. Then on Monday we got all this claptrap from Mrs May, MPs and the media. It was nice to hear it at 0200 with no little traffic and virtually no one around but otherwise I couldn't give a toss.

The Houses of Parliament need repairs - just get on with it but do it properly and safely and not turn it into some sort of pathetic faux crisis or excuse to axe H&S rules or deafen workers. That's not me taking your post seriously. It's me moaning about our idiotic politicians who have their priorities utterly wrong.










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