28 February - From the BiB post box
There are no Council meetings until next week so once again it is fill in as best one can time.
If you ask me why I try to keep BiB going I’d say that without it there would be no quick and relatively easy way of
finding out what Bexley Council is plotting, there being no local newspapers
worthy of the name left. Meeting reports are not quick to
write and take at least four times the duration of the meeting to knock comprehensively
into shape. (Some of the less interesting ones get the short treatment but it
still takes around twice the meeting duration to write.)
And for what? I don’t recall even one occasion when a resident came
back with a comment on a meeting and it is very rare for a Councillor to respond with
anything useful, or at all. Not even a complaint. I’d like to think that is because
they are far more carefully written than meeting
minutes knocked out by a biased Deputy Council Leader.
I can only hope that having one’s actions at risk of being reported here keeps Bexley Council’s worst excesses in check - or
are they driven underground?
There is however no great shortage of comment on BiB fillers of which there have
recently been a fair number. They can be wide-ranging. The SL3 bus. The brown
bin scam. Telephone Directories. Covid vaccinations. Amazon taking over the Post
Office and the huge price rises by both companies. (It needs to be said again
that the Post Office does not set the price of stamps); and finally the divided
opinions on Lee Anderson and his remarks about Sadiq Khan.
Let’s see if they can be turned into another little filler.
Superloop SL3
There are are approaching 40 buses an hour using New Road since
the coming of SuperLoop. A once quiet and leafy largely residential road which serves as
a free commuter car park. Yesterday just before 5:00 p.m. I was on my way to
Chingford and five buses were clogging the bottom of New Road. Two 301s, two
SL3s and a single decker were all trying to use
Bexley’s beautifully designed T junction at the same time. Temporary gridlock.
Politics
At my quiz venue, a pub in Iain Duncan Smith’s constituency. I was on a table
of four with four more quizzers on the table to my right and a team of seven
behind me. During the interval one of the other group of four said something
derogatory about Keir Starmer. The comments were enthusiastically taken up by my former Labour
supporting cousin and I did my bit to stir things up a little. (What me? Surely not?)
In Duncan Smith’s pub (apparently he has been known to drink there) everyone
thought that Lee Anderson’s comments on the Mayor were broadly correct, although
I have received a certain amount of goading on the subject about which I do not think I have expressed an opinion.
“A time of suffering under the worst Prime Minister of all time is the ideal moment to elect Kneel Starmer,
if we really have to, as every new generation of the gullible and naive should learn, the hard way if necessary,
that a Labour Government will always be worse and in any case, Momentum will
have Keir out of office within 18 months.” This ancient wisdom may not hold true
when the alternative is Sunak but nevertheless there was universal agreement
among my 14 fellow quizzers. For the record we won £116 between the four of us and
for the first time in ages it was my contribution that pushed us over the line.
Telephone Directories
I am not the only one to have some nostalgia towards Phone Books. Who else had
the knack of tearing an A-D in half in one go? And one reader remembers Maze
Hill telephone exchange by the North Eastern gate of Greenwich Park. It was very
dark and dingy inside when I used to visit in the 1960s but too well used to be closed.
By now regular
Maggot Sandwich readers have probably seem my thesis on Telephone
Directories but for those who might prefer to see it in a different format
a PDF copy is here.
Garden waste
From Maidstone came news from a Bexley émigré who says that their bins are
cheaper than Bexley’s and their Council is relaxed about black sack overspill. From nearer to home comes
the advice that a shredder and compost bin is the appropriate response to Bexley Council’s avarice.
Mary Poppins
A local joker (probably) says that Mary Poppins should be banned totally because it portrays
men dressed as chimney sweeps with blacked up faces. Don’t give them ideas sir!
mRNA vaccines
I think I will leave this one for now.