15 May - A break but not much of a holiday
Apart from the dishing out of lucrative jobs to the favoured boys and girls there will be nothing much
going on in Bexley Council until the first Full Council meeting in a week’s time, hence nothing worth reporting here.
As a few of you have guessed I have been busy with other things, mainly the
elderly aunt who has returned to her home in East Ham but who for now at least
requires daily visits. There has also been a repair job to be done after my
front garden wall was knocked down as a direct result of poor road design and rather worse parking.
It is a long time since I have mentioned East Ham, as a borough the Socialist Republic of Newham
has little going for it apart from the lowest Council Tax in Outer London and
free residents’ parking permits. Every time I go there I am reminded of President Donald Trump’s
description of Haiti, El Salvador and parts of Africa.
My aunt gets free visitor’s parking permits because she is not a car owner and
she keeps them in a pile near her front door.
When she had people staying with her for a few days recently they took a ticket from the
pile and carefully read the Ts & Cs. Next day another permit was taken from the pile.
Unfortunately no one noticed that Newham Council had changed the conditions
between one batch of tickets and the next (nothing about it in their covering letter) which resulted in a £130 fine.
The same number of tickets would have been used whether they were free 24 hour tickets or free All Day ones.
Probably it will be possible to take some sort of financial revenge on Newham Council via their appalling Social Services.
In spare moments more changes have been made to the website, literally thousands
of them, most unseen but not all. Those who use small screens, mobile phones and tablets
will now be seeing things differently to those who use traditional desktop PC screens.