The days when the Bexley Magazine distributor would walk straight past my house
- and quite a lot of others according to reports and my own observations -
appear to have gone. For the past eighteen months or thereabouts I have been
able to scan new issues quickly and fling them into the box under the bed
without comment here. Not so this time. The copy that dropped onto the doormat yesterday has
several politically correct messages as is inescapable in woke Britain but it is also stuffed with
interesting and very readable articles. Some may even be helpful.
The Winter 2022 issue will help me fill in the gap before the next Council
meeting report which looks like being next year, the Public Cabinet meeting
scheduled for 13th December having been cancelled.
Cafer Munur’s (Cabinet Member for Growth) three page spread on Shop Local caught
my eye and in particular the item tucked away at the end of Page 21.
Long term readers will know that I was appointed Secretary to the Abbey Wood
Traders’ Association in February 2016. Neither of the two local Councils liked
that and asked for my removal, banning me from the occasional joint meeting. The
Traders stood their ground and I remained in post until the lock downs prevented
their monthly meetings which never restarted.
When Boris Johnson provided the area with
regeneration money six years ago Bexley Council through its partner Retail
Revival set up a village website featuring most of the shops. Unfortunately it
was full of errors, silly things like wrong phone numbers and wrong opening times.
Even more unfortunately Retail Revival had sub-contracted the website to a totally
uncooperative company which never responded to any update request but eventually
offered to hand over the site for an unaffordable sum. It therefore sat there,
neglected and a total waste of taxpayers’ money until it was abandoned in 2020.
With no meetings at which the issue may have been discussed,
I bought the domain name with my own money and replicated the original website
which I had copied, with corrections of course.
Since then it has remained virtually unchanged because all requests for further
update information has, with one exception, fallen on deaf ears. The Abbey Arms
updated their pizza page which is just as well because it gets a mention in the
Magazine. I was considering taking the site off line because it attracts
enquiries which I am unable to answer.
If I was really mischievous I would change the code so that www.abbeywoodvillage.co.uk
redirects to Bonkers. It’s about time Bexley Council gave BiB a bit of publicity.
(No, I won’t do it, but it’s tempting.)
Note. For web pedants, none of the original code was replicated but the pages looked exactly the same.