finally got round to citing all the cloned images used in the header
Bluebells and Motorbikes
Bluebells in Oxleas Wood
The bluebells on the easternmost edge of Oxleas wood are reaching their greatest flowering intensity around about now. This photo is a week old, so they be will a lot more vivid by now (although I did increase the saturation a bit to try and bring it up to date). I’m not sure why the bluebells are so happy in that part of the wood, but there are some sections where the whole forest floor is covered in a dense blanket of flowers, and it’s quite a sight to behold. The farm were doing some special walks as well which were advertised in the neighbourhood watch site, I didn’t go but I imagine they knew all the best bits to go to.
Actually this photo doesn’t really show the best view of the bluebells, mainly because it also also shows some recently laid motorbike tracks. It’s not certain whether off roaders will be persuaded to leave the woods alone, but this does remind me that the Friends of Shrewsbury Park are holding an event to safeguard the park against invading cars on the 30th of May:
Put up bunding. We want to stop cars getting into the Park, so will re-install the bunding the Water Board removed from the Garland Road entrance last year. Please bring spades/shovels, stout gloves and wear strong boots – Meet at the junction of the Green Chain Walk with Dothill.
ps – this site is now mobile friendly, which has the added benefit of being much faster to load.
Dosey Doe
The first Woodlands Barn Dance of the year is coming up this Saturday, and has been added to the events list, here’s a bit of eynsham morris to get the mood going, although i gather that skinners rats are a full ceilidh group offering all styles of folk dances… The next event is on the 10th of July.
Brighton Camp, Eynsham by eshootershill
Sat May 15 2010 7:30 PM: Music by Skinner’s Rats; ploughman’s meal included, but please bring your own drinks and glasses. Tickets £10, available from the Farm office. These dances were very successful last year and sold out quickly so please book early to avoid disappointment. Tel: 020 8319 8900
Election
The turnout for the local election was a fantastic 80.4% 67.7% (oh dear I just checked and the turnout figure appears to have been revised), almost double that of four years ago. The most interesting thing to come out of this is that decent voter turnout here appears to be very good for labour, and very bad for the tories, with a 7 point swing to labour (I’m not exactly sure if i calculated it right, but here goes):
lab = sum(total lab vote 2010/total vote 2010)-sum(total lab vote 2006/total vote 2006) = 5% positive
con = sum(total con vote 2010/total vote 2010)-sum(total con vote 2006/total vote 2006) = 9% negative
diff/2 = 7%
On the fringes, the greens got more votes (4%) than the bnp (3%) too, another reversal of national behaviour, so overall, and considering the extremely high turnout, it looks like the residents of Shooters Hill present a fairly socially progressive political outlook compared to the country as a whole.
The lib dem share went down by 3%, which leads me to speculate that the downturn in con/lib fortunes is probably not for want of trying (the tories look to have spent a small fortune on glossy leaflets) but rather the mobilisation of the left. Certainly it is possible that some of the green/liberal vote went to labour, although it’s curious to note that the local green got more votes than their parliamentary candidate for eltham, who only got 419 votes, losing his deposit… Considering that, it looks like shooters hill greens probably did vote tactically nationally but possibly not locally…
I haven’t really given much thought to the national election, but now that clive efford has successfully staved of the tories in their target seat #68 (based on the 68th smallest amount of swing needed – 4.1%), i’m looking forward to seeing what happens with his proposals for green flag paths and signs (and gym!) in eaglesfield park. simon emmett, who was very gracious in defeat, has announced that he will be watching labour in the proposed regeneration of swingate lane shops and in the opposition to the tetra mast (but not the other masts?) – i.e. can the emergency services have it moved somewhere else?
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2010 Council Election for Shooters Hill Ward (turnout |
||
| Name | Party | Results |
| Phillip Jonathan BECKER | Green Party | 659 |
| Mo BURGESS | Conservative | 1,881 |
| Richard John CHANDLER | Conservative | 1,628 |
| Simon EMMETT | Conservative | 1,777 |
| Edward OTTERY | Liberal Democrats | 1,210 |
| Harry Drummond POTTER | Liberal Democrats | 939 |
| Jagir Kaur SEKHON | Labour | 2,917 – ELECTED |
| Barry Ian TAYLOR | Labour | 3,093 – ELECTED |
| Danny Lee THORPE | Labour | 2,788 – ELECTED |
| Steven Thomas TOOLE | Liberal Democrats | 1,009 |
| Eddie Herbert WHITE | British National Party | 513 |
For comparison, here’s the details from last time:
| 2006 Council Election for Shooters Hill Ward (turnout 42%) | ||
| Name | Party | Results |
| Linda Susan Cunningham | Conservative | 1409 |
| Sylvia Gladys Derrick-Reeve | Liberal Democrat | 796 |
| Elizabeth Patricia Drury | Conservative | 1393 |
| Denise Hyland | Labour | 1527 – ELECTED |
| John Kelly | Labour | 1589 – ELECTED |
| Edward Ottery | Liberal Democrats | 736 |
| Simon Lester Tee | Conservative | 1326 |
| Danny Thorpe | Labour | 1540 – ELECTED |
| Michael Westcombe | Liberal Democrats | 660 |
Denial of Service
Apologies for the lack of website lately, for some reason the site experienced more traffic in one day (april the 20th), than it normally does in two months, which didn’t go down too well with the host. It was probably something to do with the post on Dickens, anyway the site trundles on.
Remember to vote next Thursday!
A Tale of Two Cities
This latest bit of hilliana, by Charles Dickens, was stumbled across in the Shrewsbury House Library, and since the copyright has expired it’s reproduced in part here. This scene takes takes places in 1775, but it’s worth bearing in mind that the serialisation of the story began in 1859, so it’s not necessarily a historically accurate account of the hill at that time, it is however Dickens at his (late era) best:
II. The Mail
It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November, before the first of the persons with whom this history has business. The Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up Shooter’s Hill. He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the horses had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however, in combination, had read that article of war which forbade a purpose otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to their duty.
With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were falling to pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested them and brought them to a stand, with a wary “Wo-ho! so-ho-then!” the near leader violently shook his head and everything upon it—like an unusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be got up the hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.
There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all.
Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body, of his two companions. In those days, travellers were very shy of being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on the road might be a robber or in league with robbers. As to the latter, when every posting-house and ale-house could produce somebody in “the Captain’s” pay, ranging from the landlord to the lowest stable non-descript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So the guard of the Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in November, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering up Shooter’s Hill, as he stood on his own particular perch behind the mail, beating his feet, and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest before him, where a loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on a substratum of cutlass.
The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected the passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they all suspected everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but the horses; as to which cattle he could with a clear conscience have taken his oath on the two Testaments that they were not fit for the journey.
The above is just a snippet of the chapter although subscribers will have got the thing in their email/syndicator, to read the whole book, click through to project gutenberg ebook #98.
SHAM
Mobile masts are something of a blot on the landscape, but are they are blot on sleep and other biological processes too? In recent years mobile operators have been busy improving their coverage in this area, with a growing collection of hilltop antenna, comprised of mobile, shipping, and most controversially emergency services base stations.
A recent TETRA related planning consultation period that expired on February the 17th has perhaps rather late in the day caused something of a stir. The mast is on eaglesfield road near the fire station. The opposition to proposals for the upgrading of equipment owned by airwave solutions has led to mo burgess of the greenwich conservatives writing to residents to survey local feelings on this topic; she explains in her letter that she has received a number of complaints. More recently, a number of posters have gone up on lamp posts in the area, with a couple of contact phone numbers at the bottom, not having rung them myself I’m not sure if they are to do with mo burgess.
Base stations in general are unpopular, partly because some of the masts are so menacing to look at, but airwave equipment in particular is seen as somewhat controversial because of the comparatively higher health risks thought to be associated with the encrypted TETRA radio specification they use. Firstly there’s the slow cooking problem, which relates to both those near base stations and handset users (in this case ambulance workers, firefighters and the police). Additionally there are the so called non-thermal effects associated with TETRA. The story about base station risks is fairly complex (i.e. I couldn’t fully grasp the main literature review after one very boring sitting), but it does seem that the continual repetition of signal oscillations at around 17Hz might (to me) be the mechanism behind the sleep disturbances reported in some of the survey findings, although the so-called nocebo (negative) effect can’t necessarily be ruled out in that study due to the way it was set up. This all led me to speculate that since neural firing patterns oscillate around 11-39Hz during open eyed wakefulness and 2-7Hz during sleep, a constant stream of 17Hz signal frequencies pulsing through ones bedroom wall and head at night could potentially induce wakefulness?
The experiments on the topic is divided into two camps, and Epidemiologists haven’t really been able to investigate TETRA yet as they probably need more time (they are now going over >10 year data for GSM and even that has been divisive). The general scientific consensus seems to be that more long-term adverse health affects have not been ruled out for this technology, and with the previous concerns over some of the signal frequencies and microwave radiation used in TETRA, the response of some people is quite reasonably, “Why should we be the guinea pigs!”
Air Quality
I got my first air quality warning from airtext.info today, after three whole months of London air quality giving no cause for alarm!
The london air quality network, who recently released a popular updater for iphones have reported a couple of moderate particulate readings as a result of light southeasterly winds bringing particles over from Europe coupled with the build up of traffic emissions during a cold and foggy night over here. Their highest readings tend to coincide with guy fawkes night!
Anyway apart from thinking about how dirty London is, here’s a nice rose plot of the 2009 average wind direction (in degrees from north) and speed (in meters per second) of readings taken from the falconwood site. I had always thought that the prevailing wind came from mexico (roughly 210°-240°), and usually the kites in blackheath do catch that breeze… but judging by the data (which are apparently to interpreted with some caution due to obstructions) the easterly wind (90°) seems to be the strongest, presumably it whistles up the thames all the way from siberia, brrr!
** Update ** for a bonus, which is mainly useful to those who are wondering where a case of what the daily mail infamously referred to as ‘le/der stink‘ might be coming from, here’s an updater that retrieves the wind data for the last seven days.
Severndroog gets closer to its public!
Severndroog Castle Restoration and Development: £595,500 grant, LB Greenwich.
The triangular, three-storey Grade II* listed castle stands on the top of Shooters Hill where it is a local landmark. Built in 1784, it commemorates a long-forgotten British naval victory against pirates marauding in the Indian Ocean. Closed to the public for 20 years, it was identified as a key project for repair in the BBC TV series Restoration in 2004 but failed to reach the finals. Thanks to the HLF grant it will be restored as a visitor attraction, educational centre and tea room. It will be run by a local trust and volunteers will be trained to act as guides, to staff the café and to assume the day-to-day management of the castle as well helping at future heritage events.
David Goodfellow of the Severndroog Castle Building Preservation Trust said:
“We are delighted with the confirmed award from HLF, which is a major step forward in achieving our objective of restoring this unique building. There is still plenty of hard work to be done but this decision, together with grant funding support from a number of other organisations as well as significant support from Greenwich Council and the local community, has greatly increased our sense of optimism about reopening a fully-restored Severndroog Castle to the public.”
According to the mercury the £595k amounts to 70% of the total required (595000÷.7=£850k) so that leaves 255k to go, minus the £1,573 raised by sponsor a brick for severndroog = £253,427 left to go… although that particular arm of the campaign has the aim of raising £50k.
This is a significant move by the Lottery considering that that last time they earmarked money for the campaign it was for the comparatively smaller amount of £250k November 2008. It was additionally interesting to note that after Camden, Greenwich benefits from the most lottery heritage money, so I think this is a timely reminder to get behind the campaign at the grassroots level and buy your loved ones a brick (well, a sponsor’s certificate)!
Woodlands Farm Lambing Day
Woodlands farm are about to present the first of their 4 annual events, the peak of lambing season! The event is on saturday april the 3rd from 1100-1630. hope to see you there.
