Road casualties in Crawley 200-2010 plotted onto a map

First of all I must heartily recommend this post from the As Easy As Riding A Bike blog. It is an analysis of road deaths and injuries in Horsham, based on information from the ITO website’s road casualty map. The rest of the blog is well worth a look too.

It would be interesting to see the same sort of interpretation for Crawley. If anybody does that, let me know and send me a link. If anybody wants to do the work and doesn’t have a website I’ll put it on here for them – I don’t have the inclination to do it myself at the moment.A couple of initial thoughts though. As with Horsham, the vehicle occupant deaths are predominantly on the larger roads like dual carriageways and the motorway and pedestrian deaths feature much older people. The mainjunctions of the A23 feature heavily as locations of fatal and non-fatal incidents. Cycle incidents have a couple of major hotspots at the flyover roundabout and at juntions around County Mall.

As you might expect, vehicle incidents cluster along the A23 although, to be honest, with all the reports in the local papers it would not have been surprising to see even more. Reading the locals you do sometimes get the impression that a teenager crashes their hatchback every week on the A23.

As ever, the data has been out there somewhere for ages, but it becomes so much easier to grasp visually. The map could be a useful tool for council planners to prioritise improvements, for the police to prioritise speed clampdowns and for pressure groups like the CTC to back up their cases. Just at a glance you can see that Martyrs Avenue is an accident hotspot (all those parked cars?) and that the Balcombe Road is one you want to be very careful crossing.

I am interested in the motorcycle incidents though. The ratio of fatal to non-fatal incidents is really low. For every fatal vehicle incident there are loads of non-fatal incidents. For cycle and pedestrian deaths are are fewer non-fatal incidents but for motorcycles there are relatively very few non-fatal incidents. I suspect this is down to reporting. Cycle and pedestrian incidents will get reported far less often than minor car incidents where you need a police report to help with insurance claims. As for the motorbikes, is itreally because there are very few incidents but a huge chance of an incident being fatal? It seems more likely that bikers just don’t want to report minor incidents.

I’m just glad I don’t cycle to Manor Royal from Tollgate Hill any more. The route I used to take is littered with green triangles!

I think the questions were better suited to an event where they could be given time.  A lot were ones you probably wouldn’t know, but could have a good guess at if you had the time to think about it – and time was the thing most at a premium tonight with a room booked only for a limited period, a guest of honour who had to catch a train back to London, and the Labour party’s natural inclination towards long speeches.

Maybe I would have been better sticking to basic pub quiz questions like “who won the FA Cup in 1985?”, “Who had a hit with “Three Times a Lady?” and “Who is the patron saint of France?” but that wouldn’t have been too interesting.  Or would it?

Given that the winners had a score of just under 50% it was obviously pitched wrong and too difficult.   My own slightly logical, dry and mathematical opinion is that it is the relative score that matters, but I guess there is satisfaction in getting answers right and many people would feel happier coming last with 80% than winning with 50%.

MInd you, we don’t want to be accused of dumbing down the exam questions do we?

To be fair, I did throw in a few questions with 50-50 answers, giving everyone an even chance of getting a point and a couple that everyone should get – but the need to rush probably made people trip over some of them.

Anyway…  Hazel Blears was a delight.  I know that a lot of the more active members, being of a left-wing slant, might have preferred McDonnell, Cruddas, or Diane Abbot or Ed Balls but none of the other MPs who were invited were able to come, many not even replying.  Hazel did reply, did come, and said some good things.

And of course, we have to remember that the majority of members may not feel the same way as the far fewer active members – and there were a few members not seen for ages who turned up for a big name who might not have turned up for John McDonnell.  I think Hazel Blears made some friends tonight and set a good example coming out to visit Tory strongholds and not just go out to key marginals and safe seats.

Most importantly, the evening raised (I hope) a lot of money for the party.  OK, we still have a fraction of the resources available to other local parties but at least we can compete a bit now and get printing lots of newsletters and stuff.

Maybe I should publish a few of the questions here and see what my limited readership thinks of them?  See if I am being too hard on myself, or not hard enough.

An even more controversial idea was to redefine the criteria for winning the quiz.  Instead of the winner being the team with the most points, it could be the team that won the most individual rounds.  This would prove hugely unpopular, but I would love to be able to say to all the traditionalists in the party “OK.  If you don’t like my first-past-the-post idea we will go back to the old-fashioned proportional method of deciding the winner if you think that’s more fair.”

I think I’ve worked out why I am not put in charge of things more often…

Now then, back to the questions.  We have a round on lyrics to Yes songs, a round on Sherlock Holmes, a round on George A. Romero’s zombie films and a round on the seven layer OSI model for networking.  Should cover all the bases I think, except sport.  Just time to dredge up 10 facts about US college football.   I do hope I’m joking.

The writer should appreciate that anybody can make a mistake: these are new staff learning a whole new range of foods.  It is not like they are a professional writer who uses “bought” when they mean to say “brought” or anything like that…

Wabi is the kind of place you’d go for a treat. Today, there’s a special Father’s Day lunch, so I have bought my 16-year-old daughter, Maya.

The substantive criticism is that you pay over the odds for what you are getting, but in a way that is a sort of selling point for the more up-market places in Horsham so probably won’t do them any harm.  Wabi will fit right in and probably thrive.

Fortunately the book turned out to be so much better than the DVD I watched at the weekend and I thoroughly approve of it.  I have a fair collection of Sherlock Holmes-related books, and will happily admit to enjoying all of them, even when I know they are not good, so I was likely to enjoy this anyway, but I didn’t expect it to be good as well.

Holmes fans are difficult to satisfy completely: they will always pick up on the slightest little thing that contradicts the official canon – even though the official canon itself has some inconsistancies, like the exact location of Watson’s wound form the Jezail bullet – but this succeeds in not setting off any huge alarm bells.

Of course I may be biased because, according to this book the Holmes family home is in Horsham!

Here is what I wrote about it:

Andrew Lane has a taken on a massive challenge with this book, which is to be the first in a series, because he has set out to write adventure stories for teenagers about the young Sherlock Holmes in such a way that they fit in with the established ‘facts’ about Holmes and so will be of interest to fans of the original stories without taking too many liberties.

I’m a long way from being a teenager myself, but I think I would have enjoyed this book if I had read it when I was, and more importantly I think I would have enjoyed it if I had read it before reading Conan Doyle’s books.  As a straightforward boys’ own adventure story, albeit one with quite modern levels of violence in parts, I reckon it works well enough, but does it satisfy the Holmes fan or just annoy them?

I probably qualify as a bit of a fan myself.  As well as all the original books in several formats I have a decent collection of Holmes pastiches, homages, sequels, and rip-offs. This book is more of anhomage in prequel form.

The book has obviously been written by somebody with a good knowledge of, and affection for, the original stories and a familiarity with the accepted theories about Holmes.  It includes plenty of passing references to things that Conan Doyle mentioned like the mysterious Paradol Chamber and Holmes’ French lineage on his mother’s side.  The uncle’s name in this book is Sherrinford Homes, which was actually one of Conan Doyle’s original names for the character.

What this book cannot do is have the feel of the ‘proper’ books, because they are (nearly) all written from the perspective of Dr. Watson and are very much in his voice. It would be too clumsy and implausible for the teenage Holmes to have his own equivalent and so this is just written as a normal third-person novel. Apart from in the prologue, the narrator only follows Sherlock Holmes.

Although sticking to known ‘facts’ as far as possible the author has had to introduce some of his own, necessarily.  It is fine for Conan Doyle to be vague about Holmes’ origins, but if you are writing a book about his early years they have to be set somewhere and in this case it is established that the family home is in Horsham, and Holmes is at school in Deepdene, near Dorking. But although some new biographical details are introduced I am pleased to say there is nothing that contradicts the Conan Doyle originals.

Other attempts to portray young Sherlock Holmes have had him being friends with the young Dr. Watson and the young Lestrade, which is not only ludicrous but is completely at odds with A Study in Scarlet by Conan Doyle, where Holmes meets Watson for the first time in 1881. There are no such gimmicks in this book and the historical details appear to be well researched too.

Admittedly the pace of this book is faster than the canonical stories, to suit the teenage tastes perhaps, and young Sherlock seems to have an un-natural ability to pick up things like horse riding or boxing just by watching somebody else do it, but I still found it absorbing and I am looking forward to more of the same even if only to find out whether there really is more to the sinister Mrs. Eglantine than meets the eye.

There is also a good chance that younger readers of this book will be tempted to read the originals and create a new generation of Holmes fans, and that can only be a good thing.

Obviously there are things I would have done differently if I had my time again, but that is to be expected.  If you can’t learn from experience there is little point in having it.  Lesson #1 has to be don’t bother turning up at the count before 2am.  It was 6:20 before I got away from Christ’s Hospital.

In terms of votes the outcome was disappointing but not surprising.  With the general anti-government feeling and the understandable temptation to vote tactically in Horsham we were braced for fewer votes and a lower share than before, but suceeded in some of our other ambitions.

We made some good contacts, and had some membership enquiries.  Finishing the campaign with more members than we started was a target, and getting more attention for our campaigns on affordable housing and council play schemes was another, and I hope we can now get more progress on those two issues.  I know Horsham’s Chair will not let those go.

And now perhaps I should think about having a look at what happened elsewhere – or maybe I should get a few hours sleep before attempting that.  I do know about the result in Crawley and I’m really sorry for Chris Oxlade and his dedicated team.  They will be feeling terrible right now, but I’m sure they will bounce back.

The Oxmobile. So much better than the Skudmobile.

It is going to be a long day today.  I was round at my agent’s house at 7am, having already met my first voter of the day.  It was an old lady sitting on the wall outside the place that used to be the polling station at 6:45.

Our first port of call was, ironically, in the Arundel and South Downs constituency.  David had agreed to do a proxy vote for a member, but although they are in Horsham district they are not in the Horsham constituency.

After that we did a bit of a tour of polling stations in the constituency – not all of them: there are 50 in total which is a lot of polling stations.  Some of them have as few as 400-500 voters on their register, but we did get to quite a few villages where I suspect they have not seen a Labour rosette for a long time.

My favourite was the one in Roffey by the shops, because after visiting it we popped into the Roffey Griddle for a small breakfast.  Well maybe not so small for me, but it is going to be a long day and I need to keep my energy up.

I think David’s favourite was the one at Pease Pottage, because it is set up in the Black Swan pub (my local!) although we didn’t stop for a drink.

After all that we stopped off at my place for a cup of tea and found Chris Oxlade’s vehicle parked outside.  Very impressed, and more than a little jealous.  I just have our old Mondeo estate with a Labour car sticker and a couple of posters in the back.

Anyway, I’m now changed, caught up with the news, Twitter and email, and ready to go out again for the harder part of the day – all the knocking on doors.

The day started badly though.  A burst water main meant no water in Broadfield when I got up.  There was just enough in the kettle to have a cup of tea before going down to Worthing for a candidates’ briefing with the chief executive of West Sussex NHS.  That was interesting.  Although all candidates in West Sussex were invited, only a few turned up – me, Emily Benn, Simon Holland, Godfrey Newman and a nother couple of Lib Dems.  Peter Bottomly sent an extremely posh young girl from his office, but otherwise there were no Tories there.

Came back home and put my suits in for dry cleaning¹ and tried to catch up on events on the laptop since the proper PC was inaccessible due to decorating.   Paint was everywhere…  even the kitten has a bit more white than she had yesterday and there was almost as much paint on the floor as on the walls.  A few splashes on my monitor but Jayne says it will come off and it doesn;t mean I can go out and buy an even bigger one.

The only lasting casualty is my bass guitar, which has a broken bridge.

When the paint was dry I went down to put the shelves back up and finished that just in time for a candidates’ teleconference with Douglas Alexander, before going off to the launch in Horsham.

The day ended on a high when I got home at about 11pm and found my newly-cleaned suits hanging up in the hall – just in time for dress-down Friday at work.

1. See – I *am* taking it seriously!

These ladies want you to make Horsham greener

I was out in Horsham town centre this morning doing some anti-BNP campaigning and met these lovely people from Greening Horsham. Their objective is to get as many residents of Horsham to make commitments to make small changes in their behaviour, and display a card in their window to show that they are doing it.

The actions they are suggesting are small in themselves, but would make an impact if enough people took them – why not have a look?As for my own activities…  there were three parliamentary candidates there: me, Francis Maude and Jim Duggan.  Godfrey Newman would probably have joined us, but unfortunately he was out of town for the weekend.   The aim was to persuade people who might otherwise stay at home to get out and vote to register their opposition to the BNP.

I’m sure I will be bumping into Francis & Jim several times in the next month or so at hustings and similar events and I’m sure we will disagree vigorously with each other, but this first encounter was very much on friendly terms as disgust at the BNP and a desire to see a higher turnout are two of the few things we will agree on.  And Greening Horsham is probably a third.

The results are here is anybody is interested.  I can particularly recommend the page telling you how to donate to my campaign

Very impressed by the ability to choose layout options and resize columns.  It is a lot easier to resize columns than in WordPress, and there is a preview of what you are doing visible all the time.  It takes a bit of the challenge out of it all, but it puts all sorts of things within the reach of people who don’t do HTML and CSS.