Vidor.

The group photos above (click on either for a larger view) were taken in the foyer of CineWorld Bexleyheath last Sunday afternoon. The occasion was the private showing of the new Star Wars movie. "The Rise of Skywalker" to a select audience of roughly 350 people all of whom were personally invited by the organiser Nav, who can be seen in the upper photo above wearing the bright orange X-Wing fighter pilots uniform. Every year for the last five, Nav has organised a private showing of each of the new Star Wars movies, and it has now become a regular pre - Christmas event, and part of the local social calendar. The film viewing aside, it is also a time for people to catch up and socialise, some of whom only get the opportunity to do so once a year at the private showing. It is also a time where parents, who saw the original series of films when they were children, get the opportunity to bring their own offspring along to share the event with them. 

This week The Bexley Times have reported the a one year old pony had to be rescued after getting into difficulties in a field in Norman Road, Lower Belvedere. The horse had fallen down a steep bank and was unable to get back up before collapsing with exhaustion. The horse had slipped down a muddy bank and was stuck, laying on his side, with his back legs caught around a tree and his front legs in a small culvert. He had been trying to get back to his feet and was exhausted; he was on the brink of death. A vet sedated him so the team of firefighters from Erith fire station could get the straps under him and start to winch him back up the bank. The RSPCA were in attendance; they left an abandonment notice at the site and removed the pony for further veterinary treatment. The horse, named Frosty by the rescuers will stay with the vets until he is strong enough to move to an RSPCA centre. If no one comes forward to claim him then he will be re-homed by the charity. This winter, the RSPCA expects to take in more than 10,000 animals in need across England and Wales as more become lost or simply just abandoned after Christmas. The practice of horse and pony owners effectively abandoning their animals is unfortunately widespread. The practice of “fly-grazing” has become increasingly common both in the local area, and also around the country. Thousands of horses and ponies are being abandoned by their erstwhile owners as irresponsible breeding, spiralling bills and sale prices which have reached rock bottom take their toll. In a recent interview, RSPCA Inspector Nicholas Wheelhouse said:- "We find some people who have horses and have just kept them on undeveloped land, but as the developers are now snapping up these sites, the horses are being moved on. The knock-on effect is that with a shortage of green land we are finding that the owners are then tethering their horses on the side of the roads or keeping them in very poor makeshift enclosures, not even fields. It’s an issue that I as an inspector am seeing on the increase, as sadly, if the horses are not attended to well enough, welfare problems can start and that's when we become involved. I’ve seen horses in places you wouldn’t ever expect them to be and many in really built-up areas." A pony can fetch as little as £5 at auction – if it sells at all, whilst stable costs, feed and vets bills can amount to around £100 per week per animal. The six main horse welfare charities have come together to compile a report on the situation; it would also appear that the European appetite for horse meat may be fuelling the situation – a £5 pony can turn into a £230 carcass on the European meat market. It may be that ponies are actually being farmed for live export to France, Belgium and Italy. The RSPCA have called for legislation that will enable them to more quickly identify owners and punish them with fines and the seizure of animals for fly-grazing. They also want a review of agreements allowing the free movement of horses not intended for slaughter between Britain, Ireland and France. The British horse population is thought to be just under one million animals in size. The vast majority are owned privately for leisure – a sector which, unlike the horse racing industry, has not historically been tightly regulated. A bill was brought into law back in 2015 which was hoped to change this situation. The Control of Horses Act 2015 made changes to the law to deter people from illegally grazing or simply abandoning horses on public and private land, which is known as ‘fly-grazing’. As many as 3,000 horses are thought to be illegally fly-grazing across the country. The changes meant that horse owners who fly-graze their animals without permission could  be dealt with more quickly and effectively. These changes to the law have on paper given rural communities greater powers to deal with thousands of horses that are left to graze illegally without the land owners’ permission. Horses that are left to fly-graze can now be re-homed much more quickly and effectively, improving the welfare of these animals and preventing disruption to communities. By allowing abandoned horses to be re-homed much more quickly, this act will encourage owners to pay proper attention to their animals’ welfare and ensure communities are no longer blighted by the illegal practice of fly-grazing. Under the previous Animals Act 1971 an abandoned horse could only be disposed of after 14 days through sale at market or public auction. The 2015 Act means fly-grazing horses have to be reported to police within 24 hours, and owners now have four days to claim their animals. Previously, an abandoned horse could only be disposed of through sale at market or public auction. The 2015 law extended the options for dealing with abandoned horses, which now include private sale, gifting and rehoming. Unfortunately the 2015 Act has in practice made very little difference to horse and pony welfare. Actually determining the owners of the fly grazed animals is often very difficult, as the animals have no registration or other ownership documents. The owners are now resorting in some cases to leaving sick animals to die, rather than having them properly treated by a vet. It would seem that no amount of legislation will stop the misuse of ponies and horses if the authorities are not prepared to enforce it properly. What do you think? Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com with your feedback.

Most computer users will be very familiar with Microsoft Office, the pretty much ubiquitous combination of word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation suite and Email client. Microsoft are encouraging users to switch from the locally installed Office 2019 to the web based Office 365. There are actually several exceedingly good alternatives to Microsoft Office, including one particular office suite which is full - featured, completely Microsoft file format compatible, mature, backed by a large organisation, and unlike Microsoft Office, it is totally free to download and use. The office suite is called LibreOffice. The history of LibreOffice goes back to 2010, after database software giant Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. This included OpenOffice, an open source Office suite originally known as Star Office. Sun had picked up the Star Division, the company behind Star Office, in 1999, and published the suite as free and open source in an effort to reduce the dominance of Microsoft Office. In September 2010 a group of OpenOffice contributors who were unhappy about Oracle's tight control of the project announced The Document Foundation along with a fork of OpenOffice 3.3, which they called LibreOffice. Oracle was asked to transfer OpenOffice to the new group but refused. A few months later more former OpenOffice contributors declared their support for the new fork. The following year, Oracle decided that OpenOffice had no commercial future and in June 2011 transferred the project to the Apache Foundation, where it continues, with a claimed 1.6 million downloads of version 4.1.7, released in September. LibreOffice had the momentum though, and has been developed more rapidly. 2020 will be therefore the 10th anniversary for LibreOffice and it is planning "a year long celebration." Has LibreOffice succeeded? The software is popular and highly valued by users, and unlike Microsoft Office works well on Linux. It is free software and also lets you adopt the OpenDocument Format (ODF) in place of Microsoft proprietary Office formats. The LibreOffice team has been working on the user interface, and there are now a bewildering number of options for menus and toolbars. You can select Standard Toolbar, Single Toolbar, Sidebar, Tabbed, Tabbed Compact, Grouped bar Compact, and Contextual Single. You can also combine various options, such as choosing Tabbed UI, which is reminiscent of the Microsoft Office ribbon toolbar, and then adding the traditional dropdown menubar on top. Interoperability with Microsoft Office formats has been improved, and you can now export document templates (.dotx and .xltx), import and export PowerPoint SmartArt, and import charts which use Word DrawingML. LibreOffice still has a place for organisations (not least the EU) concerned about retaining or recovering "digital sovereignty". It removes the reliance of Microsoft's proprietary document formats, which tend to change every couple of years, meaning that in order to read and use your old MS Office files, you have to buy the latest version of MS Office and then upgrade your old files to the new format. That said, Microsoft Office remains the business standard, and today's battle is more between the web based Office 365 and Google's G Suite, than between the locally installed Microsoft Office and LibreOffice. Most Office 365 subscriptions bundle Microsoft's desktop software with Email and other online services, making it hard for LibreOffice to break in. LibreOffice plays an important role in providing a high-quality office suite for Linux and as an alternative to Microsoft Office. There are now also browser-based options, including Google's G Suite, but if you prefer the freedom of working locally with open source software, LibreOffice is for you. LibreOffice then has not changed the software world, but it has perhaps made it a better place. You can read more about LibreOffice and download it for free by clicking here.

Whist surfing the BBC iPlayer website, I found an archive recording from back in 2010. It features comedian Mark Steel in an early episode of his popular BBC Radio 4 comedy series "Mark Steel's in Town". The programme description reads thus:- "Mark Steel visits 6 more UK towns to discover what makes them and their inhabitants distinctive. He creates a bespoke stand-up show for that town and performs the show in front of a local audience. As well as shedding light on the less visited areas of Britain, Mark uncovers stories and experiences that resonate with us all as we recognise the quirkiness of the British way of life and the rich tapestry of remarkable events and people who have shaped where we live.  In this episode Mark performs a show for the residents of Dartford in Kent where he talks about the peasants' revolt, gypsy tart, Mick Jagger and what one resident calls the Road To Hell". You can hear the very funny programme, which features Dartford, Erith (postulating that Christopher Columbus came from Erith, and that before he went on to discover America, he first sailed across the Thames to discover Essex!) and many other local towns, including Mark Steel's own birthplace - Swanley. Click here to stream the show, which I can highly recommend.

The two photos above date back to the 1920's; the upper of the two photos shows shrimp fishermen employed by William Gilder, the fishmonger who had a shop in Erith High Street for many years between the two World Wars. The distinguished chap in the Fedora hat the helm of the vessel is Mr. Gilder himself; I am not sure if he regularly went out on shrimping trips, or if this was a special occasion that merited a commemorative photograph. I was surprised when I came across the photo; I knew that the River Thames off Erith was a rich source of Lemon Sole, Dabs and Eels, but I did not know that it had been a historic source of shrimps. What is somewhat troubling is that back then, raw sewage was pumped into the Thames from Crossness Sewage Works. Shrimps and Prawns get their nutrients from filtering the water they swim in, and any noxious substances tend to get concentrated in their bodies as a consequence.  This would have made eating Erith caught shrimps a bit of a lottery regarding whether they would give you food poisoning or not; I guess that people’s constitutions were a bit more hardy back then; personally I would have avoided local shellfish just to be on the safe side. More on this later. Gilder ran a successful fishmongers shop on the river front at Erith, directly opposite the wooden jetty that is still there today. The shop was in business for many years between the wars, and was only demolished in 1937. Some years ago, Maggot Sandwich reader and local historian Ken Chamberlain sent me the photo of Gilder’s Fishmongers which you can see above. He told me that the Gilder family were heavily involved in trade in and around Erith for many years, and indeed several members of the family still live locally. I had commented on how William Gilder looked considerably younger in the photo that Ken had sent me back then, to which he responded that although there was a distinct family resemblance, it was possible that the figure in the doorway was not the same person as pictured in the fishing boat. Either way it is a real slice of Erith’s long and varied history. The more I consider the state of pollution of the River Thames before WWII, the more I am amazed not only that a successful fishing business could generate income from the murky waters, but that people were apparently not routinely poisoned. In addition to the aforementioned sewage outfall from Crossness, back before the war Erith Pier was frequented by heavy cargo freighters and ships that were judged as too large to navigate further upriver to the docks, or the Pool of London. The output sewage and waste oil into the river, along with leaving traces of chemicals from their anti fouling paint (which used to contain large amounts of poisonous tin or copper compounds to inhibit weed and barnacle growth on the hulls of ships). It is a wonder that anything managed to live in the Thames off Erith at all. The water nowadays is far cleaner than it has been for years – the reason it looks brown and murky is mainly due to the large levels of silt that is suspended in the water, rather than to high pollution levels. This is evidenced by the large number of seals that now inhabit the river in the local area; seals are top tier predators - they would not be in the Thames if all of the fish lower down the food chain were not present and very healthy. As I have mentioned in the past, Lemon Sole spawn in Anchor Bay and the area around Erith Pier. Dabs and Eels are also present in abundance.

A forty first birthday took place recently - a ground breaking cult comedy series that changed many things, and certainly influenced Sir Terry Pratchett and his much beloved Discworld novels; Back in 1978, the first episode of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was broadcast on BBC Radio 4. At the time no-one - least of all its creator Douglas Adams - would have known that the story of galactically - displaced nobody Arthur Dent would one day travel as far in the pop-cultural landscape as the book’s characters did across the universe. I got into Hitchhikers pretty early on - I recall that when I was at school, I could recite, word perfect, entire chunks of the first two books. In the years since in inception, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy has existed in almost every form imaginable - first a radio series, then a book, record albums (different to the radio versions), a television series, various stage productions, a computer game, a towel and a major motion picture - each one expanding on or compressing previous versions, using some aspects, flatly contradicting others and completely ignoring the rest. It has proven astonishingly prolific as a franchise, and that’s probably because its main thesis – that the universe is an idiosyncratic and absurd place as viewed from a human perspective – is one that cannot help but resonate with audiences across time and space.

Do you recall the Vidor brand of batteries? They used to be sold all over the place, especially in shops such as Woolworths. They were cheaper than Ever Ready or Duracell, and very popular, if not so long lasting. The brand Vidor was based in Erith, and they produced a range of consumer electronics in the years after the war; their battery production facilities were located in South Shields and Dundee, whilst their television and radio factory was in St Fidelis Road, off West Street, Erith. In 1934 T. N. Cole, managing director of the Lissen battery company, left that company sometime after it had been taken over by Ever-Ready; he purchased the Burndept radio company and set up the Vidor battery company, in direct competition with Lissen/Ever-Ready. Vidor's name came from the initials of Thomas's two daughters, Valerie and Denise, and his wife Rebecca. As a concession to Ever Ready and his agreement with the company, he did not run Burndept and Vidor himself, but employed Mr. R.P. Richardson as Managing Director. In 1935 Thomas brought an action appealing against the agreement with Ever Ready. An out of court settlement was made and from that time on, relations between Ever Ready and Vidor were strained, not helped by popularity of Vidor batteries with radio dealers because of their competitive prices, which were around twenty five percent cheaper than their rivals. In 1939 a Vidor portable radio shown at National Radio Exhibition. After World War II, between 1947 - 1958 Various models of radio were manufactured - you can see a video featuring the Vidor "My Lady Margaret" valve portable set by clicking here. The company appears to have been absorbed into several others in the late 60's / early 70's, and the battery making part of the business was sold to an Argentinian company, who as far as I can ascertain, still own the brand.

I had a bit of a real life Monty Python "Spam sketch" moment on Monday; I was on my way back from a meeting in the West End, and at lunchtime I reached Charing Cross station; feeling peckish, I broke my journey to go onto the station concourse in order to purchase some lunch. I rolled up at the  baguette shop, and had a look at what was on offer. Bacon and egg; ham and cheese, chicken and bacon; salami and salad. All the filled baguettes had one thing in common - they all contained some type of pork. I am pork intolerant, and have to avoid the meat or otherwise get a violent stomach upset. I asked the unkempt and spotty individual behind the counter (who bore a striking resemblance to Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel from the Simpsons) if they had any other fillings available. He ummed and aahed for a few moments and said "We've got prosciutto rolls too" I explained that I wanted something without any pork - and had to tell him that bacon was actually a kind of pork, which was evidently news to him. He then said "We do have chicken royale with bacon - but it doesn't have much bacon in it". I gave up. You can contact me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

The Bexley Borough Neighbourhood Watch Association office is closed for the Christmas and New Year holiday, so this week there are no local safety and security reports from the various ward Safer Neighbourhood Police teams. Normal service will be resumed next week.

The end video this week is a blast from the recent past; it features the Erith Lighthouse, a pop - up restaurant and art studio that was located in Erith Riverside Gardens in the late summer of 2017. The events were organised by The Exchange - the arts and community not for profit group who took on the old Carnegie library in Walnut Tree Road, subsequently opening the excellent Bookstore Cafe in the basement of the historic building. Indeed, looking back one can see that the Lighthouse project was a prototype for the Bookstore Cafe. Many new and exciting events are planned for the near future by The Exchange. The Carnegie library and the Bookstore Cafe are currently closed for staff holidays, but they will re - open on the 15th of January. You can read more by clicking here.