At long last - four out of five.

The photo above shows the progress in the construction of the new Bexley College campus in Walnut Tree Road, Erith. The place is now certainly coming together rapidly; it is due to open to its first students in September. I am hoping to get a sneak preview of the interior in the not too distant future, when I hope to publish a Bexley College Maggot Sandwich special edition. Keep watching this space.

Readers may recall how I have been involved with fighting illegal fly tippers in and around Erith for some time. There have been occasions when I have felt like I was fighting a losing battle, but recently the tide appears to have turned against the illegal rubbish dumpers. The worst site for fly tipping has for years been the council recycling centre at the end of James Watt Way, round the back of Morrison’s. It is small, out of the way and out of view, yet readily accessible by car or tipper van, making it an ideal place for nefarious activities. In the past I have discovered dumped loads of old furniture, bed mattresses, fridge freezers, and most surreally a massive load of batched and bound used men’s underpants and several huge pallets of putrid, rotten bananas. As a result of this, Bexley Council Environmental Crimes Unit installed a CCTV camera on the site, complete with a large warning sign. Predictably the level of fly tipping dropped noticeably. I understand that several prosecutions are planned, though currently I am unable to say more at this point regarding the specifics. This got me thinking. Why do certain individuals fly tip in the first place? I think that there are several factors involved. Firstly I think there is a degree of ignorance – some of the fly tippers do not have English as a first language, and may assume that since there are recycling bins and hoppers, that anything can be deposited there. Of course this precludes those who tip anywhere at any time – there can be no excuse for that. Other tippers may be lazy and not bothered to go to the official council tip in Thames Road, Crayford. I think the biggest reason is down to cost. Commercial operators (basically any person not in a private car) get charged heavily for legal tipping. A single Transit – type van full of waste can be charged over £100 for a single tipping visit. I have spoken to the Council about this. I understand that when illegally tipped waste is cleared up, it is done by a council subcontractor, who charges the council over £300 for the work. Basic arithmetic would dictate that it would be cheaper for the council to allow waste dumping to be carried out by traders for free, rather than to have to clear up the illegally tipped waste at a later stage. I would propose a six month trial period where commercial waste tippers were not charged for using the Crayford dump; in all other ways they would still have to comply with the existing waste disposal rules, and the content of their loads, the company name and vehicle registration number would still be recorded, but no money would change hands. If at the end of the trial, the amount of fly tipped waste had substantially reduced around the borough, then the scheme would be judged a success. I think a pragmatic approach may be worth trialling, as the current system does seem to be failing, and the amount of council tax payers money spent on clearing up after the illegal tippers could be far better spent elsewhere. Don’t think I am opting for a soft approach to criminal activity – I am still strongly of the opinion that catching and prosecuting fly tippers should be a high priority, but a mixture of both carrot and stick, rather than stick alone may deliver better results for both the environment and the council taxpayer.

Now that the light evenings are with us, an annual event takes place around Erith and Slade Green – something you can virtually set your watch to. The appearance of the illegal off – road bikers, who ride on the pavements, or pulling wheelies in the road, on their way to the Slade Green / Crayford Marshes. It seems to be a rite of passage that a certain subset of the local yobs come out pasty faced and blinking from their bedrooms and X-Boxes once the ambient air temperature rises above 20 degrees Celsius; they then dust down their unlicensed, uninsured and illegal two stroke trail bikes and proceed to annoy and endanger the local population with their activities. If this in itself was not so bad, the noise can be insufferable. Invariably the scrotes will remove part if not all of the exhaust system in the ill –founded belief that this will give their weedy bike engines a few extra horsepower. What actually happens is that the bike ends up sounding like an angry wasp trapped in a biscuit tin, causing sonic grief to those unfortunate to be in the vicinity. The police regularly chase these riders, and every so often a prosecution and subsequent judicial bike crushing will be the result.  The trouble then calms down for a while, before the whole sorry cycle begins again. The worst offenders really don’t care about bikes being crushed, as they have stolen them in the first place. I caught three under aged and scrawny chavs on a shared moped in Manor Road not too long ago; I managed to write down the number plate and report it to the police, only to subsequently discover that the bike had a false number plate on it. The whole problem waxes and wanes, but never really goes away. The only respite is when it rains – the scumbags hate wet weather, and I guess that return to their dank bedrooms and their video games consoles.

You may recall that back in January 2013 I reported on the Pizza Hut delivery outlet in Northumberland Heath that was closed by health inspectors due to the unbelievably filthy conditions that they found both in the kitchen and throughout the building. The situation was deemed so bad that the story made it into the national papers and really reflected badly on both the area, and the Pizza Hut brand in general.  The place was forced to close for a deep clean and partial rebuild. It then re – opened. I thought little more on the matter until back this January I received an anonymous Email from a reader which read: “I work in this "disgusting" pizza hut you mentioned and let me just say, you have mentioned the fact that "Apparently the place has received a deep clean and its’ hygiene standards are improving". The shop was recently given a new shop front to improve the customer perception of the shop but this was as far as improvements actually went. The general conditions within the shop is probably in my opinion worse than ever. In November 2011 most Pizza Hut delivery units were franchised off to private companies and this is when the trouble started. The company that runs this and many other stores in the surrounding area presented managers with such unreachable targets that they soon all left. This then left it open for the company to get in their own managers. Just before Christmas 2013 conditions within the shop were so bad I was having to work in pools of water leaking from various fridges walls and ceilings. Toilet facilities at one point were completely non-existent, the toilet was in fact broken and laying on its side exposing the sewage pipe where rats were seen and making the whole inside of the shop smell of raw sewage. Dates on ingredients are changed to extend the shelf life rather than discarding then like they should be. Things like the can opener, vegetable slicer and oven are no cleaner really now than they ever were. Finally, Just to say that if any of your readers think that eating here may make you sick, believe me, even I won't eat from here”. I reported this information to the local authorities, and also to the News Shopper and to be honest, I thought little more about it. Whilst carrying out my periodic checks on the “Scores on the Doors” website to see what hygiene grades local food outlets were being awarded, I noticed something which indicated that things have now finally changed much for the better. Earlier this week, the Scores on the Doors rating has been updated once more. I am more than happy to announce that the Pizza Hut Delivery outlet in Bexley Road, Northumberland Heath now has a revised rating of four our of five stars, so something must at long last be going right. Whether it has been pressure from Bexley Environmental Health, or a change in franchise ownership I cannot at this point determine. Either way, it is a piece of good news for the consumer at long last. Personally I would still not use the place, but that is my individual choice. Any opinions / reviews on the place would be more than welcome. If the place really has pulled its boots up, then the good news needs to be shared. 

According to a leaked document that I have been privy to, Erith and Thamesmead MP Teresa Pearce has been putting her boot in this week. She’s been giving very short shrift to Councillor Don Massey over the council’s decision to not take part in the Open House project -  as mentioned last week, every year, for one day only, each London borough opens up some buildings not normally open to the public to visit for free; it also drops entrance charges to buildings for which there would normally be an entrance fee. This year, on top of abolishing the Danson Festival, Bexley Council have decided to withdraw from the scheme, citing the need to save money. The irony is that the Open House scheme normally encourages around five thousand visitors from outside of the borough to visit, and although they don’t have to pay an entrance fee for places such as Danson House or Hall Place, they invariably spend money on food and memorabilia whilst they are visiting. The visits also have the less tangible benefit of raising the profile of the borough, which generally does not have much of a presence in the consciousness of people not resident in the area. The costs of operating the scheme are minimal, and it strikes me  that Don Massey and his cohorts are fully aware of this; I get the impression that they are not trying to save money – they are trying to be seen to be saving money, which is a far different thing. Please feel free to leave a comment below, or Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

Over the last couple of years, it seemed that wherever you went in South East London or North Kent, about every fifth vehicle on the road would be an open backed lorry from City Scrap. So ubiquitous was their fleet that I can recall on many occasions seeing four or five of their vans in convoy; they also habitually congregated around the Londis corner shop and convenience store in Manor Road, before returning to their depot on the Darent Industrial Park on the Slade Green Marshes. I noticed a couple of weeks ago that their vehicles were suddenly absent from our highways, and although I had heard vague rumours, I had nothing substantiated or verified to report. Now the News Shopper has published the story as to how a lengthy Police investigation into City Scrap has led to the arrest of the owners, the removal of their scrap trading licence and the forced permanent closure of the company. It turns out that the claims on the City Scrap website that their operators and drivers were fully CRB checked and with UK driving licences were only one of a mass of lies the company told.  It transpires that City Scrap were allegedly engaged in a large insurance scam involving around £30,000, along with another forty five other offences including:- perverting the course of justice, making a false statement to obtain insurance, and making a false statement to obtain a scrap metal licence. An illegal CS tear gas canister was also discovered during the Police raid, which was part of Operation Ferrous – a project to target, prosecute and jail bent scrap dealers and metal thieves, which I have detailed in the on the Maggot Sandwich back in December 2011. Bexley has been one of the London boroughs worst hit by metal theft and criminal scrap dealing, and it has been the heart of the London – wide Operation Ferrous. Metal theft costs the UK economy an estimated £700 million a year – enough to build and run two major teaching hospitals. The British Transport Police say that theft of power and signalling cables is second only to terrorist threat as their priority. Bexley is very hard hit by metal crime as the borough has a higher concentration of scrap yards than anywhere else in Greater London – which it has to be said are not all crooked, but substantial number have sailed rather closer to the legal wind than would be desirable. It would appear that although trade prices for non ferrous scrap (copper / brass / zinc / gunmetal / bronze) have dropped somewhat in the last year – mainly due to a drop in demand from China, prices are still pretty high, and there are enough crooked dealers prepared to break the laws concerning the ban on paying cash for scrap and keeping proper records to keep the illicit trade in pretty rude health. Hopefully the taking down of the largest scrap dealer in the region for multiple counts of illegal activity will send a message to others doing the same, though I am not holding my breath.

You may recall that recently I have written about the heavy engineering company Fraser and Chalmers that were based in Erith for many years. They made mining equipment, pumps, boilers and ore separation machines, many of which were exported to the gold and diamond mines in South Africa. The photo above was taken back in 1907, and shows the main foundry and many of the men that worked there - click on it for a larger version. Notice the lack of safety equipment, and the huge amount of manpower available - by World War 1 there were 4,000 employees. It was hot, backbreaking work, and the average labourer worked a 54 hour week - including Saturday mornings. This is one of the reasons that football matches traditionally start at 3pm; historically this was to allow the men to get home, have a wash and some lunch, before heading out to the game. 

Over the last few years there has been a resurgence of interest in real ale. When I first joined CAMRA, the popular image of a real ale drinker was a bearded bloke in a woolly jumper and open toed sandals, complete with darned socks. He would be listening to folk music and writing down each beer that he quaffed in his “ticker book”. Whilst there are a small minority of such individuals who usually only come out in public at Beer Festivals, the vast majority of real ale enthusiasts look just like everyone else. Indeed, if you take a stroll around somewhere like Hoxton, real ale is now seen to be cool and trendy, and being drunk by the Hipsters. Did you know that there are now more breweries in the United Kingdom than at any time it its history? Many small breweries are taking advantage of the resurgent interest in the product (ale is the oldest manufactured product known – it predates bread by several centuries). As I mentioned last week, a new brewery is opening in Erith in September, though preparations are already under way.  The Bexley Brewery will be the latest in a line of breweries in the borough. One reader with a very good memory corrected a statement I made last week, when I said that the last brewery to operate in the London Borough of Bexley was Reffells in Bexley Village. I was wrong, and to be honest I should have known better. The last brewery in the borough was the Fenman Brewery which was located at the rear of the Jolly Fenman pub in Blackfen Road, Sidcup. The micro brewery brewed beers for sale in the pub, and at events in the local area; it operated between 1984 and 1988, and I visited it on a number of occasions. I recall that there was a glass window at the back of the pub which looked into the brewery area so that you could see the brewery in action. Regular reader Martin reminded me of this when he wrote” The Fenman brewery at the Jolly Fenman Blackfen road was in operation from 1984 to 1988, up to 4 beers were brewed on the premises for sale in the pub. The beers also found their way into local south east London beer festival held at the old Greenwich town hall. From memory the Jolly Fenman was at that time part of Clifton Inns, itself part of Grand met. It produced 4 regular beers, Blackfen Bitter, Heath Special, Fenman Fortune and Dynamite which was sometimes branded as Exploder. There were probably others but that's what I remember at the moment, it was 30 years ago! It seems the idea was that all of the Clifton Inns would have their own brewery installed on the premises, rather like the Firkin pubs of David Bruce but plusher, this didn't happen only around 5 did. Probably the most well know of these was the Orange Brewery in Pimlico SW1, they were still brewing around 2001. There was also the Greyhound brewery in Streatham. My memory fails me on the others in the chain and there is very little on the internet about the chain. The plant at the Jolly Fenman was a 5 barrel one and after it stopped brewing was relocated to another Clifton inn, the Duke of Norfolk, Notting Hill around 1989.” Interesting recollections from Martin, who knows, we may even have visited the pub at the same time without knowing; I have to admit that had he not jogged my memory, I would have completely overlooked the Fenman Brewery. Hopefully the forthcoming Bexley Brewery will last far longer than the four years the Fenman was around. More on this soon.

Have you heard of a new condition called Nomophobia? It is defined as “ the fear of being out of mobile phone contact. The term, an abbreviation for "no-mobile-phone phobia", was coined during a 2010 study by the UK Post Office who commissioned YouGov, a UK-based research organization to look at anxieties suffered by mobile phone users. The study found that nearly 53% of mobile phone users in Britain tend to be anxious when they "lose their mobile phone, run out of battery or credit, or have no network coverage". The study found that about 58% of men and 47% of women suffer from the phobia, and an additional 9% feel stressed when their mobile phones are off. The study sampled 2,163 people. Fifty-five percent of those surveyed cited keeping in touch with friends or family as the main reason that they got anxious when they could not use their mobile phones. The study compared stress levels induced by the average case of nomophobia to be on-par with those of "wedding day jitters" and trips to the dentists.  Ten percent of those questioned said they needed to be contactable at all times because of work. It is, however, arguable that the word 'phobia' is misused and that in the majority of cases it is only a normal anxiety. More than one in two nomophobes never switch off their mobile phones. The study and subsequent coverage of the phobia resulted in two editorial columns authored by those who minimize their mobile phone use or choose not to own one at all, treating the condition with light undertones of or outright disbelief and amusement”. The sad fact is that many people feel that they cannot live a meaningful and fulfilling life without a mobile phone. When one thinks it is only really in the last twenty years or so that mobile phone has become widespread, and only the last ten or so years when they have become ubiquitous. How did people get on before then? Absolutely fine. In fact if anything people were better organised and disciplined – there was no phoning to say that you were running late for a meeting or a dinner date, you had to make it or face looking bad. Nowadays people can call ahead and warn their friends and colleagues, which to my mind rather encourages a less rigorous approach to timekeeping. On top of all this are the serious privacy issues. A lot of smart phone owners think that as long as they have GPS logging switched off, they cannot be traced; nothing could be further from the truth I am afraid. If you watch the short explanatory video below, all will become clear. Please leave a comment below, or Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

Worse than ever?

You may recall that back, almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a feature on the Pizza Hut franchise in Northumberland Heath, and how appalling dirty and unhygienic the place was. The News Shopper also had it as their headline story at the time. The scandal ended up being covered by several national newspapers, the conditions were so bad. The shop ended up being closed for emergency remedial cleaning work; I had thought that the story was now closed; On Friday morning an anonymous person uploaded the following comment onto my original blog posting. I am reproducing it here, as it is shocking, and if true (and I have no reason to believe it is not), then the public needs to know. I work in this "disgusting" pizza hut you mentioned and let me just say, you have mentioned the fact that "Apparently the place has received a deep clean and its’ hygiene standards are improving". The shop was recently given a new shop front to improve the customer perception of the shop but this was as far as improvements actually went. The general conditions within the shop is probably in my opinion worse than ever. In November 2011 most Pizza Hut delivery units were franchised off to private companies and this is when the trouble started. The company that runs this and many other stores in the surrounding area presented managers with such unreachable targets that they soon all left. This then left it open for the company to get in their own managers. Just before Christmas 2013 conditions within the shop were so bad I was having to work in pools of water leaking from various fridges walls and ceilings. Toilet facilities at one point were completely non-existent, the toilet was in fact broken and laying on its side exposing the sewage pipe where rats were seen and making the whole inside of the shop smell of raw sewage. Dates on ingredients are changed to extend the shelf life rather than discarding then like they should be. Things like the can opener, vegetable slicer and oven are no cleaner really now than they ever were. Finally, Just to say that if any of your readers think that eating here may make you sick, believe me, even I won't eat from here. I have passed the information onto reporters at the News Shopper, as they have the resources to carry out a full investigation, and I do not. It will be interesting to see what they discover.

During my enforced period of quarantine whilst I suffered with Gastroenteritis recently (fortunately not caused by eating from Pizza Hut, as I don't eat takeaway pizza), I decided that I would grow a beard. Actually I was so unwell that I could not be bothered to shave, but that is another story. Once I recovered, I decided that it was high time for the beard to go, as it was getting itchy and anyway, I don’t think a beard particularly suits me. I am one of those individuals who uses a Gillette Fusion wet shaving razor. It is claimed by Gillette (actually a company in name only, as they are 100% owned by Procter and Gamble) that each fusion blade will give many comfortable shaves before they need to be replaced. The number of shaves varies between adverts and promotional material, but nevertheless they do cite multiple uses. In my own experience I am lucky to get three shaves out of a single blade unit before it is too blunt to use, and in the case of the beard removal, a single use was enough to completely knacker a brand new blade head. Bearing in mind that a four blade pack of Fusion blades costs £9.95, this is no small expense. I have read research which states that each blade head costs the manufacturer around 5p per unit to manufacture – which, by the time the supermarkets have taken their cut is a total mark up of 4,750%. Nice work if you can get it. If you search around online, and even look for buying these type of blades in bulk, there are surprisingly few discounts of substance to be had. One would have thought with such a huge profit margin, some savvy retailer would have bought a few lorry – loads and set up a discount service. I can find no evidence of this. I then got to doing some thinking. Why has no savvy business person seen the gap in the market, and gone to some manufacturing supplier in somewhere like China where high quality, well engineered kit can be made to a customers’ specification in fairly short order, and got them to make huge numbers of “own brand” blades that are compatible with the popular razor hand units, then sell them online at a fraction of the outrageous prices charged by Gillette / Procter and Gamble. I got so taken up with this idea that I contacted a very good friend, who just happens to be MD of one of Britain’s’ most highly respected market research / market analysis companies, and asked his professional opinion on the matter. He said that a couple of the big supermarket chains tried this very approach a few years ago, but soon found that it was a bigger problem than they had initially expected. Procter and Gamble, owners of the Gillette brand, supply something like 25% of all the goods sold in most UK supermarkets. As soon as Procter and Gamble heard of this endeavour, they rolled out their heavyweight lawyers and started muttering about copyright infringement. The supermarkets backed down, unwilling to cause potential disruption to other goods in their supply chain. Thus the whole “own brand” razor blade project withered on the vine. My business contact did say that he could see a potential way an entrepreneur could challenge the current corporate razor blade monopoly – but it would need someone like a modern day Richard Branson to attempt it. In essence, the entrepreneur would need to set up a business in somewhere like the British Virgin Isles, and conduct all business from there (a place where it is very difficult for third parties to carry out malicious prosecutions). They would need to hire a Gillette product manager – someone who knows how the company works and how they think. The blades could be made in China, then shipped in bulk all over the world; all ordering would have to be done via an online shop located outside of the European Union. If this could be kept up for a year or so, to the point where the blades had got a degree of market penetration as a viable alternative to the much more expensive “big name” versions, you might well end up in a situation where Gillette / Procter and Gamble would be forced to lower their exorbitant prices due to the newly introduced competition in the market place. To be honest, this is all a bit of a pipe dream; the idea of selling lower cost, high quality razor blades to compete with the big producers is such an obvious business opportunity that if there was any viable way to do it, someone would have done it by now. The fact that they have not really goes to show how tightly the market is already tied up. Please leave a comment below.

Last weekend local drivers had a new challenge. Bexley Road, from the roundabout by the railway bridge and Fraser Road, as far up as Park Crescent, was blocked off from very early on Saturday morning to midday on Monday. I went for a snoop when I heard the news; The News Shopper is reporting that a Mini Cooper crashed into a parked Mercedes saloon in the early hours of Saturday morning, and this left a mixture of Diesel and engine / transmission oil on the road. Apparently the driver of the Cooper was badly hurt, but his passenger did a runner – which sounds very suspicious indeed. The Police had blocked off the road for a stretch of several hundred metres, and the Fire Brigade had spread some kind of moisture absorbing granules over the leaked fluid. I am unsure why the section of main road was closed for quite so long; all I can assume is that there was damage to the road surface – which would not be surprising – petro chemicals eat away at tarmac like acid eats away at metal. It may well have been that the Borough Surveyor needed to check the damage before the road could be re – opened. Residents in the adjoining side streets have been most put out, as drivers have been using diversions to skirt around the normally very busy closed section of Bexley Road.

The photo above was kindly sent to me by local history expert Ken Chamberlain; it is my current favourite shot of old Erith, as it shows so much life and activity, and is not a posed photograph. It shows the view looking Northwards along the High Street, towards the River Thames. Unfortunately it is impossible to take a modern equivalent photograph from the same location as the historic one, as the Erith Riverside Shopping Centre is now in the way, and the road layouts in and around the centre of Erith have drastically changed in the intervening years. The one thing we do know for certain is that the photograph was taken in 1910. By the looks of it, the shot was taken late on a Saturday morning in Spring or Summer - there are a lot of adult men in the photo, most of whom would be at work if the photo was taken during the week; secondly the shadows are very short, indicating the photo was taken around midday. Quite why so many people are standing around in the street is unclear. There are no apparent indications of preparations for a parade or other festival; it just appears to be a very busy street scene. The one building that is still readily recognisable in modern Erith is the Cross Keys pub, which is shown in the distance in the old photograph. Nowadays it is being renovated and converted into offices and meeting rooms for management consultancy the Aleff Group. They are making sure that the external appearance of the building is as close as possible to the original, as they are keen to preserve the building, which is located in Erith’s conservation area. They take the preservation of the historic building very seriously, unlike the people who ran the nearby White Hart, and who ripped out the listed frontage to install hideous plate glass. I don’t normally like seeing empty premises, but the Potion Bar that replaced the White Hart was definitely a bad move, and I have to say that many locals are glad to see the back of it, now that the business has failed. I may be a tad on the optimistic side, but it would be nice to see the building housing a proper sit – down restaurant. The trouble is, the work required to bring the building up to a decent standard in order to open such a restaurant would almost certainly be prohibitively expensive.

This week I have a guest writer, who for reasons best known to themselves, has asked to remain anonymous. He's one of a small team behind a very influential online publication that has its' roots in the local area:- One little known aspect of the north of Bexley borough is that it saw the birth of a science fiction venture that still continues today. The Science Fact and Fiction Concatenation began in 1987 as an annual fanzine produced by a group of local scientists and engineers reviewing the SF genre. The editorial team has since now largely dispersed across the UK but the zine still continues, including with some editorial support from those still within what was the old Erith borough (now Belvedere, Erith, Slade Green and Northumberland Heath), in an on-line largely text-only webzine. Over the 1990s interest expanded and SF enthusiasts from overseas began to take interest including from Eastern Europe with the Iron Curtain coming down. This led to SF2 Concatenation appearing at Eurocons and a trilingual edition (English, German and Romanian) in 1994. This edition saw Concatenation's first of, to date, 4  European SF Society Eurocon Award wins for 'Best Fanzine' and other categories: all  Concatenation's European Award wins have been when the Eurocon that year was in another country than Britain, and this is a small matter of pride for the team garnering such attention away from their home turf. In addition to running the zine, the team have engaged in a number of allied projects. These have included a number of Eastern European (Romania and Hungary) cultural exchanges in the late 1990s to early 2000s. In addition to members of the team going to Eastern Europe and staying with local fans there (including  to see the eclipse of the Sun in 1999, the team sponsored Eastern Europeans to visit Britain. Among the many things they did included a welcome by Bexley's Deputy Mayor, visiting Dartford Groundwork, seeing the Crossness Engines in Thamesmead, and broadcasting back to Eastern Europe via the BBC World Service. Another of the projects was to catalogue all the SF works up to 2004 that have won SF enthusiast popular voted awards and publish this as a book called Essential Science Fiction A Concise Guide. Today the Concatenation site is still maintained by a couple of locals to the north of the borough. Others who have left the area (and are now elsewhere in Britain) do still contribute. This summer will see a reunion as many of the team will join a few thousand of SF enthusiasts, writers and professionals at the annual World SF Society Worldcon which, (called Loncon) for the first time in many decades, will be in London! Indeed it is arguably worth passing this news along to anyone locally you know with a penchant for science fiction as this year the SF World is coming to our door step. So you can see from all of this that there are those in the north of Bexley borough who have an eye on the future and the far horizons of other worlds.

As I have mentioned in the past, there are weeks when writing the content for the Maggot Sandwich is a real uphill struggle, and other weeks when it pretty much writes itself. This week I have had an embarrassment of content, which makes nailing the update together very straightforward. Reader Stephen dropped me a line midweek to ask if I had heard of a new online service called Jabbakam.com which takes feeds from web cams and network connected CCTV systems and enables groups of people and communities to be able to share the video feeds, irrespective of geographical location. This somewhat coincided with a story in the News Shopper which relates to an Erith resident who has installed four CCTV cameras on the outside of his house in order to monitor and record any criminal activity occurring on his private property. The Council have decreed that he will have to apply for planning permission for the cameras, as apparently under the Town and Country Planning Act, cameras on private dwellings have to be located a minimum of ten metres apart, otherwise they need planning permission. When this law was passed, I could understand this; back in the 1980’s CCTV cameras were large, bulky and unsightly items which definitely could adversely affect the looks of a property. Nowadays modern cameras are tiny and extremely discreet, and any requirement for planning permission now seems utterly superfluous. It seems to me to be a classic case of the law not keeping track of technology. It also seems that the house owner – a chap called Michael Hix, has been unfairly targeted. There are a large number of local structures that have multiple CCTV cameras mounted on them, all of which are very unlikely to have requested planning permission. My understanding of the position the Police take regarding private CCTV is that they are not really bothered, just as long as the cameras are only pointing onto the owners’ property – they (quite rightly) take a dim view of CCTV cameras pointing out into the public street. This seems to be a more enlightened view than that taken by Bexley Council. The fact is, a mobile phone can be used as a portable CCTV recorder just by downloading a suitable app. This video can be shared worldwide with services such as Jabbakam, and the council are living in the Stone Age if they think they are able to control such actions by using a blunt force such as the planning rules. The game has changed, but the Council are unaware of it.

Malcolm Knight of the Bexley is Bonkers website has reported that, just as he correctly predicted, Bexley Council are in the process of halting the move of Bexley Local Studies and Archive Centre from Bexleyheath Library to Bromley. Indeed, his sources indicate that Bexley Council never formally approached Bromley Council regarding the project, and that the whole thing could well be something he describes as an “Aunt Sally” – something set up to make the council look good, as if they have actually been listening to the views of the local population, and amended their plans accordingly, when in fact they had never seriously intended on moving the Archive in the first place. The wording on the Bexley Conservative Party website is currently very vague and non – committal, but it does begin to sound like the Local Studies and Archive Centre may well be safe – for now, at least.

Things are looking even bleaker for the Arabfly Dangleway – otherwise known as the Emirates Airline Cable Car. As I have said in the past, the service gets very little use, and it has been losing money hand over fist since it originally opened just prior to the 2012 London Olympics. Figures have recently been released, which, according to the Evening Standard, show that for the second quarter of the 2013/14 financial year, the income from the cable car was thirty five percent lower than budgeted.  The Mayor’s office had predicted that the £60 million cable car would generate £8.3 million in tickets for the period, but in reality it only took £5.4 million. Transport for London are still in denial, publicly stating that the service is not making a loss, but this can only be because of the quarterly £3.6 million sponsorship package supplied by Emirates Airline, which is effectively propping up the entire enterprise.  As I have previously wondered, once the sponsorship deal comes to its’ first potential break point, I feel that it would be unlikely for Emirates to continue, as the whole cable car issue has become a farce – Boris is reluctant to intervene to improve the ticketing structure, and pretty much anyone who has any familiarity with the service is aware that it is a vanity project which was built in entirely the wrong part of London. It goes to nowhere from nowhere, and over a warehouse, truck park and a couple of derelict factories – all in all, not a very enticing prospect. The fact is, the current exclusion of Oyster card, London Travel Card and Freedom Pass users from the cable car has done nothing to encourage commuters to use the service – which in any case is far quicker by tube. I regularly pass underneath the cable car when I use the Docklands Light Railway, and it is quite usual to see nobody in a cable car at all; indeed there have been occasions where the operators have switched the system off until a customer turned up – just to save on the electricity bill! Whatever does happen, I seriously doubt that it can carry on in the current manner for very much longer – it is haemorrhaging money. Boris needs to pull his finger out.

I read with disgust that Thamesmead resident Michelle Roberts, who was found guilty by Basildon Crown Court of a number of cases of theft - including from her own family members at a wake after the death of her Uncle; she is to be sentenced in March - you can read the full story on the News Shopper website here. Apart from anyone's normal sense of affronted decency after hearing of the crimes against innocent and often vulnerable victims, what makes it worse for me is that I used to know her. She was a care assistant at my late Dad's nursing home. We don't think she ever managed to steal anything from him, but we have no way of knowing what she may have stolen from others. She's thieving scumbag and a nasty piece of work; she deserves to be locked up for a very long time indeed.

I am afraid the ending video this week is somewhat predictable. Pretty much every media outlet has been banging on about how we are at the 30th anniversary of the launch of the original Apple Macintosh computer; I decided not to give the event as much coverage as I otherwise might, due to the fact the story has been so widely reported elsewhere. Anyway, here is a short video summary of the history of the Mac range. Please feel free to either leave a comment below, or Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

A thin crust pizza with extra salmonella Sir?

As I have said on a couple of occasions in the past, there are weeks when I struggle to write content for the Maggot Sandwich, and there are weeks when the blog virtually writes itself. This is one of those occasions. You may recall that last week I once again wrote about the “Scores on the doors” website, and the star rating system for assessing restaurants and fast food outlets for the quality of their hygiene standards. On Wednesday the News Shopper reported that the Pizza Hut in Bexley Road, Northumberland Heath (not Erith, as they incorrectly state in their article) was visited by Bexley Environmental Health Officers in November; the food outlet was apparently in a disgusting state – inspectors found a total of sixteen health code violations; these included items used in the production of almost every pizza such as the pizza oven, the equipment tubs, the vegetable slicer and the fridges and freezers. Even the telephone was so dirty it was considered to be a danger of infection. Inspectors found that items were still considered a health risk after they had been through the dishwasher, they were so thoroughly contaminated. Apparently the place has received a deep clean and its’ hygiene standards are improving, though personally I would not touch the place with a barge pole. The story made The Sun on Thursday, in a large colour article that you can read by clicking here. What is worrying is that the Pizza Hut was one of a total of fifty food outlets in the London Borough of Bexley that scored zero out of five points for hygiene. That is just over seven percent of the commercial food retailing in the borough. Bearing in mind the official recommendation that customers should avoid any place that scores less than three out of five stars, and the area has a lot more places scoring one or two stars, it is very worrying. As I wrote last week, the health inspectors don’t ever actually seem to close any outlets down, they just issue notices for improvement – it is understandable to not want to put staff out of work, but surely a few examples need to be made. It might well shake up the other low scoring establishments. The first commenter on the News Shopper story says, he had not suffered any ill effects from eating food from the Pizza Hut store in Northumberland Heath; I have a theory, so please bear with me. I reckon that the locals who frequent the large number of squalid and unsanitary fast food shops in the area do so on a very regular basis, and in so doing they build up a strong resistance to the harmful bacteria and other nasties that are doled up with their noisome burger, kebab or curry. If an outsider were to sample the same cuisine, they would most likely drop dead in a large puddle of explosive diarrhoea. Just an (unsavoury) thought. Please leave your thoughts in the comments box below – you can select “anonymous” from the drop down list of ID’s if you so wish.

Some time last Monday afternoon, the digit counter ticked over the 150,000th unique visitor to the Maggot Sandwich. This does not mean I have 150,000 readers (though it would be nice!) It means that 150,000 different people have visited the Maggot Sandwich at some time or other – this is after visits from spammers and crawl bots are discounted. I get an average of 15,525 visits per month, many of which are regular readers. Most others seem to do Google searches for subjects I have discussed, or photos that I have taken, so there are a lot of “stumble on” encounters as well. I am pleased to say that if you input the name “Arthur Pewty” into Google, the blog comes out over the Monty Python name that inspired it in the first place. The down side to this level of popularity is that the blog gets a huge amount of spam posing as comments from readers – usually around a hundred items a day; this is the reason that if you do write a comment, it does not appear instantly. I have to log into the Blogger control console and manually check for any genuine comments amongst the spam and dross.

Not that very long ago I attended a conference at which a number of very senior Civil Servants were present. During a conversation with one, I was told with no uncertainty (and I quote) “If you think Yes Minister is a sitcom set in the world of politics, think again; it is a gritty, fly on the wall documentary”. Something that was both amusing and at the same time worrying.  It strikes me that the actions of Matthew Kershaw, the special administrator hired to sort out the troubled South London Healthcare trust has overspend his already huge budget by around £1.1 million. From what local reports are saying, Kershaw spent around £3 million on management consultants from McKinsey (who are renowned for their high fees and lavish staff remuneration). Bearing in mind that the report was designed to establish how Queen Mary’s in Sidcup, and The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich could save money, possibly by closing certain functions such as accident and emergency at University Hospital Lewisham. It is supremely ironic that the special administrator has overspent in order to try and stop a bigger overspend. If Kershaw and his team of tame management consultants cannot control their own costs, it does not bode very well for their ability to advise on cost control for other parties. The final report and recommendations was presented to the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt on Monday; there is currently no news on when the final decision will be made public, although a lot of the recommendations have been trotted out and dressed up by the local press as if they are definitely going to take place. As previously mentioned, I think it is likely that despite the extensive and heartfelt local protests, Lewisham will lose its’ accident and emergency department.

Anyone in the local area who has to commute into London by train (pretty much the only option, as buses into town are ridiculously slow, and you need to make a couple of changes to boot, and the congestion charge makes driving uneconomical) has been hit by a fares rise of 4.2% - well above the rate of inflation. Bearing in mind an all zones travel card from Erith already cost £205.10 before the increase, you can do the maths. Bearing in mind the erratic service and general lack of cleanliness in the trains, not to mention the tediously regular overcrowding that commuters have reluctantly become resigned to, and the picture is not exactly rosy. Things (once again) get Yes Minister – like when one delves into the activities of those behind the fare price hikes. The Rail Fares Minister (and who would have thought there would be such a post – one would have thought that rail fares would have come under the remit of the Minister for Transport, but apparently not) is a chap by the name of Simon Burns. Mister Burns has rather blotted his public image (such that it was) by using a Ministerial car to chauffeur him from his home in Essex into his London office. His excuse for using the car with driver is that he often has to work on classified documents during his journey, which he is forbidden to do on public transport. Just what kind of classified documents can a very junior minister have access to? The design of the next generation of radar absorbing stealth train perhaps? It is not like Simon Burns is the Minister for Defence, or a member of the Intelligence Oversight Committee. He’s a relative nobody, and the excuse of privacy strikes me as being utter rubbish. Mister Burns is renowned for being a particularly heavy smoker, and cannot last more than thirty minutes before needing a cigarette break. If he was to make his journey by public transport, it would take him nearly two hours, and he would be unable to smoke at all; what also gets me, is that as his official car has a driver, it is classed as a place of work, and the rules of the smoking ban are also in effect, so he should not be smoking in his car either. He ought to set up his parliamentary office in the Erith Riverside Shopping Centre - the smoking ban applies there too, but it is so widely flouted that it might as well be a smokers haven. I feel that by distancing himself from the very commuters he is meant to be championing, he has made a pretty big public relations gaffe.  Nothing new there then – as some wag once said “It does not matter who you vote for – the government always wins”.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine turns 20 years old this week. The series was a darker, grittier take on the Trek universe, and a significant number of fans cite the show as their favourite Trek. Like the Next Generation, the original broadcast quality of the picture was atrocious – whilst both shows were shot on film, they were transferred onto NTSC video for editing, which did much to knacker the image quality. As I have previously written, the UK Sy Fy channel are showing ST:TNG remastered from the original film footage, and the HD results are astonishingly good. Whether CBS/Paramount will do the same for DS9 is debatable.  Many fans found the concept of boldly sitting where everyone has sat before was tedious in a weekly format. Despite this,  the show was initially very successful, but this soon dropped off after viewers cottoned on to the fact that the space station was little more than a high tech motorway service station - Crossroads with phasers, if you will. Later series improved with the appearance of the Defiant starship, and the transfer of Worf from TNG, but the similarity to the rival show Babylon 5 did neither programme much good – except to the notoriously partisan sci fi fans. Personally I was not that keen on either series, but it has to be said they were very much in the vanguard of (then) new television science fiction – which was extremely scarce at the beginning of the nineties. Shortly after DS9 got under way, we saw the appearance of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (otherwise known as Beverly Hills 90125 with vampires) and Hercules / Xena and the other sci fi / fantasy shows that became such a common part of the television schedules in the mid to late nineties. DS9 won several awards for its’ art and production design, but the quality of the acting was variable in the extreme, going from as wooden as an Ikea flat pack wardrobe to a level of scenery chewing second only to Brian Blessed in Flash Gordon (a film I love dearly, but which is sorely misunderstood by many viewers, who accuse it of being over the top and camper than a field full of pink and sparkly tents – I have news for them... it was meant to be that way..). Anyway, Happy Birthday Deep Space Nine. At least you were better than Voyager and Enterprise – not that it took very much.

There has been much press coverage of the new ITV reality show “Splash” and to how cringe makingly awful it is. The Guardian had an interesting article referring to the programme, and how it has become some peoples’ “guilty pleasure” viewing.  The discussion covered other shows that could be treated as guilty pleasures – almost all of which I have never watched, as I have no personal interest in reality television or competition type shows. I suppose my equivalent guilty pleasures are “Man versus Food” and “Wheeler Dealers”, both of which I can watch on a virtual loop. One BBC TV show that I feel gets unfairly pigeonholed into both the guilty pleasure and the turkey categories is one that has long faded from many memories is the soap opera “Eldorado” which still has a small, but very loyal fan base. It was the first British TV show to be both filmed and edited from a foreign location; it was the first to feature a disabled person in a lead role, and the first to feature foreign language actors in roles which did not require them to speak English. So sure was the BBC of the potential of the show, they moved the production forward by six months; a decision which led to its’ downfall only a year later, due to the rushed preparations for the show to go live. Much has been written about the programme. If you want to learn more, I would suggest checking out the Eldorado Wikipedia entry here. Shows from my own murky past that could be considered to be similarly so bad that they became good include the iconic “Get Stuffed” – a cookery show that was shown in the wee small hours of the morning on ITV. It was made for what was obviously about £2.50 an episode, and was basically a cooking show for students. Original five minute episodes were aired between 1991 and 1994, though they were repeated into the new millennium. The show had a “wacky” look, but some of the recipes were actually quite good, and able to be made on a student budget. It did have a message for the emerging health and safety brigade (sort of) in the presenters’ catch phrase “and now we wash our handies”. Oh, the thought of it brings back guilty memories of late night post pub RealEat veggie burgers and re – runs of “V”. Happy days.  You can watch a montage of vintage clips of “Get Stuffed” by clicking here. A modern, slightly less anarchic equivalent to Get Stuffed is the excellent and very entertaining "Titli's Busy Kitchen" - an online cookery programme that is amazingly popular and should, in my opinion, be given a slot on BBC2 at the very least. The food demonstrated covers most international cuisine, but there is an emphasis on Asian and Mediterranean food. Titli's recipes tend to be relatively simple and unfussy, as is the case with the low fat, diet recipe for a vegan Lentil Bolognese in the video below. Personally I would have added a wider variety of herbs to the dish; the beauty is, you can always customise the recipes to your own particular taste. Watch the video below, and see what you think.

Over the last weeks I have travelled on the Docklands Light Railway from Bank Station to Woolwich Arsenal on a number of occasions; as I have previously written, the journey gives a fascinating view of the East End of London, with some of the richest, and also the most poverty stricken societies living cheek by jowel. One thing that has remained a constant in these rail journeys is the Emirates Airline cable car - better known locally as the Arabfly Dangleway. Every time I pass underneath the cable car, every single car pod is utterly empty. I have not once actually seen anyone using it. I wonder how long the whole vanity project can last? I read in the week that many countries around the world want to have a giant Ferris Wheel like the London Eye, and many build them, only for them to go bust through insufficient customers. Even the very popular London Eye never operates at capacity - and London is one of the biggest tourist attractions around.  I think that perhaps Boris and his cohorts in the London Assembly had rose tinted spectacles on when they debated the cable car - as previously said, it goes from nowhere to nowhere whilst flying over scrap yards, factories and warehouses - not the nicest of views. Very few tourists, and even fewer commuters use it. It was built in the wrong place - it should have been in central London, where it would have had a better chance of attracting more tourists. I predict it will be out of business by this time next year. 

The ending video this week is a feature length dramatised documentary about one of the most daring and audacious air raids in military history - the bombing of Port Stanley Airport by an RAF Vulcan bomber during the 1982 Falklands War. It is fascinating "Boy's Own Stuff" - and well worth a watch. Leave a comment below, and let me know what you think.