Bridge or Tunnel?

I took the photo above last week whilst out one evening with my camera. I was amazed to see a young adult fox on the roof of the Vinton Metals warehouse, off Manor Road. The photo shows the fox reacting to the sound of my camera's shutter. The animal was scruffy and quite possibly suffering from Mange. It stayed on the roof for around five minutes before disappearing from view. Foxes in the local area have become almost completely indifferent to people; I saw a fox (it may have even been the same one as in the picture) on the footpath a couple of weeks ago. It had been going through a dustbin bag put out for collection. I moved toward it, expecting it to run off, but it just sat there watching me with evident curiosity. I then saw it again on Thursday evening when it was sitting on top of a wheelie bin, no doubt trying to get inside. It has absolutely no fear at all. 

The debate about the possible new cross Thames bridge in South East London drags on. After doing some research, I was astonished to discover that plans have existed in one form or another since 1943, where it was due to form part of the post war London regeneration plan. Then it was seriously proposed in 1979, before being subjected to a lengthy public inquiry, redesigned, subjected to a further inquiry, approved in 1991, cancelled in 1993, revived in 2002, subjected to another inquiry in 2005 – and finally cancelled again in 2008, after pressure from the London Borough of Bexley, who were concerned that there was no provision for improving the road infrastructure on the South side of the bridge to prevent serious congestion. If you look at London as a whole (in essence Greater London already functions as a semi independent state) there are twenty two road and rail crossings to the West of Tower Bridge, and only two to the East – the Rotherhithe and Blackwall tunnels (the Dartford QE2 tunnel and bridge do not count as they are outside Greater London). Bearing in mind that more than fifty percent of the population lives to the East, and a majority of the growth in both housing and jobs is going to come in the future, it seems curious that so little priority seems to have been given to improvements in communications to the East. There are practical problems; as the river travels eastwards, it becomes far wider as it heads towards the Thames Estuary. Any crossing will by nature have to be larger and more expensive than those in the West. This is one of the reasons I recently suggested a runnel crossing between Rainham and Lower Belvedere as an alternative to a bridge between Beckton and Thamesmead at Gallions reach, which seems to be the solution favoured by most of the current group of decision makers. Personally I think the Gallions Reach option is a poor one; whilst the Beckton side of the river is mostly a brown field site, with old factories and other structures which could easily be demolished to make way for bridge approach roads, the same cannot be said of the Thamesmead side – where a large and well established housing estate and residential nursing home are situated. It is evident to me that the planners of the Gallions Reach bridge have not spent any time in the area that the proposed structure will affect, or they would be aware of the unsuitability of the solution they propose. Studies have been carried out as the negative impact that additional traffic coming up Knee Hill in Abbey Wood – a narrow road through Abbey Wood that struggles with anything larger than a small car, yet carries HGV’s in a constant stream, which would only get worse with traffic from a proposed bridge. The areas surrounding Knee Hill would also have their own problems – Wickham Lane in Welling is already heavily congested, which would only get worse, as would the side streets which extra traffic would no doubt use as a “rat run”. There would be additional air pollution on top of any increased congestion levels. If this was not enough, any new bridge would need to be high to allow ships underneath, both to the new cruise terminal adjacent to the O2 Arena, and to the Pool of London. If a bridge had sufficient air draught to allow large vessels to fit underneath, it would also need to have very long approach roads to avoid a too steep gradient during the climb up and down from the cross – river bridge span. Conversely my proposed tunnel would have none of those restrictions, and would connect the A13 in South Essex with the A2, and the South Circular in Kent. I feel that other crossings on the East of London will also be required, especially with the creation of Ebbsfleet Garden City (or whatever name the scheme finally gets given) and the Paramount theme park. It seems as if my outline plan for the “Arthur Pewty Memorial Tunnel” (image here) between Rainham in Essex and Lower Belvedere in Kent have at least been in part listened to by the civic planners. On Wednesday an announcement was made that a formal proposal for a road bridge between the two towns was to be launched by Transport for London, in addition to the Beckton / Thamesmead one, as previously described. TfL’s argument is that having two new river crossings would mean that the volume of traffic over each would be reduced, relieving any potential local congestion problems. My concern is that the river is very wide at Lower Belvedere, and any bridge built there would need to be high, long and consequently very expensive. I am still of the opinion that my tunnel proposal is a superior solution. Please feel free to leave your comments below, or Email me privately to hugh.neal@gmail.com. I just hope that planning consent does not take over seventy years like the current scheme already has.

The cinema industry is starting to get very nervous about the forthcoming Google Glass wearable computer. Vue Cinemas and the Cinema Exhibitor’s Association had bilaterally announced that Google Glass wearers will be banned from their cinemas. They have concerns that the camera in the Google Glass headset will be used to pirate movies by recording them from the screen. They seem to have overlooked the fact that the current version of Google Glass can only record 720p video for a maximum of around 45 minutes, and is thus incapable of recording an entire movie, and even then not in true high definition. They also have a “recording in progress” light which fairly blatantly shows observers what the Glass wearer is doing. I understand the wariness of the cinemas though; the technology being showcased in the current prototype version will be upgraded to increase the devices’ capability before the proper commercial launch; I would not be at all surprised if the actual production version of Google Glass bypasses 1080 HD, and goes directly to 4K resolution. This would be a genuine boon to potential pirates, though any films recorded in this manner would still be as obviously low quality, wobbly and pirated as the current ones readily available on dodgy DVD on Morrison’s car park in Thamesmead from the Chinese pirate DVD sellers. To be honest I think there is just as much resistance to the cinema industry to new, potentially disruptive technology they neither understand or want.

A story from the News Shopper caught my attention this week;  a lady called Michelle Roberts got sent  down for three and a half years for a range of thefts, including from her own relatives at her Uncle’s funeral in Southend in 2011, and from other friends and well wishers when she fraudulently claimed that her son had cancer so that she could obtain money for his treatment. You can read the story here. Many readers think she only got six months in prison, but the judge sentenced her to six months for each offence, which are to run concurrently. What this news article does not say is that I used to know her when she worked at the Gallions View Nursing Home in Thamesmead, where my Dad spent the last six and a half years of his life. She was a care assistant there, and to be honest she was not bad; we certainly would not have taken her for a habitual thief and liar. I notice in the photo the News Shopper use, Roberts has a stethoscope around her neck. This must have just been a pose, as she was not a qualified nurse, or even a senior member of the carers. Knowing the Gallions View team as a whole, I am sure that they will be horrified at the news that a former employee could turn out to be such a nasty and dishonest piece of work.

Regular readers may be aware that I run an occasional feature on independent local businesses, and how their work benefits the economy. This week I have received an Email from Dave Parsons, the boss of Kort Propulsion – a world famous and long established marine engineering company that are based in the old River Police station in Erith High street, right on the river front. The Email contained a press release concerning a large export order the company have recently won:- "Kort Propulsion receives order for further 28 x 7.5M RAMEWC Tugboats in Egypt. Kort Propulsion has received an order for the second batch of twenty eight Tug boats for the Egyptian Army. The 7.5M RAMEWC tug boat which has a requirement of 8 Knots and 2.3T Bollard Pull. The first fourteen recently completed by Kort exceeded the Egyptian Armies expectations and requirements. We are delighted to receive this positive feedback and the new order, it secures the future expansion plans of Kort Propulsion. Managing Director David Parsons comments "For the past 6 years we have been working on this project which started with an order for 1 Tugboat, Fourteen more in 2012, and now the quantity is increasing to Twenty eight. This new order well into 7 figures gives the platform for further growth in the company. "This is a special day and a mile stone for the company, my late Father Norman who started this project back in 2008 will be very proud of what we have achieved in such a small period of time. We are continuing his 40+ years of service to Kort and proving we can continue in his footsteps for many years to come." This new order for Twenty eight boat sets from Alexandria Shipyard will consist of Deutz Air Cooled Engines, ZF Gearboxes, Shafting, Propellers, Kort Nozzle Rudders, Steering Gear, all of the Fenders on board, Electrical Controls, and switchboards. Alignment and commissioning will be carried out by Chock Design UK in Alexandria, Chock Design was acquired by Kort Propulsion in 2013 and helps strengthen the group, this company specialise in mounting and alignment of rotating machinery, it also has the distribution rights to the RotaChock adjustable mounting product which are being used in the mounting of the prime movers in this project. "With further quantities due in 2015, this provides a great platform to build on our success in previous years. It's exciting times ahead for the company. We have added new members to our team with Naval Architects in our design office and another member of family to the team. Ann- Marie Parsons, will be looking after the marketing and image of the company moving forward. A new website will be launched within the next 2 months to show the continued growth." Interesting stuff indeed. When Dave has returned from his annual holiday, I hope to visit their offices to interview him and his staff, and to compile a feature on the well known and long established independent local company.

Last week I covered the new Bexley College campus on the piece of land between Walnut Tree Road and Stonewood Road, which is getting close to completion, and is scheduled to open in September for the new academic year. Whilst I was being shown around by Principal Danny Ridgeway and Deputy Principal Martin Peat, we discussed some of the archaeological finds that had been unearthed on the site before construction of the new college building began. I was very surprised when they told me that the foundations of the original Erith Swimming Baths had been unearthed; I was aware of the original baths, but erroneously thought that they were located on the opposite side of Walnut Tree Road, adjacent to the old and currently unused Carnegie gifted library building. Actually the baths were sited in Stonewood road, which back in the day was known as Station Road. If you click on the vintage photo above, which dates back to 1908 you can see that the baths were little more than a tin shack with an open roof, right next door to the old Erith tram shed; from the original ordnance survey plans, one can see that the baths were opposite a large coal yard, and very close to cattle pens that at the time existed outside of Erith Station. There was also an electricity generating station where the current substation exists, next to the old library, and the smoke from the boilers would have added to the whiff. The place must have reeked – and I would have thought it would be used more by the working man than by the local gentry. The photo shows some kind of special event, possibly involving a game of Water Polo, which was then becoming popular, after the sport made its first Olympic appearance in 1900. I think the aristocratic looking lady and gentleman standing on the poolside to the centre left of the picture are John Parish and his wife. Parish was a wealthy local businessman who owned several enterprises in the local area, including Erith Ballast pit and the accompanying riverside wharf. You can read more about John Parish here. what is tragic about the photograph is that many of the young men featured in the picture would not have survived the First World War, which took place only six years later.

Residents in and around Manor Road have learned with dismay that their inconvenience is going to last longer than they were originally informed. The large scale re – engineering of the main road, which had planned to be shut to traffic for ten weeks has slipped by a further week, only eleven days after the work began. Residents have not actually been informed of the change in plans, the only way they discovered that things were progressing more slowly than anticipated was that hand written notices that had been spray painted on the old road surface on the section between Londis and Frobisher Road which had read “No parking from 3/7/14" were hastily re – written to say “No parking from 8/7/14". It would seem that the new road surface is being laid at a slower rate than was expected. Residents were told that a liaison officer from the surfacing contractor would be available to answer questions, but little evidence of such a person has been seen. The fundamental re-engineering of Manor Road is vital to the economy of the area, and I suppose a little pain now should lead to a lot of gain later – it is just a pity that communications between the contractor F.M Conway and residents are not better.

This week Samsung announced that they would be ceasing production of plasma screen TV’s by the end of this year. A lot of film and sports fans are very keen on plasma technology, as it offers screen images with very deep blacks and almost imperceptible motion blur. The downside to plasma technology is that it uses a relatively large amount of electricity, and the screens can run very hot. This is not a major issue for commercial users – you will often see very large plasma displays used in offices, where they are often inset into meeting room walls. They have become less popular for home use, however, where LED and LCD technology has been improving steadily, to the point where picture quality differences are now minimal. On top of that, the newer technologies consume far less power, and consequently run at a lower temperature. To cap it all, plasma TV’s can be made in resolutions higher than 1080i, but they are very difficult to make reliably at full 4K resolution (the old spectre of “dead pixels” returns as the pixel density increases exponentially between HD and 4K resolutions).  Plasma televisions tend to be substantially thicker that LED screens – something that is a major factor for many buyers, who want the thinnest possible television in their living rooms. As I wrote last week, now is really not the time to be shelling out a large wodge of cash on a new television – the technology is in too much flux right now. Better to spend a small amount on a cheap and cheerful HD TV and save your cash for when 4K TV has matured to the point when the big broadcasters are actually providing 4K programming before investing in a 4K television, which will also have the benefit of having dropped considerably in price. I recall when I first saw a flat screen television in John Lewis at Bluewater. It had a 42” screen and was about five inches thick – and it cost £12,000! Nowadays a telly a quarter of the thickness would be about three hundred quid; the same will happen with 4K, even if the first sets have not been quite so eye wateringly expensive as the very first HD ones were.

A team from Exeter University led by Doctor Fiona Matthews recently published a report:- "The Effect Of Mobile Telephones On Sperm Quality: A Systematic Review And Meta-analysis”  in the journal Environment International. The team of academic researchers have been studying the effects of microwave radio frequency energy from mobile phones on the production of sperm.  Many men carry mobile phones in their trouser pockets, and the team were keen to discover if this could be a contributory factor in the increase in male infertility in the last twenty years or so. Currently around fourteen percent of couples in developed countries have problems in conceiving a child, and mobile phone radiation may be a contributory factor. The University of Exeter team discovered that in normal conditions between fifty to eighty percent of sperm are healthy and viable, but that this falls by a little over eight percent where they have been exposed to microwaves on the same frequency as used by mobile phones. Dr Mathews said: "Given the enormous scale of mobile phone use around the world, the potential role of this environmental exposure needs to be clarified. This study strongly suggests that being exposed to radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation from carrying mobiles in trouser pockets negatively affects sperm quality. This could be particularly important for men already on the borderline of infertility, and further research is required to determine the full clinical implications for the general population." Certainly a cause for concern. You can read the full, extremely detailed and technical report by clicking here.

Long time Maggot Sandwich reader Brian Silk (who is also webmaster of the Erith Town website) is also the Manager of local amateur football club Bexley Invicta. They recently won the Aslie Pitter MBE Trophy after winning 4-2 against Bexley Police F.C. at the Thamesmead Town ground in Bayliss Avenue in front of a crowd of more than a hundred people including local MP Teresa Pearce and Aslie Pitter himself. The Aslie Pitter MBE Trophy is named after a chap who first raised the subject of homophobia in football after playing in the late 1980’s for Sutton United and later Clapham Old Boys; when a fellow team  mate discovered that Pitter was gay, he got dropped from the first to the fourth team the very next day by the manager. He realised he was never going to be accepted just for his footballing talent and quit the team. By 1991 Pitter had set up Stonewall FC – the first gay football team in the UK.  Today Stonewall FC has grown to sixty players, and they field three teams, playing home games at Barn Elms playing fields in Barnes, West London. Aslie still plays for and manages the second team. "Today there are five other gay teams in England so we're no longer unique. But with all that we've been through, from some colleagues dying of Aids to others meeting their life partners, the club has become an extended family, and more than a football club." Bexley Invicta are an inclusive football club with both straight and gay players, and are keen to fight homophobia in the game. Bexley Invicta play their home matches at the Northumberland Heath Recreation Ground. If you would like to know more about the local club, you can visit their website by clicking here. Please feel free to comment below. Brian is also a talented amateur musician - here is the video for his latest song. 

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. 

Then and now.

The photos above show part of Erith High Street, looking East. The first photo was taken at Easter 1981 by me as part of a school project on the River Thames; the second photo was taken by me late last year, and shows a very similar view, albeit with a far higher resolution and with a wider angle lens. As can be seen, the road has not changed dramatically in the intervening years; The fisherman's cottages have been sympathetically restored and now form part of the sheltered housing scheme that has been built behind the old Police station - which itself is now decommissioned and converted into private flats.  The shops to each side of the restored cottages were demolished to make entrance and exit roads to the main part of the riverside sheltered housing block. Other than that, and the increased shrubbery in the Riverside Gardens, there is not a lot of change, all things considered.

The only relatively local music festival  - the Paddock Wood Hop Farm Festival has been cancelled this year, citing poor ticket sales. I think the problem has been twofold – one, people are cutting back on their discretionary spending due to the dodgy economic climate, and secondly (and to my mind more tellingly) the bill of performers was pretty poor when compared to previous years. I think this could well put the entire future of the Hop Farm Festival in doubt; the organisers have really had a big dent put in their credibility. In previous years there were performers like Prince, Peter Gabriel, The Eagles, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan and Morrissey. This year the line up was to have included relatively unknown bands including My Bloody Valentine and The Horrors – hardly headline grabbing acts at the best of times. The festival has hat its’ critics since it began in 2008, mainly due to the perception that the organisation and planning of the event has been poor. The practice of selling a load of tickets for a one day event, then adding a second day (with the need for the purchase of an additional ticket some weeks after the delivery of the first) was something that was often cited by critics. The service infrastructure at the venue was also not always up to scratch; in 2010 there was a complete failure in the drinking water supply, which in any case had been a hose feeding a single tap – hardly adequate for a crowd of around 30,000 visitors. Whether the festival will return next year I don’t know. If they do give it another try, they really need to tighten up their organisation, and also book a couple of big name acts to bring in the punters.

Talking of local events, it will not be too long before the annual Erith Riverside Festival, which is taking place in June; I fervently hope that the weather is better than last year, when gales and torrential rain made the event a bit of a wash – out, which was a real pity as it is normally an excellent event, which attracts a big crowd. You can see some photos from previous Riverside Festivals by clicking here and here. If you get the opportunity to go along, I would strongly recommend that you do so; it is a great day out, as long as the weather stays fine. More details on this years’ event as soon as the information becomes available.

An Apple 1 computer from 1976 is going on sale by auction next week; it is one of an estimated fifty or so still working models thought to be in existence. Interest in all things Apple remains at a high, and this first Apple product is now worth a fortune. It is thought that the reserve price on the model being sold is somewhere in the region of a quarter of a million US Dollars. An Apple 1 with a hand written letter from Steve Jobs, and a signed motherboard by Steve Wozniak sold last year for a little over $400,000! I think that this is about as high as a home computer will ever sell for. There is a widely believed myth that the Apple 1 was the World’s first home computer. I can dispel this – it was not. A year prior to the Apple 1 being released, the MITS Altair 8800 was on general sale in both kit and ready built form. The Altair was a stunning piece of electronic and mechanical engineering, and very much ahead of its’ time. If you have seen the classic 80’s movie “War Games”, the computer the protagonist uses to unwittingly break into the US defence computer network was a IMSAI 8080, a very early clone of the  Altair 8800, though the things the computer did in the film were way past the relatively limited powers of the machine – such is the way with Hollywood! The Altair was more at home playing the original Star Trek video game – if you had it connected to a suitable monitor and keyboard. More on the Star Trek game later.

Back on my update on the 10^th of March, called “Kebabs and College” I noted with dissatisfaction that not only were all of the fast food takeaways in and around Erith of a very poor standard in hygiene (the exception being McDonald’s and KFC, both of which got a 5 out of 5 star “scores on the doors” rating). But that the kebab shops were the very worst offenders of all. I also wrote a piece about the Yildiran in West Street – a kebab shop of incredible popularity, not least with the local Police and emergency services, who seem to use the place as an informal canteen. I know that it is the only kebab outlet that many locals will use. Since I wrote the piece, the Yildiran has now had a visit from the “Scores on the Doors” health inspectors and the results are really not good; it only managed to score a one star out of a possible five. This is extremely disappointing. I really thought that the place would do better; it just goes to show that you cannot tell all you need to know about a shops’ level of food hygiene by simply looking at it. With any luck it will be a wakeup call to the owners and staff – I get the feeling that their trade will dive if the knowledge of the terrible health rating becomes widespread. Once again, I really think that any food outlet scoring lower than a three out of five possible stars should have immediate sanctions taken on them to enforce a close down and deep clean, plus compulsory staff training in safe food storage and preparation. The trouble seems to be that Bexley Council’s environmental health department seem to be essentially toothless. They seem to have just enough staff to carry out the initial shop inspections, but not enough to carry out any enforcement actions. One thing about the whole “Scores on the Doors” rating system is that prior to the inspectors turning up at a food retailer, the proprietors are sent a detailed questionnaire document which they have to complete. Many people find these documents very dense and difficult to understand – and this must be doubly so if English is not your first language. I wonder if the non – completion of this questionnaire may skew the inspection results, as from what I have been told, if the form is not completed, it negatively affects the overall inspection score. If anyone knows, please drop me a line. One scam being run by a couple of local restaurants when they get an awful hygiene rating is very simple, but actually very effective. They change the name of the place. This has very recently happened to the Wazobia restaurant in Pier Road, which rated zero stars, as you can see from the screen grab above. Very suddenly it changed its' name to "K-Spice" though it appears to be run by the same people. On top of this it has a licencing application submitted, requesting that it be allowed to serve alcohol until 1.30am from Monday to Sunday each week. Bearing in mind the restaurant is located below some residential flats, I think it somewhat doubtful that the Council will agree to this, and certainly not so very late at night. Time will tell. 

Google Glass seem to have been polarising public opinion. Whilst only fifty or so pre – production pairs of the enhanced reality glasses have been released to technical journalists and software developers, the impact seems to have been disproportionately large. Virtually any TV or radio show with any interest in technology has featured them; I reckon that Google’s marketing people realised that they could garner a whole load of free publicity by releasing the beta version of the forthcoming finished product to a handful of movers and shakers, and indeed this does seem to have been the case.  I have heard both good and bad comments being made to the whole Google Glass concept. The one that made me laugh out loud was the person who wondered if Glass will become the “Sinclair C5 for the head”. I know what they mean; is it too soon for a wearable computer to take off? I for one don’t know, but it will be interesting to see who buys them when the full retail version comes onto the market in the autumn – the price point will be a major factor in the popularity or otherwise of the product.

I was working from home last Wednesday, as I had a number of long conference calls scheduled. Lengthy telephone conversations whilst sitting in a crowded and noisy open plan office are difficult at the best of times, and it made more sense for me to have the calls in the peace and quiet of my dedicated office in Pewty Acres. Halfway through the morning, I heard the loud whine of a gas turbine engine, and thought “I wonder if it is the Air Ambulance again?” Close but not quite; it was the Police in a very similar type of helicopter. The chopper few over my house a couple of times before heading towards the Larner Road Estate. A few minutes later I heard emergency service sirens from the direction of the estate, but saw nothing. Mystified, I returned to work. Later that afternoon I found out that two World War II era suspected explosive devices had been discovered by the demolition contractors at Larner Road. According to the News Shopper (who were very quick to report the incident) the two “bombs” found on the site were actually inert practice rounds originally used for training purposes. Nevertheless it must have been a bit of a shock for the digger driver and the site workers. What amazes me is that not more wartime bombs are found during local building works. During World War 2, the areas both North and South of the River Thames were heavily bombed, almost to the end of the war. Not only did the area house many war related industries and manufacturing facilities (and thus legitimate bombing targets), but the river itself was used as a main navigational pointer towards London. After all, as long as a Nazi pilot could navigate across the English Channel and find the Thames Estuary, all he then had to do was follow the river until he came to London. A bit of a giveaway really. An interesting and somewhat quirky historical fact related to the wartime bombing came to light a couple of years ago when I was having some work done to install a new garden fence. My builder had to dig holes for the new fence posts; he had brought a compact electrical Kango breaker drill with him. After more than an hour of drilling, he had only made a relatively small dent in the ground. Frustrated, he disappeared for half an hour to visit a local plant hire shop. When he returned, he was armed with an enormous breaker that looked like it could take out a main battle tank at five hundred metres! Even with this vastly more powerful tool, it still took him an hour or so to drill half a dozen holes. It turned out that the bottom of my garden had a layer of reinforced concrete well over eighteen inches deep, which covered an extensive area. It turned out to be the roof of an underground, wartime bomb shelter. After some research at the Bexleyheath Local Studies Centre, I discovered that the cast concrete Mulberry Harbours which were floated over the channel to aid the 1944 invasion of Normandy were constructed on the River Thames at Erith (hence the local road named “Mulberry Way”). Many of the workers who constructed the harbours were former brick workers (prior to the war, Erith’s largest product was building bricks, which were exported all over the world, and helped to build the Empire).  The concrete to construct the harbour elements was imported from the USA by ship, and local labour mixed and poured it. During the war, the maximum thickness of concrete permitted for an underground air raid shelter was four inches, as concrete was under ration. Apparently the workers would take wheel barrow loads of mixed but still liquid concrete home to reinforce their shelters – and this is what my builder had discovered! From what I can gather, the management turned a blind eye to the practice, and it was regarded as being a perk of the job. I can understand management allowing this – after all, your workers are not much use if they have been blown up by a bomb. An interesting local story.

Another River Thames related story has surfaced this week; it is something that really seems to polarise opinion. Transport for London have now published the results of the consultation on South East London residents preferences for a new river crossing. The results quite strongly indicate that people prefer the idea of a fixed crossing, rather than an additional ferry service. The figures reported by the Bexley Times unfortunately don’t make any sense. According to them 51% of survey respondents said that they would prefer a ferry, whilst 71% preferred a fixed crossing such as a bridge. These figures sound like something from the election results of a banana republic. I for one cannot work out how 122% of the respondents can have responded, or are I missing something? Suffice to say, whatever the percentages, it would appear that the bridge option is liked by a greater number of people. As I have written before, I am ambivalent about the whole additional crossing project; unlike fellow local blogger Darryl Chamberlain, who is vehemently against any addition to the local transport infrastructure that will increase the number of cars travelling through South East London and North Kent, I can see the benefits to the economy that better physical communications links would potentially bring.  My own issue is more concerned with the geographic location of any new service. The proposed Silvertown to Gallions Reach site has a couple of problems that I have outlined before – the bridge would need to be higher than 15 metres to permit river traffic to pass underneath – which would not be permitted as it is less than a kilometre from London City Airport, and the south side of the proposed crossing would feed into the residential area of Gallions Reach – a very sleepy backwater of a place which is also the location of a large residential nursing home which I know very well, as my Dad spent the last six and a half years of his life living there. A combination of dense housing and a nursing home located on the doorstep of the southern side of the proposed crossing does not make a good combination, and I am sure that residents would be up in arms once the story gets out.  The trouble with any new civil development in greater London is there will always be someone who is inconvenienced – due to the population density. People are already virtually living in each others’ pockets, and any changes will cause inevitable friction. The other pressure is that any crossing further downriver will become more expensive as the river widens quite dramatically – at Erith it is nearly half a mile wide, for example. The closer to the centre of London, the shorter the distance to span, but the greater the disruption to residents. It is a balancing act I am glad I am not having to manage.

With the latest movie in the Star Trek franchise being on release right now, it put my thoughts back to the dim and distant past of playing the original Star Trek computer game on both the Commodore PET and the Research Machines 380Z 8 bit micro computers in the computer room of what was then known as Picardy School in the very early 80’s. Star Trek was originally written in 1971 on a Sigma 7 mainframe computer operated by the University of California by a chap called Mike Mayfield. The story goes that he was not actually a student at the university, but managed to get a mainframe user account anyway, by (in his words) “less than legitimate means”. Anyway, shortly thereafter he was asked to port the game onto a Hewlett Packard mainframe by some HP engineers. The game got bundled on paper tape with each HP mainframe installation and thus made its’ way into the public domain. In later years, the code was copied and re – written for pretty much every kind of computer system around. When the home computer boom of the 1980’s began, the game was re – named because of copyright problems with Paramount – who by this point were extremely sensitive to any threats to the then burgeoning franchise. Apple wrote a version for the Apple II, which was (no that imaginatively) called Apple Trek. From then on the BASIC programming code for Trek based games got published in magazines like the once ubiquitous Computer and Video Games and it was ported to pretty much any piece of kit that was capable of running a version of BASIC. I would say that it was probably the most ported application ever. The game was relatively simple adaptation of the classic Battleship; the game was addictive and easy to modify. To be honest, there were so few computer games available when Star Trek started doing the rounds, that anything quarter decent was going to be wildly successful as then proved to be the case.

To continue the Star Trek theme, and to end this weeks' update, here is a video from a very popular online cook from Australia; he's preparing a special Lobster Risotto which is a favourite dish of William  Shatner, the actor better known as Captain Kirk. Watch and enjoy.

The Air Ambulance.

On Tuesday afternoon I was strolling homewards from Erith station after a day spent working in Canary Wharf. I could hear the distant whine of a gas turbine engine, but could not determine where it was coming from; giving it no heed, I passed through the Tunnel of Doom (tm) and then up the steps and into Pier Road. The engine sound was suddenly much louder, and I could see a helicopter swooping low over the area in front of Erith Riverside Shopping Centre, where the buses stop. It was the Air Ambulance, and it was clear to me that the pilot was looking for a place to land. He quickly realised that the bus halt area was unsuitable – there were too many street lamps and covered bus stops in the way. The helicopter then climbed, probably to give the pilot and the observer a better look at the area, before it flew towards the river front. I followed on foot, in time to see the helicopter land on the piece of grassland next to the Running Horses pub that used to be home to the old Erith Swimming Baths. As this happened, the sound of Police sirens seemed to be coming from all directions; it was pretty obvious to anyone in the area that something pretty serious had kicked off. I charged home at top speed, picked up my camera and strode back to the riverside as fast as I could. The helicopter observer had exited the craft, and used a large pair of bolt croppers to cut through the padlock which secured the gates in the fence that surrounded the piece of land. It was pretty obvious that the helicopter crew had to do this sort of thing on a regular basis, and came readily equipped. From speaking to the Police who had turned up en masse, it appeared that a young lad had been in some kind of altercation, and had been stabbed in the chest. I did not actually see the victim, as he was being treated further along West Street; the helicopter crew assisted the local ambulance crew for some minutes, before it became evident that they were no longer going to be required. After a few more minutes the helicopter crew returned to their aircraft and they took off, heading Northwards across the river.  I took quite a number of photos, some of which you can see on my Flickr account here, and they are also being used by the News Shopper with my permission here and here.

The much anticipated break in the wintry weather was greeted by pretty much everyone I have spoken to; having said that, there does seem to have been some reluctance to shed the winter garb; despite the welcome rise in temperature, I have still seen quite a large number of people dressed in heavy coats and woolly hats. I am unsure if this is because they are creatures of habit, and are reluctant to change their outer garb, or whether, after such a long periods of bitterly cold weather, they don’t trust the forecast and think it will still be freezing outside. It all rather smacks of the legendary cold weather protections espoused in Victorian Yorkshire and elsewhere – where certain protagonists were sewn into their woollen underwear from Autumn until the middle of Spring.

The Woolwich ferry celebrates its’ 50th anniversary this week; or more accurately, the current ferries that make up the service are in their 50th year of use. There has been a ferry on the River Thames at Woolwich for  far longer than this. The three vessels in service are currently undergoing a major refit in order to extend their service life, decrease their running costs and reduce harmful exhaust emissions. The £50 million project to life extend the vessels is being undertaken by marine engineering firm Briggs Marine; this should extend the operational life of the ships by another seven years or so.  The M.V James Newman, the M.V John Burns and the M.V Ernest Bevin carry between them approximately fifty thousand people and twenty thousand vehicles a week, and make an invaluable contribution to the transport infrastructure of South East London. The seven year life extension is important; it is designed to cover the period in which a new river crossing – either a bridge or a tunnel can be constructed to replace the Woolwich ferries.  The favourite solution with some local Councillors is a bridge at Gallions Reach, between Woolwich and Thamesmead. The counter to this which seems not to have registered on the said councillor’s radars is that the site of the proposed bridge would be located slap bang next to London City Airport. The problem for any potential bridge developer is international aviation law. Under this law, it is illegal to build any structure more than fifteen metres tall within a kilometre of an airport runway. Any bridge built over the Thames at Gallions Reach would need to be taller than fifteen metres to allow ships to pass underneath into the Pool of London, and the new liner facility opening adjacent to the O2 Arena, not to mention the possibility of the QE2 moving opposite the O2 Arena to be converted into a luxury hotel – a story I covered here.

Many people get targeted by cold callers; some of these want to try and sell you compensation services for mis – sold personal loan insurance, or the classic silent call that comes from an automated call centre somewhere obscure and outside of Europe. The big threat nowadays is from what is known as virus call centre scammers.  You may receive a call out of the blue from someone purporting to be from Microsoft, telling you that your computer has a serious virus and that they have detected it remotely. If you go along with this (and many do, not realising that neither Microsoft or Apple will phone users directly) the scam will proceed along these lines. The caller will tell you that your computer has been remotely detected with a number of serious virus infestations. The caller instruct you to download a remote access tool such as PC Anywhere. The caller will then get access to your Windows PC and start the event viewer utility, saying that a number of the event viewer notices are warnings of a virus infection; at this point the caller may well also tell you that your Windows activation key is invalid and has expired. The caller will then offer to “re- activate” your Windows installation for a fee of $160, payable annually, as part of their “software loyalty programme”. All of the above is utter tosh, and completely fraudulent. The scammers are trying to create FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) in the person on the other end of the phone line. These calls are coming mainly from organised fraudsters in India, who have industrialised this phone based crime with large call centres targeting people in Europe, the USA and Australia. Investigations are ongoing as to who the master minds behind this activity are, but in the meantime, don’t believe anyone who phones you saying that you have computer problems – just put the phone down. If you have any questions or concerns, get in contact with me for advice – hugh.neal@gmail.com.

Erith couple Jerry and Wendy Crabtree appear to have stirred up a hornet’s nest in the News Shopper this week. They have made a complaint to Bexley Council regarding the behaviour of staff working for the council’s parking warden contractor. Wendy Crabtree is disabled, and the couple had to fight hard to get permission for a disabled parking bay to be created outside their house in Appold Street, off Manor Road. The traffic wardens were checking cars parked in the road, and in doing so they parked their own vehicle in the Crabtree’s parking bay. The Crabtrees then then returned in their own vehicle to find the bay occupied; they beeped their car horn and asked for the warden to move the vehicle, but they were ignored. When the wardens had finished their checks, they then drove off without an apology. I am surprised by this turn of events because of a number of factors. 1) I have never seen parking wardens in Appold Street or Manor Road – I wonder what caused them to visit? 2) I know Appold Street well – it is the road I recently highlighted as being the most infested with dog mess of anywhere in Erith, and the place where I ruined a previously perfectly good pair of boots after I accidentally stumbled into a particularly juicy and noisome turd – which I discussed at some length a couple of weeks ago. 3) Appold Street does have traffic problems, but not usually caused by people parking badly – quite the opposite- the road gets used as a cut through, or rat run when Manor Road gets busy in the mid afternoons, when traffic to and from the Slade Green Industrial Estate is at its’ peak. At the far end of Appold Street, where it joins with Wheatley Terrace and the site of Abbey Car Breakers, there are a row of bollards sunk into the roadway to prevent cars from taking a short cut round James Watt Way (the road that runs around the edge of Morrison’s car park) to bypass a great wodge of traffic that at times sits almost immobile in Manor Road. The problem is that the bollards are too widely spaced apart, and small cars can squeeze through the gap. This fact has become widely known by local drivers, who break the law using the shortcut all of the time. The mix of dog poo, fly tipped commercial rubbish (I nearly forgot to mention this) and illegally driven cars makes for quite a potent mixture in the street. I don’t think the offending traffic wardens had any clue about Appold Street being used as a rat run – from the News Shopper article describing the incident, the wardens were too busy looking for cars to ticket to actually address the far more pressing issue of the improper use of the road.

I took the photo above last Sunday afternoon; it was the first day when the terrible weather finally broke, and I took the opportunity to take a stroll up to the Larner Road Estate with my camera. Nowadays the place is a ghost town; all but one of the tower blocks have been evacuated, and the residents housed elsewhere until the demolition and reconstruction work has been completed. What was rather spooky was that a lot of the flats still have curtains at the windows, and some windows are even open, making the place feel like people are still living there, even though the tower blocks are blocked off with high hoardings and locked gates. When I visited, the main part of the physical demolition had yet to be started, but by the time you read this, much of the real estate depicted in the photo above will be gone; it is likely that the photos I took of the Larner Road tower blocks are some of the last ever taken, and may with luck become some kind of historical record of the events.As I wrote last week, I do feel that the new name for the reconstructed estate is anodyne and bland in the extreme - "Erith Park" is meaningless and non descriptive of the ambitious new development that will spring from the corpse of the old, failed estate.  

I gather that there have been a number of very specific rumours circulating on Facebook concerning a couple of alleged attempted child abductions in the last week or so in the local area. The first of these was raised at the start of the week, and was concerned with an alleged abduction attempt in Dartford. In my role as Neighbourhood Watch Co-Ordinator for part of Erith, I was contacted by a couple of concerned residents, and I did some research into the subject. It turns out that several non - specific accounts of "Eastern Europeans" trying to abduct British children had been voiced. The Police investigated, and the stories turned out to be incorrect - there was no factual basis to the allegations whatsoever. It does sound like someone with an axe to grind has been making up these tales in order to make scurrilous and racist accusations where in fact there is no case to answer. A second, similar story arose later in the week, where a parent alleged that an Eastern European woman had tried to abduct a child in a very similar scenario in a park in Beckenham. The original Dartford abduction incident has now been dismissed by Police as nothing more than a fantasy that has been fuelled by online gossip mongers on Facebook. I have little information about the second reported incident, but at the time of writing, it seems to have a very similar profile. Abductions of children do occasionally occur, but they are extremely rare, and almost never occur where the parents are present, as has been alleged in the two incidents this week. I get the feeling that these are protective hysteria mixed with a racist subtext, and fuelled by someone with a hidden agenda. As always, time will tell.

About this time last year, rumours started circulating around a number of technology gossip websites; the scuttlebutt was that Google were investing a huge amount of their unbelievable fortune in a research and development of an enhanced reality set of goggles. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, this rumour turned out to be correct, and Google have just launched the pilot of their  Google Glass wearable computer  hardware. A select few Americans, who entered a lottery for the privilege of paying $1,500 for a pre- release set of glasses, are now receiving them, and they are beginning to publish their findings online. Google Glass is an attempt to free data from desktop computers and portable devices like phones and tablets, and place it right in front of your eyes. Essentially, Google Glass is a camera, display, touchpad, battery and microphone built into spectacle frames so that you can perch a display in your field of vision, film, take pictures, search and translate on the go. The principle is one that has been around for years in science fiction, and more recently it has become a slightly clunky reality. In fact, the "heads-up display" putting data in your field of vision became a reality as early as 1900, when the reflector gun sight was invented. Google Glass consists of a spectacle – like frame that has a miniature camera and a refractive prism screen, which acts as both a viewfinder for the motion and still camera functionality, and as an output device for the enhanced reality features, such as simultaneous language translation – a person talking to  you in for example, Mandarin, could have their words translated into English to be read from the tiny screen; the conversation could then also be automatically transcribed to read later.  The prism screen has  a resolution of 640 x 360 pixels, the camera has a five megapixel resolution, and is capable of recording 720p HD video. Connectivity is via both 802.11 b/g WiFi and Bluetooth tethering to a mobile device running an Android device running Android 4.0.12 or higher. Glass comes with 16Gb of built – in storage, 12gb of which is available for the user (the remainder is used by the operating system). Voice recognition software used by Glass cleverly circumvents the problem of ambient noise by using a bone transducer to pick up voice sounds from the wearer’s skull, rather than using a more easy confused conventional microphone. Glass tethers with Android and iOS devices using an app for extended functionality. You will be able to dictate Emails whilst on the go, and quite creepily, developers are working on software that will recognise the faces of your friends in a crowd, which can be linked with data from the Glass’s onboard GPS receiver to record location data. This creates serious privacy and security concerns – what is to stop someone continuously scanning attendees at an event, or even people in your average high street, and comparing them with faces in photos online to record who is where and when? The technology being developed both by Google and large numbers of third party Glass software engineers is awesome – a real sci – fi gadget that is coming into real life. As with many things of this nature, the marriage of cutting edge technology and the law of unintended consequences can produce results that nobody can predict.  The initial version of Glass, code named Explorer is currently being deployed to the beta testers who have paid handsomely for the privilege. The current version cannot be used if you wear prescription spectacles or sunglasses, but later versions are planned which may involve collaborations with companies like Ray – Ban, and versions for prescription spectacles are planned for late in 2013. On top of the previously stated privacy concerns, there are also legal issues relating to the use of Google Glass in public, not least whilst driving. I would expect that in the UK at least they will be classed in a similar manner to mobile phones – and banned from use whilst driving. It will be instructive to see when the first prosecution takes place. British users are not able to join the initial beta rollout of Glass. When the production versions become available later in the year, it is anticipated that the UK retail price will be around the £995 mark – which is sure to come down in time.

The Bexley Times are reporting a story about a graffiti “artist” being found guilty of a string of graffiti offences over a ten year period. The scrote – a certain Kristian Holmes of Sidcup was convicted of a total of thirty eight counts of criminal damage, with repairs to his vandalism costing a total of quarter of a million pounds. The damage was mostly around railway stations and trains; I recall seeing a great deal of graffiti at the South Eastern Trains depot at Slade Green; from the account it seems probable that it was indeed Holmes that was responsible, as he seems to have been “target number one” by the British Transport Police. What amazes me is that Holmes is now thirty two years old, and has a job as an accounts manager. Considering he has been carrying out criminal graffiti damage for the last ten years, whatever possessed him? Even as a twenty two year old, he surely should have gown out of the juvenile desire to vandalise? All I can surmise is that he must be amazingly immature and self obsessed to continue with this childish activity. Hopefully when he is sentenced, the court will punish him effectively. Before you counter “well, what about Banksy then?”. I have first hand experience of Banksy’s early work. Between the year 2000 and 2007 I was based in an office building in Blackfriars Road, on the South Bank of the Thames. All around the area were railway arches and warehouses – a relic of the areas’ industrial past. This was where Banksy first started his unique and humorous take on street art. I recall seeing one of his very earliest pieces – a life sized cartoon of a Coldstream Guard in full ceremonial uniform, taking a surreptitious leak against the pillar upon which he was painted.  Even at the very beginning it was obvious that this was no mere destructive paint dauber, but someone of a unique and unusual talent. I have been a follower of his career ever since.

The end video this week is a bit of a departure; it is a cover version of the classic Genesis track "Entangled" - a song about hypnotic past life regression in 6/8 time. This version is a bit of an update and change from the original, in that it uses heavy fuzz guitar instead of the original trio of two twelve string and a third six string Ovation acoustic guitar, and eliminates the huge Mellotron choir and Moog Taurus bass pedal ending. It is  an interesting take, but to my mind not a patch on the original Prog Rock classic. See what you think, and please feel free to leave a comment below.