All in the best possible taste.

A possible outbreak of unpleasantness has been avoided after some prime diplomacy between the local Police and the operators of “Amazing Bikes” – the specialist motorcycle restoration and customisation company based in Maypole Crescent on the Darent Industrial Estate in Slade Green. Amazing Bikes run a biker’s get together / club on the last Friday of every month. The event attracts a large number of motorbike enthusiasts from all around the region. This popularity has had a bit of an unintended result; the sheer number of bikes heading along Manor Road has in the past caused noise disruption to local residents; a handful of bikers did not do themselves or their club any favours by pulling wheelies and treating Manor Road like a race track. For some reason the main offenders in this respect were not young kids – they were middle aged blokes with £700 leathers, riding powerful racing bikes – exactly the type who should have known better. The August meeting was particularly bad in this respect, and it caused a lot of bad feeling from the residents of Manor Road. You can read some opinions on this page of the Erith Watch website here. Subsequent to this, the North End Safer Neighbourhoods Police Team met with Amazing Bikes on the evening of the September meeting. Some diplomacy and mutual accommodation have been undertaken. The Police report that the club meeting was very well organised, with proper event marshals. They have reminded the club management that they need to ensure members don’t act irresponsibly on their way to and from the monthly meetings; any further transgressions will attract the attention of the traffic division. Understandably nobody wants to go down this avenue. To give Amazing Bikes their due, the speeding and bike gymnastics witnessed by local residents back at the end of August were not repeated at the September meeting; the riders kept religiously to the 20mph speed limit on Manor Road, and the number of bikers using the route was drastically lower than on previous occasions. I think that the darker evenings, and the wet weather may also have had an influence on the situation. If the bikers can keep the noise and minority bad behaviour at bay, I don’t see a problem with peaceful coexistence. Time will tell.

The mystery around the platform extensions on some of the stations on the Dartford to London train line deepens once again. As recently described, some of the extensions were completed, or very nearly so (such as at Erith station) whilst others were apparently abandoned whilst half built (Plumstead is a good example). I thought that this would have been an end to it, at least until the next financial year. I notice that a whole new set of portable site offices and workshops have been set up in the car park of Erith station (incidentally, I cannot recall when it was last actually used as a car park – it has been out of bounds to rail customers for several years). At present I don’t have a clue as to what work is now to be undertaken – but from the number and size of the units, it looks like they are likely to be around for quite some time. The units are converted from sea containers – the interiors have been refitted to turn them into offices and workshops. The bonus is that the units are extremely strong and difficult for a thief to break into, as the windows and doors are covered with steel hatches when the units are unoccupied. If any reader has an insight into this new spate of building work, please let me know.

This week marks the tenth anniversary of a piece of software that shook up the online world like nothing before it. Until 2002, most computer users had only one real choice of web browser. Microsoft's Internet Explorer had something like 98.5% of the market, as the once wildly popular Netscape suite had imploded some time before – the ins and outs of the way Microsoft rose to such dominance in the browser market are not something I will detail here; suffice to say that that battle is very well documented online, should you choose to read more on the subject. So confident of their continuing dominance with Internet Explorer, that Microsoft stopped development with Internet Explorer 6. They famously said that there was nowhere left to take a web browser.  The fact that IE6 was even then renown for being a buggy, slow, full of security holes pile of junk was neither here nor there. M$ had decreed the browser war was over, and that was it. Only not quite. At the end of September 2002 a very early (and at that time somewhat rough and clunky) new open source web browser called Phoenix appeared for online download. It was written by two programmers – Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross, as a fork of the Mozilla (now called the SeaMonkey) software suite – an integrated web browser, Email client, newsgroup reader and web page designer. The two men wanted to remove the bloat from the massive combined package, and concentrate on just the web browser element, as they correctly surmised this was the way forward. Initially they renamed their new browser Firebird, but encountered copyright and other legal issues – there was already a database server application using the Firebird brand. In February 2004 the browser was renamed again – to (and you have guessed this already, I suspect) Firefox. Since then, Firefox (and more recently the Chrome browser from Google) have gone on to utterly shatter the Microsoft browser monopoly, to the point where Internet Explorer is now a minority web browser – despite the continued and very irritating campaign of TV adverts that are currently airing in the UK and elsewhere. The statistics I get from Blogger regarding visits to the Maggot Sandwich show that Firefox is now the most commonly used web browser by readers, closely followed by Chrome, with Internet Explorer coming in third. This may be a bit unrepresentative of the “real world” though, as a lot of companies and government departments still use Internet Explorer, as they have web based applications specially coded to the quirks of that browser family. A lot of corporates are still stuck with IE6 – even though this has been out of support for what seems like an age. To give IE its’ dues, the latest versions (9 and 10) are actually not bad at all, although they are limited to the Windows platform. Much credit to this dramatic improvement can be handed to the Firefox team, who upped the bar on web browser development, and showed Microsoft that they could no longer rest on their laurels. Happy birthday Firefox.

The News Shopper finally picked up on my story about the installation of the Erith Wind Turbine from last week; they currently are featuring a story first posted by them on Tuesday about a man from Slade Green who was taken aback at the sudden appearance of the 285 foot tall structure located adjacent to the junction of Manor Road and Ray Lamb Way; to be honest, the guy cannot take much interest in local events – it was on the Bexley Council planning website for several months prior to work commencing, and notices were attached to a number of lamp posts in the area directly surrounding the proposed site. All I can surmise is that he must have walked around with his eyes half shut. I always read planning applications when I see them posted locally (it is where a significant number of my local stories originate). I also keep an eye on the council planning website – despite it being a bit of a nightmare to successfully navigate. I don’t think he really has very much of a case. Quite a handful of other locals have taken up the cudgel, agreeing with him - and none seems to have been aware of all the planning publicity. I do think the council could have leafletted nearby houses just out of courtesy though - it would have only taken a few minutes to stuff a flyer through letter boxes, thought there would always be a danger that it was binned after being mistaken for another bloody pizza menu. If you live in close proximity to an area designated as for industrial use, it somewhat goes with the territory that new and potentially unusual structures may appear from time to time. I knew that when I moved into the area – it is one of the factors that keeps the house prices affordable, so it is a two way street. The NIMBY's who oppose the wind turbine should have picked another back yard. I do think that the wind turbine is imposing – when you enter Erith and look Eastwards, it does dominate the skyline, that had previously been notable for the Erith Riverside Shopping Centre structure and the pseudo barnlike bulk of Morrison’s. Now the wind turbine makes a new land mark for the area; in my mind somewhat preferable to the hideous fish sculpture (tm) that the town has been notorious for over the last few years. There has been little local resident feedback other than in the News Shopper (whose talkback comments do tend to attract a certain number of habitual whingers - which devalues their worth, in my opinion) so far; it will be instructive to learn what other people think of the newest architectural addition to the town. If there was going to be a wind turbine in the borough, it was always going to be on the cards that it would be located in Erith - it is the only town in the London Borough of Bexley that has direct access to the River Thames, and thus the strong winds that regularly blow upriver; it is close enough to the main national grid power cables to minmise transmission losses, and Bexley Council generally treat Erith and Slade Green as the arse end dumping ground of the borough anyway. To summarise, if you don't like developments in the industrial area, you should not have moved next door, as it is what happens around here. Sad but true.

The CD and CD player have just turned thirty. The Sony CDP-101 CD player (see photo above - click for a larger view) was launched on the 1st October 1982 in Japan, though it did not make it into the UK until the following year. My friend Andy, a fellow Saturday boy in Silica Shop bought one; I recall when he first played it to me - I was impressed by the total silence between tracks, but it was so toppy and squeaky that "Holiday" by Madonna sounded like it was being sung by Minnie Mouse! I also pointed out to him that it sounded like his loudspeakers were wired out of phase, which he hotly contested. It was only very much later (actually, when I was researching this piece) that I discovered that the CDP-101 used a single Digital to Analogue converter to save money. Normally, CD players have a Digital to Analogue Converter (DAC) dedicated for each audio channel. The Sony CDP-101 only had a single one, which had to process the audio for both the left and right audio channels. This was done as a money saving exercise - the DAC was the single most expensive component in the player. The down side of this cost cutting was that audio from the left and right channels was out of synchronisation by eleven microseconds due to DAC timesharing - this was what I was incorrectly detecting as speaker phase shift, though the sonic results were the same. Everyone of a certain generation can vividly recall when Tomorrow's World presenter Kieran Prendiville famously spread strawberry jam on a CD by the Bee Gees and then got the disc to play on live television. What most don't recall is that the jam was spread on the label side of the disc, not the data side; also, early discs were half again as thick as later production ones, and were far robust than those that were sold to the public. 

As an anonymous poster has recently commented, I thought that I would give my readers some background information on event that was planned, but never came to fruition. Back in 2008 my former employers, Radio Caroline planned to move their then newly restored radio ship, the Ross Revenge to a mooring on Erith Pier. I was involved in the plan, as working for Caroline is a bit like joining the Mafia – you never really leave. The organisation is run by volunteers, and pretty much everything is powered by goodwill. Because of my close proximity to Erith Pier (Pewty Acres is less than five minutes walk from the pier) I would have been the ship’s key holder when it was not crewed. The plan was to moor the ship on the pier for a few months, broadcasting using a special event radio licence. This was designed to coincide with the release of the Richard Curtis film “The Boat that Rocked”. The biggest obstacles were the Port of London Authority (PLA) and Bexley Council. The council were concerned that the ship would lay on the Thames mud, and kill small worms that were apparently unique to the area. They did not realise that ships moor at the pier all of the time. I had to trudge round to the pier from Pewty Acres every time a new ship moored up, in order to get photographic evidence to back this up. The police were concerned about the Ross Revenge attracting anti social behaviour – primarily from local chavs trying to break into the ship when unmanned, in order to steal anything they could. The fact was (and is) that the Ross Revenge is built like a fortress; following the illegal 1989 Anglo Dutch raid on the vessel, it was re – engineered to make a future boarding next to impossible. The doors and portholes were armoured – it would take several hours with oxy – acetylene torches to gain ingress to the locked ship. Secondly, any scrotes seen acting suspiciously on the pier would have no means of escape. If the Police sealed off the entrance to the pier, in Morrison’s car park, there is no other way for a person to get away, other than by jumping in the river – and the last time this happened, it ended up in a death. So the perception of risk was far greater than the reality. I understand that there was also an objection from a resident of the retirement flats nearby; from my understanding, several of their claims were malicious – they basically did not want to have a “bunch of scruffy pirates” nearby. They were also worried that they might get harmed by “radiation” from the ship’s radio transmitter. The fact was, the main 50 Kilowatt medium wave transmitter would not have been used. All Restricted Service Broadcasting Licences specify the maximum available transmission power, and this is usually no more than a couple of Watts – not even enough to power an incandescent light bulb. A much smaller, dedicated transmitter would have been used – it is not economic to “turn down the wick” on either the 50kW or either the 10kW or 5 kW transmitters on the ship to less than ten Watts. To be honest, had the 50kW transmitter been powered up in a fit of madness, every fluorescent tube in half a mile of the antenna would have spontaneously lit up, powered by the intense radio frequency field. I have seen this happen myself when I was on board in 1990; the induction of RF into fluorescent tubes is quite a spooky experience – seeing a tube light up on its’ own is counter intuitive (and you can have great light saber fights, as long as you don’t clash the tubes, or wave them around so hard that they shatter!) Anyway, for various reasons that I am not fully party to, the Ross Revenge never made it to Erith. It was a great lost opportunity, as for at least part of the time, the ship would have been open to paying visitors. I was looking forward to guiding locals around what once used to be my own floating home. Incidentally, if you watched "The best possible taste" on BBC 4 earlier this week, the dramatised documentary about the life of Kenny Everett - the section with him on board the Radio London ship, the Galaxy in the mid 1960's, was actually filmed on the Ross Revenge at its' current mooring in Tilbury.

And now to the traditional ending video; I have had some very positive feedback regarding my coverage of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) a couple of weeks ago. People were generally fascinated by it, and several wanted to know more. I pointed them in the direction of Aerosight - the company that owns and operates them. The video below is a piece of test footage, and thus not as slick as the original promotional video I shared when I first talked about the company, and their recent test flights in Erith. This footage, shot in a field, has a humorous ending - look out for the blonde bloke with the fishing rod...

Erith gets a Wind Turbine.

This is a bit of a scoop - I have beaten the News Shopper and the Bexley Times to a story (again!) The new Erith Wind Turbine was installed on Thursday and Friday this week. The work was carried out by Anglo Dutch firm AGRenewables. The turbine is designed to generate up to 500 Kilowatts of electricity, just by harvesting the energy from the wind. Engineering - wise it is most impressive, but cosmetically perhaps less so; it is much bigger than I had been expecting, and quite a bit closer to the junction of Manor Road and Ray Lamb Way than I had anticipated - it does rather dominate the view of the area. It will be interesting to see what the public reaction to the construction will be like. Click on either photo for a larger version.

On my way to Erith Station in the morning, I take a short cut across Elrick Close (home to the erstwhile Pop – In Parlour, and still boarded up and empty a year after its’ sale), past the staff entrance to Erith Police office, and across the car park adjacent to the shops in Pier Road. Amongst the shops is a branch of Martin the newsagent; each morning I walk past at a couple of minutes to seven. There is always a group of six or seven people waiting for the roller shutter to rise, and the shop to open. What amazes me is that the waiting group are without exception comprised of the same people – all of them obviously retired. They are so familiar with the store that one man pops inside before the shutter is even fully retracted, and grabs the portable sign from inside the door, then positions it on the pavement outside, to save the staff from the job. This little tableaux takes place every morning, rain, snow or shine. I cannot for the life of me understand why these people have to get up so early just to get the paper or a pint of milk – they have all day to do it. I can only assume that they have got into such a rigid routine that the thought of not getting up at the crack of dawn simply does not occur to them. I’m not sure if this behaviour is a common occurrence, or something peculiar to Erith. Do let me know if you have seen something similar elsewhere.

Last week I watched Ridley Scott's new film, "Prometheus". Much had been promised, and I like most of his earlier work, including "Alien" and "Aliens" which are amongst my favourite films. "Prometheus" is a direct prequel to "Alien", and as such I was expecting much - after all, he had set the bar so high with his 1979 low budget sci fi horror movie; he virtually reinvented the genre. I had heard some rather mixed reviews of the new movie, but I watched it with an open mind. To be blunt, "Prometheus" is a total mess. The story makes little sense, the cast telephone in their performances (with one exception, which I will come to later) and the character act in a completely illogical manner. Without giving out any spoilers, the film is a confusing and sometimes contradictory experience. The crew of the Prometheus are at the centre of the story, in a similar manner to the original "Alien" movie. Unlike in Alien, where the crew were basically a group of working class manual labourers - space truckers, if you will, who were forced by circumstance to work together to defeat a common foe; in Prometheus they are a hand picked elite group of scientists and engineers - the best of the best. The problem is that the crew of the Prometheus act like a group of unruly teenagers - they disobey orders, smoke dope, drink copious quantities of booze, and generally act in a shambolic and irresponsible manner. None of this helps the suspension of disbelief; much of the time you are left wondering "just why did that character do that? It makes no sense". It is not like there is a reveal, making the uncharacteristic actions clear. Another thing, when the crew come out of hyper sleep, the ship has just made orbit around the alien world. You would have thought that the first thing they would do would be to survey and map the surface, and check the atmosphere - either directly, or by using robotic drones. But no, they just pile in to land, and guess what? They come up directly on the destination they wanted - the alien base facility. The coincidence is laughable - they had an entire planet to choose from, and they picked the right spot first time. All it would have taken was a crew member to say something like "The survey drones have located some kind of artificial structure - we are going down to take a look". Later, when the crew enter the structure, it becomes clear that they do indeed have semi intelligent mapping drones - why do the humans have to go inside what is clearly a dangerous structure, when the drones can do it all for them? Weak plotting. I could go on, but I don't want to give away what little plot there is. I feel that there is a good film in there somewhere, but it needs some drastic re-editing; still, Scott is renowned for issuing cut after cut of his movies, as anyone who has bought multiple versions of Alien, Aliens and Blade Runner can attest. Normally I can suspend my disbelief during a movei, but with Prometheus I found myself shouting at the screen - with one exception, the characters continually act against their motivation. The exception is the character of David, the robot or "synthetic human". The role is excellently played by actor Michael Fassbender, who manages to impart a understated and subtle menace to the character; there is a very nice nod to the fact that the Alien and Blade Runner universes are one and the same. You will have to look carefully though - look for the scene with David's finger prints in macro close up. Overall I would still recommend you watch the film, if you have not already seen it; the photography is beautiful, and the CGI top notch, even if some of the special effects makeup is surprisingly ropey at times, and the ending of the movie is pretty much ridiculous. I will leave it to your judgement anyway. 4/10.

The 15th and 16th of October will mark the 25th anniversary of the Great Storm of 1987. I am unsure as to what commemorations are planned locally, as the storm hit the London Borough of Bexley particularly hard. Something approaching 20% of the mature trees in the borough were uprooted or seriously damaged by the exceptionally high winds. I recall walking along the Woolwich Road in Upper Belvedere the morning after, and seeing a number of the large trees in recreation park down across the road – the fire brigade were cutting them up with chainsaws requisitioned from the plant hire shop in Nuxley Road. One of the very impressive Georgian houses opposite the Eardley Arms was seriously damaged (see the photo above - click for a larger view) – the whole third floor and roof were crushed by a mature sycamore tree that had fallen directly onto it. I recall reading in the local paper that the insurance claim to rebuild the historic house was greater than if they had demolished it and built afresh. Just as well the listed building was lovingly rebuilt, as it is one of the nicest residential properties in the whole of Upper Belvedere. My most vivid memory of the Great Storm was looking out of my bedroom window at the fury of the weather outside; some workmen had been laying a new paved pathway directly outside of my parents house. A pile of large concrete paving slabs had been made ready for the workers to continue laying them the next morning – these I saw flying through the air as if they were pieces of paper. Very worrying, as my parents house was right at the highest point in the area, leaving an unrestricted avenue for the hurricane to attack. The garden shed ended up in a neighbours’ back garden – very much like one of the opening scenes from “The Wizard of Oz”.

As I have written on a few recent occasions, Erith is not short of takeaway food outlets – even if nearly all of them are of dubious cleanliness and low food hygiene standards. What the area is crying out for is a proper mainstream  “sit down” restaurant. We have Wazobia – the African restaurant in Pier Road; as I have written about in the past, but for some unfathomable reason they don’t make any effort to attract non African customers – a real mistake in my opinion; as I have said before, when Bangladeshis came to the UK in the 1950s and 60’s they consciously attracted UK natives to eat their food. As history has shown, their efforts were so successful that curry is now considered a British staple food. In my view Wazobia (and by extension most African food outlets) are missing a trick. Discounting them from being mainstream, the only other places that you can sit down to eat a meal with a knife and fork are the Mambocino coffee house and Morrison’s cafe. Mambocino is disqualified as it does not open in the evening – once the iron gates to the Riverside Shopping Centre are closed, all business inside ceases. As for Morrison’s cafe  - well, you would not exactly take someone out on a date there, would you? That leaves us with nowhere. All other establishments like McDonald’s and KFC are fast food type outlets. Erith has nothing like a curry house or little Italian restaurant, and I feel that having to get on a 229 bus to Northumberland Heath is not the best solution. We need something on our doorstep. There are a number of retail outlet units that still remain un-let in the block next to the new and unloved Erith Library, opposite the Health Centre. I don’t know what kind of leases are available on them, but bearing in mind they have been empty since they were built, I would think an accommodation could be met.  Suggestions on a postcard, or better still, left as a comment below, would be welcome.

I wrote about Erith tattoo studio Point 2 Point a little while back, and how they had moved to new premises recently; some of their rather less sharp witted and observational customers have seemingly been somewhat put off track by the move. The studio have had to tape notices saying "we have not gone out of business, we are now a couple of units further down the block" on the shutters that cover their old shop front. Personally I cannot understand why someone would want to voluntarily disfigure themselves, but as always, my philosophy of "what works for you" takes precedence.

The main video this week is a bit of a blast from the past; it is the full length pilot episode of “Space: 1999” from 1975. It may look laughably dated to contemporary eyes, but when Lew Grade commissioned Gerry and Sylvia Anderson to produce the show, it was the most expensive ever British television series made to date, costing over £3 million to produce. A huge amount of money at the time. In case you have not heard of it, Space: 1999 was a science fiction series set on Moonbase Alpha, where a crew of just over three hundred scientists, engineers and pilots worked, both carrying out scientific research, and also monitoring the huge nuclear waste storage facilities which had been dug deep under the surface of the moon. In this, the first episode the story is set up. A huge explosion in a nuclear waste dump blows the moon out of Earth’s orbit and off into deep space. The series then progresses with the crew encountering all sorts of alien races and strange situations – a bit like Star Trek, but with an entire moon as the vehicle, rather than a starship. For a programme that was intended for a family audience like Doctor Who, Space: 1999 was extremely dark and gritty, especially in the cerebral and brooding first series. Whilst the show went down well in the UK, feedback from the USA was less favourable – a target market for the show. Consequently the second series was lighter in tone and more action oriented. Plans were made for a third series, but these were shelved partly because of poor ratings, but also because Lew Grade was seriously out of pocket on his movie “Raise the Titanic” – one of the biggest box office turkeys of all time. Nevertheless, in most part, Space: 1999 is pretty scientifically accurate (if one ignores the fact that if the moon ever did break orbit with the Earth, it would be the end of all life on the planet – on top of this, any force great enough to blast the moon into deep space would certainly also destroy it). The Eagle spacecraft used in the show are debatably the most credible design for a working spacecraft in any science fiction show, and the stories (in the first season, at least) were well crafted and thought provoking. Whilst Space: 1999 may have gathered dust on the shelves of television stations for many years (it has hardly ever been re – run) it has influenced several modern sci fi series, such as the excellent 2004 remake of Battlestar Galactica. Show runner Ronald D Moore admitted that the opening titles for Battlestar Galactica copied those of Space:1999 almost shot for shot; praise indeed from one of the masters of television science fiction. Do make the video full screen and enjoy an hour of “Breakaway” - the pilot episode of Space: 1999.