7 April (Part 1) - Told you so a year ago!
The
Danson Festival has been cancelled, allegedly because of the poor ground
conditions which I am not sure I believe because there were several hints in
council a year ago that the 2013 Festival would be the last.
I am personally ambivalent about the whole thing. I went last year for the very
first time and
reported it in glowing terms, but then I didn’t have any youngsters with me
in need of entertainment at £4 a ride. That would probably have taken the smile
off my face. And then there is the annual
trickery employed by Bexley council to boost parking fines. Their website
said one thing and their parking attendants did another.
Local residents must be seriously inconvenienced, I live two and a half miles as
the crow flies from the site and shielded from it by the biggest hill in the
borough but the noise from Danson Park comes in loud and clear.
On a personal level, whether the Festival is cancelled or not does not bother me
greatly, my interest extends only to whether cabinet member Don Massey was being
truthful when he said the reason for cancellation was ground conditions.
I must shamefully admit that I had never walked around Danson Lake before I went
there in February 2011 to check on
the absence of life belts. It proved impossible to get to the water’s edge
because it was pure mud and I managed to fill my shoes with the stuff before I
was able to extract myself. While at the 2013 Festival I thought I would make
another attempt to get to the lakeside but it was again solid mud. The Festival
itself takes place on higher ground as visitors to the park will know.
On that evidence the park is constantly muddy and that has not stopped the
Festival going ahead in previous years. Comments on the
News Shopper’s report
confirm the mud situation. I doubt it is any worse than usual.
Whilst the start of 2014 had a reputation for rain we got off surprisingly
lightly in this part of the world. My solar panel installation recorded 55% more
sunshine in January 2014 than in 2013, 54% more than in February
2013 and 67% more in March. Less scientific is that I only had to use my
car to pick up the morning paper once this winter and last year it was three or four
times! The ground conditions may be poor, but they have always been poor, and
the long range forecast is not at all bad.
In all the circumstances it may have been the right decision to cancel the 2014
Festival but presumably Don Massey lacks the honesty to provide the real reason. It’s the cuts stupid!
It was forecast a year ago.