16 February - Everything is broken
Good News but Bad Debts
By
September of last year Bexley Council had accumulated
£2·7 million of PCN debt and wrote a quarter of it off.
They later excused it by saying that offenders simply disappear and chasing them is a hopeless waste of money.
Locally we had a ‘family’ of five men and two women living in a two bedroom
flat. They ran a small fleet of clapped out vans, five at one time but more recently only three.
Between them they would be issued with three or more PCNs a week and residents
assumed they never paid them because they appeared to care not one jot and would
pavement park even when they knew the CEO was due imminently.
On Wednesday evening all the vans were taken away, at least one on a low loader, by the owners.
Some say it had a DVLA clamp on a wheel though I didn’t see that myself and the
DVLA website suggests it was taxed. None of
the people involved spoke a word of English and probably they have left an unpaid landlord behind.
Broken Bexley
Abbey
Road has flooded regularly for as long as anyone can remember.
Today I lazily accepted a lift to shorten the walk to search for a post box. I opened the
car door in Abbey Road and found myself staring down a gully.
Totally clogged by the silt of ages.
FixMyMuddyStreet Bexley!
Broken Britain
I try not to use Royal Mail services, over-priced and unreliable, but
occasionally needs must and I use a left over Christmas stamp. This time
a sympathy card to Ramsgate.
At lunchtime today none of the local postboxes displayed a Next Collection flag before next Monday.
(If you are coming to this late; it is Friday today.)
I had to queue in the Post Office to ask if they would kindly accept my envelope, which the lady did.
The stamp shown here is from my last remaining pre-barcoded set. It neatly sums
up the privatised Royal Mail. Run by a bunch of scheming Trotters intent on becoming millionaires.
Note: I printed out all the received condolences messages
and included a copy in the card sent to Mick’s widow.
Broken BT
Yesterday I had an invitation to afternoon tea with the old lady who had
been compulsorily purchased out of her Wolvercote Road tower block into a new
one which looks down on Lidl on Harrow Manorway. She wanted to thank me for
helping to push BT into
restoring the phone number
she had had for more than fifty years.
Ridiculous that BT hadn’t done it as a matter of course. She told me that she is
the envy of her new neighbours who have been similarly displaced from nearby
addresses. Every one of them has had to accept a new number. She is very
grateful to her new friend at BT, Andrew.
My whole time in BT and the GPO before that was spent trying to improve the
customer’s lot. Whatever happened to that idea?