The Clock Tower.

Many people think that Erith is just a small, semi industrial outer London suburb. What they don't realise is less than fifteen minutes walk from the town centre, and you can be in an area of outstanding natural beauty, which has hardly changed since the Bronze Age. The photo above shows the salt marshes and reed beds that border the banks of the River Thames to the Eastern end of Erith. The photo was actually taken from Erith Yacht Club, and shows the characteristic Erith "big sky" which you can only find in this part of the Borough. The marshes are a great place to visit when the weather is warm - you can walk dogs, or ride a mountain bike, or just go for a stroll. If you do have a dog, you need to be able to keep it under control, as there are a couple of farms on the marsh, which have both sheep and cows grazing in the area. Worth a visit once the incessant rain and high winds finally abate. Click on the photo for a larger view.

After the unwelcome revelation last week of Erith KFC applying for a 24 hour opening licence, I forgot to mention problems I encountered whilst logging my own objection to the plan on Bexley Council’s website. As I have written in the past, the site is very comprehensive, but it is labyrinthine and very difficult to navigate. If you do persist for long enough, you can generally find what you are looking for, but the experience is very far from pleasant. One thing that many of Bexley Council’s website online contact forms have in common is that they require not only your name and Email address, but full postal address, along with multiple phone numbers. Not only are some of these forms not encrypted by HTTPS, meaning that data uploaded onto them could potentially be intercepted and stolen, but on top of this, the logic parser used by the pages does not allow for any contact fields to be left blank. Quite why the council feel the need for so much personal information is a mystery to me.  I particularly found the form field for a mobile phone number a challenge. I tried inputting “N/A” and “I don’t have a mobile phone”, but these were both rejected. I tried a string of zeroes, but this too was not accepted. In the end I was forced to make up a number. I hope some poor innocent does not get phoned by a council worker trying to get hold of me. Quite why the council think absolutely everyone has a mobile phone is a mystery. By making a mobile number a compulsory field, they are effectively blocking a small but nevertheless significant group of residents from accessing their services online. I have also discovered that it is possible that my objections, and those of others may not have been correctly recorded by the site; the council are already aware of this and are currently investigating. I have agreed with them that if Maggot Sandwich readers wish to send me Emails of protest regarding KFC potentially opening 24/7 in Manor Road, I will collate the messages and forward them to Bexley Councillor Chris Ball, who is managing the investigation of the possible website problem. You can Email any objections to hugh.neal@gmail.com and I will ensure that the correct people in the business licence team get the messages. I think it is extremely unlikely the Council will permit the vastly extended opening hours. As I wrote last week, the KFC Drive Through site is surrounded by residential housing on three out of four sides, and already causes a degree of noise and disruption due to the number of vehicles passing through the premises, allied with the smell of frying oil that surrounds the site if the wind happens to be blowing in the wrong direction. I suspect that the application may be “a play”. They may not actually want 24/7 opening, they are just requesting it, but when it gets refused, they then will submit a more “reasonable” change request with the hours that they actually want to extend to. Currently they are open 11am to 11pm. I would not be surprised if they would really like to open at 6am and close at midnight, but to be honest, this is just a guess on my part. Both the KFC and adjacent McDonald’s Drive Through are both in relatively close proximity to the residential care home / sheltered housing on the opposite side of James Watt Way; I would imagine that any licencing changes would have to take into account the potential increase in disturbance to the care home residents. Any increases in the opening hours will be vigorously opposed by local residents. Watch this space.

If this was not enough, Bexley Council Highways Department are shortly to begin work to introduce traffic calming measures to Manor Road. These will include raised pedestrian crossings, traffic cushions and narrowing of the carriageway at key points. How successful this will be is open to debate. Manor Road is very long, and mostly fairly straight. It does suffer badly from speeding vehicles, especially in the evenings when the road is otherwise quiet. It experiences a classic problem – the Western end of the road (the Erith end) is relatively high density residential, whereas the Eastern end (towards Slade Green) is populated by industrial units and heavy industry. The road gets a lot of heavy lorries using it in the daytime, but is relatively quiet in the evenings, when most of the speeding problems seem to occur. It is unclear whether the council work will also include resurfacing the road yet again, as it is crumbling and potholed, even though it has been resurfaced twice in six years. The same can be said  of Fraser Road, which in many places is in an even worse state. I was on a 99 bus last weekend, and was almost thrown out of my seat as the vehicle hit a massive hole in the road just outside of Wickes. Both of these roads urgently need major remedial work, but I somehow doubt that it will get done. The only upside of the pot holes is that some (but not all) speeding drivers may be deterred by the terrible driving conditions. I think it is only time before either a motor bike or bicycle rider has a serious accident, either caused by hitting a pothole and being thrown off their vehicle, or by swerving to avoid a hole and riding into incoming traffic. Either way the local potholes are a danger to all road users.

Some months ago I embedded a trailer for the then soon to be released movie featuring veteran rock band Status Quo, who were appearing in their very own action comedy film, called “Bula Quo”. It looked like amiable guff, and I thought no more about it until last weekend, when a friend popped round with it. I must admit that I was expecting a train wreck of a movie, and sat down in front of the television expecting to laugh at it. I think pretty much everyone who had heard of the project was of the impression that it was some kind of elaborate tax avoidance scheme on the part of the band’s management. It all sounded like a pub conversation that went too far – the Quo travel for a series of concerts on the island of Fiji, and manage to inadvertently get on the wrong side of the local Mafia chief; comic mayhem ensues. Actually, upon sitting down and watching it, the movie is actually OK. It is not going to win any awards; Rick Parfitt has trouble playing himself, and most of the cast seem to have been recent graduates of the Formica School of Acting, but overall it is actually quite enjoyable. A prime example of the humour can be summarised in the following exchange – Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi have been locked in a room with a toy that has been converted into an IED, which is seconds from exploding:- (Rossi) “It’s a doll!” (Parfitt) “It’s a bomb!” (Together) “it’s a blow up doll!” Quite. To be honest, the scenery in Fiji is so stunning that you will have something worth looking at wherever the camera is pointed, and the story unfolds at a leisurely pace. The only believable and well acted role is that played by Craig Fairbrass, who plays the band’s much put upon manager cum minder – he’s completely believable as an ex special forces guy who handles most of the fisticuffs. I commented during the film that Bula Quo is way better than Ridley Scott's pseudo Alien prequel Prometheus, as it has several things that the multi-million dollar sci fi extravaganza lacks; namely a plot that makes sense, characters who have believable motivation and who act in a logical manner. One could never accuse Prometheus of any of those points I am afraid. Bula Quo is cheesy, cheerful and fully aware of exactly how ridiculous it all is. At the end of ninety minutes I have to say that I enjoyed myself – which is most definitely not something I could say after watching  Ridley Scott’s leaden clunker.

You may recall that last week I wrote at some length about the 70^th birthday of Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer. I had a series of very interesting Emails from regular Maggot Sandwich reader Christine, whose Dad also worked at the Dollis Hill Post Office Research Centre before and during the war, and also worked at Bletchley Park. It is entirely possible that her father knew my Great Uncle Horace, who I wrote about last week – we have very little hard evidence of precisely what Horace did during the war, but there is considerable circumstantial evidence he was one of the team that built the ten Colossus computers at Bletchley Park  that cracked the Nazi Lorenz Cipher, and so shortened the war by an estimated two years, saving countless lives in the process. Since then I have recalled a couple of events that took place in the late 1970’s. Uncle Horace’s full name was Horace Payne. He was the chief telephone exchange engineer for the City of London, and was based at the old international telephone exchange in Upper Thames Street (or it may have been King William Street - my memory is hazy - I was very young, and it was a long time ago), which handled all phone lines to America. He was one of only two people who had the key to the international hotline that linked London, Moscow and Washington DC, which was in a room made to look like a store cupboard.  When I was seven or eight, during a school holiday I got to spend the day with him at work. He showed me the hotline room, and actually it was not very impressive - no flashing lights as you would see in a cold war thriller. Instead it was very plain, and painted with what appeared to be war surplus battleship grey. There were a few panels with unlit lights, and a patch panel with some cords attached to it. There was also a small table and a matching chair, and that was about that. Reality did not match the fictional “James Bond” image, which was very disappointing for a small boy. In his office Uncle Horace had a big Victorian roll - top desk, and propped against it was a very tatty and battered looking cricket bat. I recall I was sat with a carton of Kia Ora drink whilst he made some phone calls whilst smoking a horrid roll - up cigarette. For some unknown reason he smoked roll – ups at work, but at home he smoked conventional boxed cigarettes; he had a large collection of vintage cigarette cards, some in albums, and others in large piles which he kept on top the fireplace in his back room. I would imagine that nowadays they would be worth a small fortune.  A junior engineer came in and said that there was a problem with a relay rack (the City exchange was the last one in London to be converted to digital, and at this time was still electro mechanical). Horace slowly got up, stubbed out his fag, then picked up the cricket bat, before winking at me as he said “come with me lad”. We went into the open relay floors, where tens of thousands of electro mechanical relays were clattering as they made automatic phone connections. The junior engineer pointed to a rack where the relays were not moving - they appeared to be frozen or jammed. Uncle Horace said “Stand Back!” to me over the din. He then took a great swing with the cricket bat at the relay frame. There was a loud bang, and the  frozen relays all jumped back into life!. He then fished around in the pocket of his waistcoat for a piece of chalk, and marked a cross on the side of the relay frame, before saying to his assistant “we’ll take this one out tonight - get it booked”. Now - this REALLY impressed me! That was the only time I ever got to see what he did at work; he was extremely diffident about his past, and always managed to steer the conversation elsewhere if the subject came up. Ironically I am now sitting here typing this whilst wearing Horace’s Omega dress watch, which I inherited from him when he died. He was a real enigma, and a lovely man.

Whenever I write about the history of Erith and the surrounding areas, one thing comes up time and time again. People have strong memories of the Hedley Mitchell department store in Erith High Street. From what I can gather, it specialised in drapery, soft furnishings and clothing, including bespoke tailoring. I have had conversations with people who recall that the shop had an upmarket image, and was generally regarded as a premium place to shop – a bit like John Lewis and Waitrose are today. I wonder if any readers have any specific memories, or indeed period photographs of the store that they would wish to share with others? Maybe you worked there, had friends or relatives that worked in the shop, or maybe you were just a regular customer with fond recollections of the place? If so, please feel free to drop me a line to hugh.neal@gmail.com and let me know. Any stories that I publish will get a full credit for the author; I know a lot of people are interested in the history of the shop, and regret the fact that it was demolished when the hideous concrete shopping centre and multi story car park was built in its’ place. In fact most people I have quizzed on the subject question the need for the old Erith to have been demolished in the first place. The general opinion seems to be that with a fairly extensive refurbishment, it would have been preferable to have kept the old town; by now, if suitably looked after, it would have been quite a tourist attraction. Obviously it was not to be, but it is nevertheless interesting to speculate as to what could have happened had things not been demolished in the late 1960’s. I am a little too young to remember the old shops myself, but I am pretty certain quite a few readers will have recollections that they would like to share.

Yet another thirtieth technology anniversary is coming up. A company that until this point thirty years ago which was known for producing cheap (and pretty nasty) home all – in – one hiifi systems decided that they wanted a slice of the home computing pie that was being dominated by Sinclair (the ZX Spectrum) and Acorn (the BBC Micro). The company was Amstrad, who at the time had no history in making computers. Chairman Alan Sugar (way before Sir Alan, and even further from Lord) had noticed what a commercial success affordable computers were having in both the UK and beyond, and with his business head firmly on, he told his design team that they needed to create a computer that had the following properties:- 1) It had to be an “all – in – one” unit, with a cassette deck or floppy drive, and  a monitor included (Sugar cleverly realised that many of the computers would get used in a bedroom. Back in the day, not very many children had their own TV, and a machine that would have to be connected to the family TV in the lounge might not get much use, as Mum and Dad would want to watch Coronation Street, and not have a home computer taking up their precious telly). 2) It had to be made from cheap, easily sourced components, to keep the price down. 3) There had to be a large quantity of high quality, affordable software available for the computer on the day of public launch. Unusually for a computer of the period, the design of the case was finalised before the internal architecture had even been decided. Alan Sugar made sure that a large number of functional prototypes were given to software development houses, so that they could get cracking with writing software for the machine prior to the launch date. The actual electronic design of the computer was farmed out to a number of contractors, many of which were based in the Cambridge area. There was a false start when one supplier had a breakdown and handed back their advance fee for writing the computers firmware. Another company was found, and the Amstrad CPC 464 (cassette deck) and 664 (floppy drive) models were launched on time,  with a pile of good quality software available on day one, just has Alan Sugar had promised. The prices were keen too. A CPC 464 could be had with a green screen monitor for £249, or with a full colour screen for £359 – a bargain when you consider that a colour monitor alone could cost around £200 in 1984 prices. The 664 model with the unusual 3” Hitachi floppy disk drive, accompanied by a green screen monitor became a very popular first computer for many small businesses. Accounting, purchase ledger, spreadsheet and word processing software was produced for the machine, and some of it was of exceedingly high quality for the period and the relative limitations of the eight bit architecture. The CPC range sold very well indeed; in fact in the late 1980’s the Amstrad brand was one of the few computer companies to survive the great computer crash. Even former giants like Sinclair were forced to go cap in hand to Amstrad; Alan Sugar bought all of Sinclair’s intellectual property and assets for a bargain price of £5 million. Three years earlier, Sinclair had been valued at in excess of £200 million. Amstrad expanded their range of computers to include the dedicated word processor and printer bundle called the PCW 8256, which was incredibly successful, shipping eight million units worldwide from 1985 to 1989. The print quality from its’ dot matrix printer was not very good, but the word processing “LocoScript” software was excellent – very easy to use, and quite powerful considering the rock bottom price. Many former, self confessed “technophobes” were introduced to computing by the PCW 8256, and the machines were in popular use for many years after they went out of production.

The advert above was found in a local publication dating back to 1947; the dance studio featured was located directly above the Montague Burton bespoke tailors shop (you may recall I featured a period advert from that retailer last week - who says that I don't plan these things?) I would surmise that F.W Kemp was a precursor to Len Goodman, who has his dance studio in Dartford. It all sounds faintly glamorous, but in reality it is not. Just like the historic Burton dance studio being located above a shop, the Len Goodman Dance Studio is located above a Londis convenience store. I wrote about it, complete with photograph, back in November 2011. You can read all about it by clicking here.

The ending video this week is a real gem. It is a four minute long silent, black and white film that shows the unveiling of Bexleyheath Clock Tower, back in July 1912. The film was shot by pioneering early professional cinematographer Harry Pease. The original film is in the collection of Bexley Local Studies and Archive Centre, which to my knowledge is not relocating to Bromley after all. It is fascinating to see how much Bexleyheath has changed in the last 102 years, although it is still recognisable. One thing is for certain - it was a lot smarter then than now, and the people were much better dressed. Nowadays most of the people hanging around the Clock Tower are tracksuit wearing, tattooed and multi pierced. I think if you were to wear a tweed or flannel three piece suit in Bexleyheath nowadays, a certain percentage of the natives would think you had come from another planet. Do feel free to leave a comment below, or Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

Nothing for something.

The photo above shows one of the commercial successes in Erith Riverside Shopping Centre - the Mambocino Coffee Shop - a cafe that really has formed the social nucleus of the much maligned shopping centre. It is well worth a visit if you are in the locality.

Air pollution in and around Erith has been a problem for years; at a point about ten years ago, it was deemed that several roads running adjacent to the River Thames at Erith had the highest particulate level in the whole of Greater London. Various efforts by Bexley Council Environmental Services, along with the Environment Agency have done much to improve this, through a strict regime of monitoring (which I have a personal involvement with) and very strict enforcement actions, when required. It would appear that whilst overall this has improved the air quality in Erith, there is still a way to go. As you may recall last year I reported about the terrible stench that turned out to be coming from the ADM Oils edible oil refinery off West Street; I reported the matter to Bexley Council, and the smell was gone within a couple of days. ADM are a very large and responsible local employer who at the time were replacing the filters on their factory exhaust system. They acted pretty quickly to curtail the sickly and poisonous smelling emissions. On the other hand, there is another local company that does not take care to comply with environmental laws. Metropolitan Waste Management, in Manor Road, were fined over fifty thousand pounds last week at Bromley Magistrate’s Court, for storing over twenty times the amount of rubbish on their site than they were permitted to do.  Metropolitan Waste Management (MWM) scrap wood (old pallets, door frames, planks  and wood off cuts) and convert it into a form suitable for burning in  waste to energy plants like that located in Lower Belvedere. They were visited on multiple occasions last year by the Environment Agency, who issued a number of warnings concerning MWM contravening the terms of their waste management licence. The company did little about the situation, and over the course of the year the amount of illegally held waste grew to twenty one times the volume permitted by law. When they appeared in court, MWM pleaded guilty and were fined £51,500 for the serious infraction; they were also ordered to pay costs of nearly £10,000, and to pay a victim surcharge of £15 (!) The problem with companies like MWM is that they think that as they are located in a part of Bexley Borough that is thought to be “the back of beyond” that they are exempt, or even unnoticed by the authorities. Manor Road has several recycling businesses of various types, most of whom are law abiding. Cheating the system and breaking the law has given MWM an unfair advantage, although I would think much of that has been eroded by the huge fine. At least  the message has been sent out by the Environment Agency, and hopefully any other local company thinking about testing the law will now be discouraged by the example that has now been set.

You may recall that a while back I featured a trailer for a forthcoming movie starring, starring Status Quo, playing themselves. The movie is called Bula Quo, and is described as “Think The Monkees meets On The Buses meets Tintin in the Congo.” Er – quite. The reviews for the movie are entertaining – here are a few genuine quotations from reviews:- "Whether or not the film is based on real events is unclear; I remain to be convinced that it is even based in our temporal plane. " "The whole thing is, somehow, even worse than you’d imagine" "the plot is more disposable than an airplane wet-wipe" "Not so much a movie, more a pub chat that got way out of hand" "directed with all the grace of a three-legged rhino head-ramming a broken beer cooler." "Unforgettable. Whether you want to or not" on a more positive note. "Amiable cobblers". It seems that nobody makes movies with bands playing themselves any more – so the Quo are back to save the day. Status Quo have never been fashionable; the upside of this is that in their fifty years of existence, they have never been unfashionable either – they just keep on rocking. The in joke of their musical limitations is legendary – what other band could have got away with calling an album “In search of the fourth chord”? in reality Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi are fine musicians, but their hard core audience want them to keep pumping out the 12 bar blues rock that they have proved so adept at for half a century. I reckon the movie will have the last laugh; it patently cost pennies to make, and with the amount of product placement in it has almost certainly broken even before it has gone on general release. By the time it has aired in the cinema, and made it onto DVD, I reckon it will have turned a tidy profit for the band. Critics may laugh now, but I think the Quo will have the last laugh.

This week marks the twentieth anniversary of the release of Windows NT. You may not have heard of Windows NT, but you almost certainly use it in one form or another on a daily basis. Windows NT stands for New Technology, and was designed as the operating system that would replace the DOS based Windows 3.1 back in 1993. Up until this point, all Windows actually did was act as a rather unstable graphical user interface that sat on top of the Disk Operating System (DOS) - Windows itself did very little other than convert mouse clicks into commands to be sent to DOS, that actually did all of the leg work. The down side of this was that the DOS / Windows combination was very unstable, completely lacking in any form of security (you did not even need to log on with a password) it also lacked networking ability, or a properly structured file system - really not something suitable for "serious" computer use. All in all the DOS / Windows combination had little left to recommend it; the world had moved on, and the World Wide Web was beckoning. Since Windows XP, all home and business versions of Windows have converged, so that nowadays you have one desktop operating system for all uses. The original NT kernel (the engine that drives the underlying operating system) is still in (somewhat modified and updated) use nowadays. It forms the basis for Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, XBox 360, XBox One and Windows for mobile devices. It started off back in the summer of 1993 as a brand new, high end operating system for workstations and servers; the first version was called Windows NT 3.1, somewhat confusingly – this was to keep branding similar to the then existent Windows 3.1, the main DOS based version of Windows, which was then steadily gaining in popularity. Windows NT was designed at the outset to be far more scalable, secure and to offer features that earlier versions of Windows lacked. The team that developed Windows NT were the same people led by a very bright chap called Dave Cutler who were behind the incredibly successful and very influential VMS operating system used on DEC VAX mainframes and mini computers. Their brief was to bring something as powerful, secure and flexible to the PC desktop market. To be honest, they succeeded very well indeed. It was only when Microsoft wanted to make NT much more user friendly with Windows XP, based on the NT kernel that things started to fall apart. Functionality was given priority over security, and malware was able to dominate the operating system. Nowadays Windows 7 is the popular mainstay - Windows 8 has had a very poor reception, and really has turned into an "also ran". But what unites all these different products is that underneath they all use the same code - NT. Happy Birthday Windows NT; you are not my personal choice, but many seem to still like you, whatever your quirks and insecurities.

A local businessman seems to have hit on an excellent idea which benefits pretty much everybody involved. Abzar Ali, owner of the Aligor curry house in the Broadway, Bexleyheath, hosted a lunch for pupils of the Crook Log Primary school recently. The idea was to give the school children an exposure to Indian (actually Bangladeshi, but let’s not get picky) food. It seems to have been a great success – the kids got a lunch out, got to try food that they might not have eaten before, and could potentially turn into future restaurant customers. The owner also got some free publicity from the News Shopper. I think that this open house approach might well benefit other restaurants and food outlets in the area. As I have written in the past, the proliferation of African restaurants in Erith, Plumstead and Woolwich has been noted, but they seem to restrict their advertising and publicity to within the African community – they don’t seem to make any efforts to encourage other customers to try them out. Back in the early 1960’s a large number of men migrated to the UK from mainly Bangladesh and Pakistan. Initially they opened small cafes to cater for their desire from food from home. Never people to miss the main chance, some of the more entrepreneurial of them realised that they were sitting on a huge, untapped market of British people who were used to a fairly bland diet, and who might well find the novelty and diversity of a foreign cuisine a real attraction – as most definitely turned out to be the case. The food served in what became the high street curry house might not have resembled what you would be served in a respectable family abode in Lahore, as the dishes were tweaked both for the relatively untutored British palate, and were also made easier to make in large quantities with cheaper ingredients. By this clever tailoring of the food to appeal to the British, many curry house owners went on to earn vast fortunes, both from restaurant chains, and the later move into chilled ready meals, tinned curry sauces and a plethora of other “Indian” style comestibles. The market in the UK alone is now worth hundreds of millions of pounds per year. It strikes me that the African restaurants could take a similar approach – tweak the menu to appeal to the Brits (who nowadays are a lot more open to experimentation than back in the 1960’s) and welcome them in – the tills might then start ringing. To be honest, it may be difficult for the independent African food outlets to gain a toe in a more general market, as big business has already seen the gap. You might be wondering what chain already sells African food? Nando’s – it is marketed as “Piri Piri” style food, but it is basically a watered down version of Southern / West African cuisine. For example, what Nando’s call their “Spicy Rice” is called “Jollof Rice” in Nigeria and much of Africa in general. Nando’s has been an astonishing success in the UK – it is one of the fastest growing food brands, and it has an amazingly high brand value and level of recognition. Unlike many fast food outlets, it has fan sites and even has a UK wide website for reviewers.

Over the years I have recounted numerous brushes I have experienced with beggars, con – merchants and other scam artists whilst I travelled on London’s public transport system. Over the last couple of weeks I have come across a new technique for extracting unwary travellers from their hard earned cash. I have to say that it has got my grudging admiration for being inventive and quite clever. If you travel on the over ground trains in the afternoons, especially during the recent extremely hot weather, you will often find a man or woman quietly walking the length of the carriage, placing packets of tissues on any empty seats that are adjacent to a traveller. Attached to each packet is a begging note, saying the person is homeless and out of work and a “donation” for the tissues would be appreciated. The sheer brass necked cheek of it amazed me – along with the clever exploitation of the current intolerable travelling conditions on the overland trains. A few people do make a “donation”, others like me (who ensure we always go prepared) ignore the subtle begging.  I have reported it to South Eastern trains, who appeared to be unaware of the problem. It has been going on for some time now – I hope that the British Transport Police can get a handle on the problem – I somewhat doubt that the beggars have a valid ticket to travel.  What I also note with interest is that the level of begging on public transport overall seems to be well down on the levels of a couple of years ago; whether this is due to better policing, a low level of success (most travellers wisely don’t give the beggars anything) or a combination of factors, I really cannot say.

I was Emailed the photo above recently; originally I was of the opinion that it was a piece of satire - a spoof on the state of street crime in the local area; now I am somewhat less sure - it may well be a genuine "for sale" advertisement. What do you think? Leave a comment below.

The Google Glass project has provoked a huge amount of interest from all over the world; It would appear that some people think the spectacle shaped computer and eye level display in on general release; in fact a limited number of prototypes have been available for purchase by US citizens only. The finished, commercially released product is not due for some time yet – the road map for release in the UK has yet to be published, but my best guess would be probably in around a year. This long lead time has not deterred the Department for Transport, who it is reported are already mulling over their legal position in regard to motorists using the technology on the UK roads. They have already stated that it will be illegal to use Google Glass whilst driving in Britain. This may well not please the car companies; Mercedes Benz are in the middle of developing an app specifically designed to use the Glass headset to provide a “head up display” featuring speed, distance to the vehicle in front, and integration with the cars’ GPS navigation system. Other manufacturers are planning similar software for their own vehicle fleets. I am unsure about the whole idea; on one hand, anything that detracts the driver from concentrating on the road ahead is automatically a bad thing, yet a heads up display may be the very thing to help them keep concentrating. Some cars already have HUD type displays (thinking the Citroen C6 for example), and they are legal to use in the UK. I think there may need to some clarification of the precise legal details – my thoughts are that once Glass is available in the UK, the Police will try and make a few arrests as an example. Having said that, the huge publicity surrounding the supposed crackdown on the illegal use of mobile phones whilst driving has had little discernible impact on the number of drivers who continue to drive and phone. A Google Glass headset is almost impossible to distinguish from a conventional set of spectacles at more than a few paces away; I think the Police may have an uphill battle on their hands.

Councillor Sharon Massey, the new Mayor of Bexley has made an announcement of such jaw dropping irony this week, that I find it hard to express in sensible prose. She has told the world, (well, OK, the Bexley Times) that she has embraced social media, and will be using both Twitter and Facebook to highlight her work, and to publicise the charities she supports. This is a laudable move, and much to be approved in a move to make the council more transparent and accountable to council tax payers. The irony is that Councillor Massey is the head of the Council which prohibits filming or audio recording of the events that take place in public meetings - contrary to the instructions of Eric Pickles, the Local Government Minister. Malcolm Knight, the writer of the excellent "Bexley is Bonkers" blog has written much on this topic; I too have made a few observations on the subject. Bexley Council is stunningly hypocritical - it is very much as case of "do as we say, not as we do". They are keen to censor and disparage anyone who tries to take them to account over their actions, but they are very keen to be able to express themselves on their own account. 

My television watching habits are fairly well established. I spend most of my time watching factual programmes – documentaries and history are two of my preferred topics. A few weeks ago the local press was agog with a story about an actor who used to appear in EastEnders, who recently bought the Royal Standard pub in Lion Road, Bexleyheath, and is attempting to turn it around from its’ current, threadbare and run – down state. Stuart Antony is taking on what appears to be an up – hill struggle. The Royal Standard has suffered from neglect and a lack of investment for years. I went in there a while back whilst I was waiting for the nearby Robin Hood and Little John to open, and the Royal Standard felt like it was in a time warp from 1985. Hopefully Mr. Antony will be able reverse the fortunes of the pub, which if properly managed, could be very successful. He's made what could prove to be a very astute business decision by turning the pub into Bexleyheath's only bar for LGBT people. Since the Ship in Erith changed hands a few years ago, there has not been a gay bar in the area - I think that as it has no competition, the former actor turned publican could well soon be coining it in. He's catering for a comparatively well - heeled niche market. The Robin Hood and Little John is not a competitor – they serve two completely different groups of customers, and I cannot see why the two establishments could not successfully co – exist, with The Royal Standard catering for the lager and alco – pop brigade, and the Robin Hood and Little John continuing in serving superbly kept real ales and high quality home cooked food in a peaceful and convivial environment.

The ending video this week is a bit unusual - it was filmed in Ravenswood School, Bromley. It is a tribute to former pupil David Bowie, who attended the place when it was known as Bromley Technical School. Anyway, it is a very professionally produced piece of video - just don't hang around watching the end credits - they last even longer than the film itself.  Do leave a comment below.