Crawley Tories start to have second thoughts about their new advertising agency

One of the kids brought this home today.  Apparently they are tied to bus stops all over Broadfield.

Can’t be an ill-advised election campaign poster because he is not up for election for a few years so one has to assume he has been out making friends again.

I guess you have to be pretty upset about something to go to all that trouble but while this is mildly amusing it isn’t really the right way to go about raising issues.

Informative though: I didn’t know he was a twister, whatever that means.

Two down and hope the third will be done before September.   With nearly 40 years’ worth of accumulated books I think I will be packing from now until whenever we move.  Might have to put a couple of days aside just for filling in all the holes in the wall when I take the bookshelves down too.

Looking forward to the change of scenery after more than 10 years in the same house.  I will miss Broadfield but will not miss being at the top of a hill next time it snows!

Might postpone the musical ambitions another year.

Normally I am at work of course, so I didn’t know how many people to expect for a weekday daytime session, but I thought that we had a decent crowd – nine people in Broadfield.  Maybe it is always that good, or maybe the weather encouraged everyone to come out.  Or maybe the recent encouraging opinion polls have whipped up the enthusiasm of members.

On the minus side, I think the weather also encouraged all the residents to go out as well because hardly anybody was in, but it was a nice 90-minute walk if nothing else.

It is not just me having nothing to say or write about apart from the weather though.   One of the RSS feeds I follow is the Horsham local paper. This is what the feed currently looks like:

1. Snow: school closures Friday – updated
2. Real-life man of snow
3. Snow: school closures Friday
4. Snow: care workers pull out all the stops – audio
5. Snow: county council extra workers drafted in – audio
6. Fallen tree blocks Cowfold road
7. Horsham (Aus) 40 degrees; Horsham (UK) -4 degrees
8. Snow: 1,000 999 calls in 24 hours
9. Snow: Thursday – ice creates major problems; schools closed
10. Horsham recycling and rubbish collections suspended [because of the snow]
11. Snow: county warning to drivers
12. Snow: school closures for Thursday – update
13. Snow: police report no major incidents
14. Snow: Warnham hit by power failure
15. Snow: advice for safer driving
16. Snow: audio – county has enough grit
17. Snow: latest disruption
18. SNOW: pictures of obstacles
19. Snow: more snow at weekend
20. Snow: delays and cancellations to transport
21. Send us your snow photos
22. Snow: schools shut across county
23. Snow: traffic chaos in Horsham district
24. Snow: schools gear up for closures
25. Snow: Gatwick Airport runway closed Tuesday night
26. Snow hits Horsham
27. Snow: police warn motorists
28. County council prepares for the snow
29. Snow: latest Met Office forecast

That’s right – of the last 29 entries, going back to Jan 5th, 28 relate to the weather – unless the Cowfold Road tree fell because of the weight of snow, in which case nothing at all has happened in the whole of Horsham that is not related to the weather!

Ironically, the printed version is due out tomorrow morning and I will probably be unable to get it at my local shops… because of show disrupting the deliveries.

Number 28 amused me.  My first thought was that they must have prepared by panic-buying bread, bog rolls and tinned food for their homes, because the state of the roads in Broadfield doesn’t provide much evidence of anything more practical than that.

The story itself says that “gritters will be working round the clock as part of the effort to keep major A and B road routes open” so presumably Tollgate Hill is not a major B road route, despite being the route lorries use to deliver food to Morrisons and Iceland at the Barton.

It also says that they were “preparing to distribute salt in hippo bags to around 100 key locations for hand spreading.  These will mainly be shopping precincts and hilly areas“.  Obviously, and despite the clue in the name, the Tollgate Hill area is not hilly and our local shopping precinct is not a shopping precinct.   That is a pity because delivering these hippo bags sounds like a really good idea and full marks to WSCC for coming up with it.

Maybe the overall picture for the county is as rosy as it is painted but, yet again, the north of the county is very much the poor relation, and within that area Broadfield seems to get the lowest priority. I am reminded of that line from The Commitments where Jimmy says:

The Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I’m black and I’m proud.

We should adapt that for Broadfield!

Nothing fast about Fastway this morning

Sometimes even I am astonished by my naivety.  Perhaps misplaced optimism is a better alternative.

After last night’s walk I knew there would be no buses up Tollgate Hill (no problem as I don’t want them anyway) but I just sort of presumed the more level roads would be better anyway and that the main roads between local shopping parades and the town centre had more chance of having been treated – so I walked the mile up and down hills to the Fastway stop and discovered just how wrong I was.Having got that far I decided it would be easier to walk the remaining four miles to work than to come back up the hill.   I also thought I should make the effort just in case our VIP visitor did manage to make the journey in the afternoon.

By lunchtime we saw some No. 10 buses go past our offices, but they only had town centre as a destination.  By mid-afternoon it was confirmed the VIP visit was off so I came home and found that the No. 10 was going as far as the Broadfield stadium, which helped a lot – I’m still not happy though.

I am giving the optimism a rest for now.  I have decided to not even bother putting out my bins or my four weeks’ recycling tonight.

The iconic Crawley crows feeling the cold

Our car (foreground) in its new location.

Our car has not moved from where it was abandoned parked on Friday – halfway down our road, pointing uphill.

Actually that is only half-true.  The truth is even worse, and a little more embarrassing.  I did move it on Saturday morning.  I got it far enough uphill to turn around, then I went off to the shops.  When I came back it got stuck just a bit further up from where it had been parked and could get no further: all I could do was let it roll/slide back to exactly where I started.Saturday night we had a party to go to, and thought it might be worth trying again but the thing would not even budge an inch – just a lot of wheel-spinning on the ice.  So we just went back home. Our neighbour reckons it is because of the way the treads go on our tyres, but there is no way I am going to go and swap them round in this weather.

Today there was a lot of activity in the road.  Some blokes from right at the top had come down with shovels and hacked away the worst of the ice in the road at the bottom so they could get their cars and vans up to the top, and others had been spreading grit.  I thought it might be worth trying to move my car after all that so I went back down hill, spent ten minutes scraping the windows, and then had exactly the same result as before.  I reckon we could make it up the hill OK if only we could get the car out of its parking space: all that grit and shovel work was only in the middle of the road and not right in front of our wheels.

Earlier on I had taken a walk to the shops and see that there are still a lot of people in the roads off Tollgate Hill leaving their cars at the bottom of both ends of Hollingbourne Crescent just to be sure.  It makes some sense, although it also makes the entrances to Hollingbourne a little more hazardous than they would otherwise be.

I didn’t go as far as Hobbs Road (Crawley’s steepest road – my arse!).  I imagine it is bad, but no worse than Hollingbourne Crescent, Hammond Road, Ranmore Close or Wye Close.  The county council boasts that it has loads of grit – enough to last the winter – so it is frustrating they can’t spare any for those few roads that really need it.   It is fortunate that nobody up here needed an ambulance or fire engine over the weekend!

Anyway…  a few photos from my walk:

The northern entrance to Hollingbourne Crescent

The southern entrance to Hollingbourne Crescent

A closer look at the south end of Hollingbourne Crescent

I’ll be taking the bus to work tomorrow…   What is even more frustrating is that Chrystal’s little Daewoo seems to have to trouble getting up the hill.  Must have the right kind of tyres or something.

Some other PPC either volunteered before me or volunteered more enthusiastically than I did.   Not sure I really fancied the prospect of being on the radio between 2:30 and 3:30 in the morning and then getting up at 6:30 for work.  Even an insomniac has to sleep sometimes!

An even more sure sign of an impending election was tonight’s meeting of the my local branch to select candidates for May’s council elections.  It was a good session and we selected strong candidates for both Broadfield North and Broadfield South.  Not only that but they both live in the wards where they will be standing.

Personally I think you can be a perfectly good candidate or councillor even if you do not live in the ward you represent.  Certainly living elsewhere does not make you a bad councillor, especially in a very compact borough like Crawley – within reason: the Horsham district councillor who lives in Hastings is probably less effective than he could be.

Having said that, some of the electorate seem to prefer a local candidate, and the Tories made a bit of an issue of it in the Northgate election calling their bloke “the only local candidate” when none of the candidates lived in Northgate.  I suspect they will not be making an issue of it in May, as two of their three councillors for Broadfield do not live in Broadfield.

Good luck to Ian Irvine in the North and Colin Moffatt in the South in May!  Its great to see Colin now able to stand in a winnable seat.  In the past he has been happy to be a paper candidate, but now he does not do shift work he has the time to be a councillor and hopefully see some return for the many, many hours he has spent pounding the streets of Broadfield on behalf of other candidates in the past including me, Jayne, Ian and of course Laura and I hope the campaign in Horsham leaves me time to help out back here.

What I have heard is that there were something like six puppies in the house and only one got out.  I hope it is not true, but I think it probably is.  A work colleague managed to get hold of the one that escaped.  A very serious fire – when I came past at 5:30pm today the place was still being guarded by a policeman.

Roadworks on Woodman's Hill, Aug 6th 2008

While walking back from the shops today I noticed that there are some roadworks on Woodman’s Hill.  Dare we hope that these are the long-overdue traffic-calming measures that were part of the S106 planning conditions on the Highwood Park development?

Just after that previous post I got a tip-off from Jim McGough that this work was being scheduled for the summer when the schools broke up.  I didn’t get my hopes up because there have been so many false alarms, and when the schools broke up and nothing happened for a couple of weeks I was resigned to it.

But this looks encouraging. I have not had a close look, so it could just be work on water mains or something, but I think it really is the mini-roundabout.  At least two years later than it was supposed to be done, but better late than never eh?

Collapsed wall at Woodcourt/Treeview

There are quite a few walls built like this in the neighbourhood where I live but not, fortunately, in my street.

Either it is a serious design flaw or they were just built wrong, but either way they fall down really easily.  They all have alternating sections of brick wall and wooden fencing and I sometimes feel that the wooden bits are all that are holding up some of the brick sections.

They mostly surround parking areas, but are also used for garden walls.  And you can see examples of the walls leaning at scary angles.  They always seem to lean or fall outwards which is a small comfort for anyone with kids playing in their garden or a car parked up, but a bit worrying for anyone walking by.  Even so, they are brave people who continue parking under the few bits of brick wall that are still standing.

Why doesn’t somebody do something about it?   Well, Jayne started looking into this a few years ago.  The parking areas are shared between several privately-owned properties.  As such they are the responsibility of all the owners but nothing will happen unless they all club together – and half the properties are buy-to-let with absent landlords who have no motivation to do anything.

Sometimes the fallen sections get removed by someone and a bit of fence appears, but never very quickly.  These shared areas are a real anomaly.  Many residents, especially if they are tenants, assume for some reason that a council is responsible but they are not.  Not even for street lighting. I tried to get extra lighting in one such are when I was a councillor but the end result was that it would have to be paid for by all the home-owners of the close, which meant they would all have to agree – even the absentee landlords.

I doubt that any any sort of resolution will come about, although if a wall fell on somebody I imagine the lawsuit would have to identify the responsible parties.  It would be interesting if our local travellers pitched up in one of these car parks though.  Doesn’t the landowner have to apply for a removal order?  When the land in question is held jointly and severally by a dozen properties with no management company and several of the owners possibly not in the town, or even in the country.