10 September (Part 1) - Quiet around here
There is nothing going on that I know of worth reporting. Apart from the exceptional meeting of the Constitutional Review Panel (and ignoring the regular planning meetings which have to carry on) there has not been a ‘proper’ council or committee meeting since 17th July. While Parliament has returned to their green benches and school children to theirs, Bexley council won’t end its holiday until the end of the month.
It’s
scraping the barrel for news I know, but Bexley council has been Twittering, on promoting
a Box Shop being expanded in Sidcup today. I had to look up what that is all
about but it is apparently like a very up market bazaar. The sort of thing
that used to be held in the church hall when I was a kid and to which mothers
would flock, most of them with a tea towel tied around the head which was some
sort of early 1950s fashion statement.
I’m not qualified to comment on shopping, to me it’s something to be done
reluctantly only when there is no alternative - so there is no way I would go to
Sidcup for any shop and wouldn’t pop in the Box Shop even if I was passing by. But it looked
quite attractive when I did and Bexley got a ‘Highly Commended’ in the category
‘Best
Campaign to Support Local Trade’. Not an independent assessment
unfortunately, it is judged by other councils.
Cyclists
can be an angry lot, and one at least was not at all happy with Bexley’s
mini-Holland cycling initiative.
While ridiculing the proposal for lifts on hills he correctly points out that
there is a hidden foot path up the notorious Knee Hill and it wouldn’t take much to
make it cycle friendly. However the council is content to let cyclists - and the
occasional pedestrian - mingle with the traffic on a road with no footpath. In
fact they make it compulsory by restricting access to the path with ridiculous gates that make
passage by wheelchair impossible too.
Then the cyclist’s wrath moved on to Welling. "If they were serious about cycling they would
have replaced the old bus lane with a cycle track”. It is, says my cycling friend of the
mini-Holland plan, just a publicity seeking farce before the
election season funded by Boris’s £100 million of tax payer funded generosity. And I
thought I was cynical! But so very true nevertheless.