30 November - No news or slow news?
Maryland. What’s the Point?
Yesterday was going to be a Slow News Day but became a No News Day because a trip to Newham took far too long.
While there a glance at the Newspapers, Telegraph and Mail, told me that Newham Council was
hitting the headlines. Newham is a strange place; lowest Council Tax in Outer
London but mainly scruffy and run down. A mixture of enlightened policies;
almost free large item removal and currently free - and still free with
conditions next year - residents’ parking, mixed with full on Socialist Republic and woke tendencies.
Yesterday
Newham was said to be petitioning TfL to change the name of Maryland Station
because Maryland in the USA was the centre of its tobacco growing industry and
therefore likely to have been a place where slaves were employed. And why would that interest me?
I was born a short walk away from the station and back then it
was called Maryland Point. It lies between Stratford and Forest Gate on what one
day may become the Elizabeth Line. The assistant in one of my local shops lives
a little to the East of Stratford station and she still calls it Maryland Point.
The original name is thought to derive from being a point that marked a local boundary
(mary being a corruption of the Old English word for boundary) and
Wikipedia says the name was changed in 1940. This does not explain how I became
fascinated as a child by the ‘silly’ name of my local station. Old I may be but not that old!
Where does Wikipedia get 1940 from? Didn’t we have more important things to do in 1940 than rename railway stations?
Whatever its faults I can’t see a Conservative Bexley Council ever coming up with such silly ideas and fortunately Bexley Ohio was not founded until
forty years after the last American slave had his shackles removed.
The Sun
The Sun newspaper must have had a Slow News Day last week because it thought it necessary to publish
a biography of Bexley Councillor Alex Sawyer and managed to find nothing that I didn’t already know.
The Sun headlines that Alex is married to Home Secretary Priti Patel and once employed
him as her office manager. Well who better to employ in an MP’s office than
someone likely to be totally loyal? He gave up the job the moment the Standards
Authority put a stop to the practice.
He now has a job elsewhere. So what?
The only related thing that received adverse comment here was the fact that Bexley
Council in far off days kept the relationship secret and got upset when it was revealed.
Alex always speaks like a true blue Tory but how genuine he is is not so
certain. He has often said that motorists are unfairly penalised but he is the leading advocate
of penalising them further with a plethora of Yellow Box junctions.
When
a few years ago four lorries were unable to deliver ‘just in time’ supplies
to Crossrail at Abbey Wood - in the days when Crossrail was running a few hours late
and not several years - the drivers were faced with the choice of driving around
the Wilton Road Florence Road circle causing chaos or to pull in and stop.
They
sensibly parked up. Alex Sawyer said that was the wrong decision and he
recommended that their PCN appeal should be rejected. For that decision he lost my trust for ever.
The Black Hole
There have been remarkably few comments on the gap in the middle of this
website. A small hole has existed for more than two years but became worse at the
beginning of 2020; a consequence of me dithering over if I wanted to continue with it or not.
Probably I shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of interest because almost no one
looks back at blogs more than a month old despite the effort that goes into providing the link backs.
As stated before I am working my way through from 2009 improving things where I
can but tracking down better quality photographs has been very time consuming.
The revamp has reached March 2013 and most pages will look better although you
can’t tell because there is nothing to compare them with!
The main exception to those early blogs is the current year. They are complete and the only others to have been restored
are those which support site features such as the blog collections and the photo feature pages. The pages themselves may
be found but any links they may contain will almost certainly be broken. They are a one stop shop only.
At the present rate of progress I will probably have to repeat this message in a year’s time.