T I M B E R R R R ! ! !

Sycamore (Acer pseudoplantanus) is an invasive tree species native to Central and Eastern Europe and introduced into the UK during the Tudor period. Because of it's rugged nature, tolerating a wide range of climates and soil types it has become popular as the tree of choice for new urban housing developments. This causes all sorts of problems later on though when it's large size (it can grow to 35 meters high) and spreading root system can damage the surrounding buildings it was intended to decorate.

It's famous helicopter winged seeds which are produced every year in vast numbers spread far and wide, invading gardens and hedgerows and, unless caught at a very early stage, can become virtually impossible to remove. Cutting them down without removing the root simply makes the grow even faster. You will often see them growing out of peoples hedges and overwhelming them.

Where I live, we are plagued by them. They were planted along the road when the houses here were first built and have taken over the entire area. Some of these roadside trees had to be removed a couple of years ago as the roots and branches were damaging the houses and lifting all the pavement slabs. For some reason though, they were not all removed; perhaps to keep the tree surgeon business busy.

When one wild specimen started growing in our garden some years ago, I notified our landlord (London & Quadrant) and advised them to remove it. At the time it was only a few feet high and a man with a ladder and a saw could have done the job in about ten  minutes. I wouldn't have had anywhere to put the resulting waste in case you are wondering why I didn't do it myself. 

The landlord's response was hard to fathom. They said that because it wasn't causing any damage at the moment, they wouldn't remove it. 

Can you believe that? They were actually going to wait until the tree had grown large enough to damage it's surroundings before they were going to do anything about it.

Fast forward about 15 years. The tree is now about 90 feet high; the roots have destroyed the footpath and lifted the garden fence. Now they are going to remove it but is it going to take just a man with a ladder and a saw? Of course not.

This job is going to take a team of tree surgeons to remove the tree; then someone else is going to have to come and repair the fence; then someone is going to have to come and lift all the paving slabs, clear all the tree roots, level the ground then replace the the slabs.

All of this work will have cost L&Q hundreds if not thousands of pounds, just because they wouldn't do the job when it first needed doing.

The Thames Path backs onto our garden and another two of these self-seeded Sycamores were growing just the other side of the garden fence on the land owned by Peabody. I could see the same problem happening again so I contacted both Peabody and London & Quadrant. Both completely ignored me.

A year later, I contacted Peabody again and again they ignored me but this time I persevered and just one year and three months and several emails later, I finally got a response. They, like L&Q decided that because there was nothing actually wrong with the trees, they were going to leave them where they were. They did say they were going to have them "lifted" which apparently means 'give them a good prune'. The tree surgeons must be laughing all the way to the bank. Now they have been pruned, these trees are going to grow like buggery meaning that instead of having a one-off job, they are now going to have to come back every year to do it again.

The irony is that none of this is going to be any good in the long run because they will still have to be removed eventually when they become too large to manage. In the mean time, the tree surgeon business is raking it in.

Some people are just too stupid for words.

SOMETHING STINKS IN THE 

STATE OF D̶E̶N̶M̶A̶R̶K̶  BEXLEY

Disclaimer - not a picture of
Councillor Peter Craske

One of the things I like to do is help support other local bloggers and although you cannot actually read his blog any more as it was removed soon after it began, I would still like to give a mention to Bexley Council Cabinet Member Peter Craske who has been trumpeting the council's new litter, dog fouling and fly tipping patrol. 

Five uniformed officers will be on the lookout for anyone falling foul (geddit) of the regulations with on the spot fines for any transgressors caught.

In a statement in the News Shopper. Councillor Craske says that "one of the reasons Bexley is one of the best places to live in the UK is because we take pride in having a clean and tidy community and no-one wants to see it ruined by a small minority".

Councillor Craske, as you can tell, doesn't get out much; or if he does, it isn't within the boundaries of Bexley. The cuts to litter, waste removal and general maintenance which has already been cut to the bone has resulted in Bexley starting to look like something out of Mad Max. Apparently, this is just the start with many more cuts to local services in the pipeline.

That dog mess by the way. Bexley are planning to remove all the dog waste bins they highlight on their own website. I hope you all have deep pockets.

FREE THE BONEHEAD ONE

I've just been informed by fellow blogger Arthur Pewty and since confirmed by the BBC that my old friend, champion of free speech and human rights, Joshua Bonehill-Paine, has been sent down for 3 years after being convicted of inciting racial hatred.

He has been inciting racial hatred for years but this is the first time he has actually been convicted of the offence. This followed a series of posts on Twitter containing "vile and anti-Semitic material" ahead of a planned rally in Golder's Green, according to the prosecution. 

He is the same person who was convicted back in 2014 after posting hoax messages about a pub in Leicester, claiming that the pub was banning service personnel in case it offended immigrants.

To be honest, I'm really disappointed with Joshua. He took the trouble to send a threatening email to Arthur Pewty after he reported my campaign against the witty and informative Daily Bale but never tried anything with me. I guess it's because I'm just too scary.

With him now put away for the foreseeable future, I am going to have to find another cause to champion. Fortunately there are plenty to choose from. Britain First is my first choice, (geddit?) closely followed by a scam artist who goes by the unlikely name of David Avocado Wolfe and whose posts regularly turn up on my Facebook page.

TOLD YOU SO

You read it here first.

As predicted by my earlier post, footballing legend Jose Mourinho has finally been sacked by Chelsea Football Club after stating that he "had their full support".

Anyone who follows football, and even those of us who don't, are in no doubt as to the fate of any manager who has the "full support" of his club. Those magic few words that turn "if" into "when" were pronounced by Chelsea in October and started the clock ticking down to doomsday for Jose.

Strangely enough, according to the BBC, other managers are surprised that he has been sacked, citing the fact that he is their most successful manager ever, winning them three league titles, the FA Cup and three League Cups.

How can they be so naive? Being successful has nothing to do with it. Football managers are sacked on a regular basis regardless of their performance and go on the merry-go-round of hiring and firing that is a familiar part of the football tradition. 

You sack your manager due to poor performance and hire someone else who has just been sacked by their team for poor performance. This is the way it has always been done.

It seems that a fellow called Guus Hiddink is in line for the job. Sounds about right. He is well qualified as he has already been sacked by Chelsea once already and has since been leaving a trail of destruction across Europe. Good luck.

I'M NOT SURE I LIKE THIS

Facebook is to introduce a dislike button although quite what this means is not made clear. Do I dislike a post because it contains something I dislike? Do I dislike it because someone has commented on something I dislike? Do I dislike it because I don't like the person who made the post?*

What is really alarming is that it could be used to do someone real harm. Think about it, how many times have you liked a post because it will help a sick child or make Amazon or Microsoft et al to pay for some poor person's operation? 

If you dislike that post, will it make the person sicker? Or make Amazon or Microsoft et al raid your bank account and make you poorer?

Just think, enough dislikes, or even "amen" spelt backwards could kill someone. A dangerous weapon in the wrong hands.

Personally, I think this should be banned on health and safety grounds. In fact, I think I will dislike it as soon as it arrives.

*Thinking about this, perhaps we should have lots of different buttons for all of these. There could be a competition to design them. Personally, I would like a button which says, why are you posting this crap on my page? I would use that a lot, especially on Britain First and David Bloody Avocado Wolfe ones.

THAMESMEAD GOLF COURSE

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed workmen securing the site of the old golf course in Thamesmead. They had already removed the netting alongside the footpath and were installing new fencing around the driving range. They were also securing the windows in the clubhouse with metal screens.

I have never been able to get any response from anybody to enquiries about the fate of the site but one of my regular readers has had more success although there still seems to be no clear decision made.

Part of the problem lies with ownership and responsibility for maintenance. The land is owned by Tilfen, which in turn is part of the Peabody Group who lease it to a company called Parpost Ltd. Parpost are responsible for the maintenance and access issues and their only activity in this regard was to block access to the public footpath with a huge ditch. Perhaps the new fencing is down to them.

Peabody themselves have what they call a "final map" which shows the golf course site as a "large scale sports and leisure park". Let's hope so.

 VERY 21st CENTURY

The latest Pope, who goes by the name of Francis is supposed to be a progressive (whatever that means) and is trying to make the Church more relevant in the 21st century.

In this image, he is seen to be driving out demons possessing a man sitting in a wheelchair. 

The Church later published a retraction saying that it wasn't an exorcism, rather a blessing. In any case, it didn't work as the man says that there are still demons inside him.

He has now decided that he is going to declare Mother Teresa a Saint because she has miraculously cured two people of cancer .

The first involved the bogus claim that an Indian woman was cured of cancer after putting a picture of Mother Teresa on her stomach. This laughably absurd claim which has been dismissed out of hand by rationalists, and more importantly, the Doctors who treated her, had been cited by the Roman Catholic Church as proof of a miracle.

The second miracle supposedly cured a man in Brazil of several brain tumours after his Priest prayed for Mother Teresa's intervention with God. So far, there is no more information about this case that I have been able to find but I would be willing to bet that there is a lot more to the story than we are hearing; assuming that the whole thing isn't fake anyway.

If the Catholic Church is going to continue parading this superstitious medieval nonsense then the 21st century is still a long way away.

DUMB AND DUMBER

Anyone following the campaigns of the Republican candidates for the US Presidential elections will be getting increasingly alarmed at the prospect of Donald Trump winning, and even actually getting his finger on the nuclear trigger. What some of you may not realise is that this American version of our own Nigel Farage is not the craziest of the bunch. 

Amazing as it might seem, there are names on the candidates list that make even him look like a beacon of sanity.

Step forward Ben Carson.

Now if you look at his career as a successful neurosurgeon, he has an impressive track record. He was the Director of Paediatric Neurosurgery at the prestigious John Hopkins Hospital in Maryland with his work being recognised with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008.

The problem starts when he lets his religious views cloud his judgement; these have the effect of making him look like he is at least a couple of side plates short of a dinner service.

He claims that Charles Darwin proposed his "theory of evolution through natural selection" because of Satan. As far as I am aware, Satan isn't mentioned even once in his book. (I do own a copy, bought from Down House when I visited a couple of years ago, although I haven't gotten round to reading it yet).

When he gets onto the subject of the pyramids though, he stops flying round the ceiling light of sanity and starts bumping into the crackpot window.

According to Ben Carson, the pyramids were built by the Biblical Joseph to store grain and that the mummies were used as scarecrows to scare the birds away. No mummies have ever been found in the pyramids by the way.

He also believes that the pyramids have pointy tops to prevent blimps from landing on them. The fact that blimps didn't exist at the time just shows how forward thinking the Ancient Egyptians were.

On the Subject of Joseph, he also claims that the "coat of many colours" described in the Bible was in fact only black and white and brown. It seems that in those days black and white were the only colours, as you can see from old television footage, and it was the first time anyone had seen brown.

Vote for Donald Trump anybody?

  

HAPPY FAMILIES

I know I keep posting pictures of Seals on the Thames foreshore but I think they're cute and it's my blog, so there.

This is a small family of Common Seals that have been seen pretty much in the same place now for a couple of weeks. There are two adults and a juvenile who seems to be losing its baby fur. You can spot them on the mud in front of the Power Station water outlet, near the golf course. 

By the way, you can get involved in the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) Thames Marine Mammal Survey by going to this page and reporting what you have seen.

Junior having fun in the mud

Playing with Dad

Mum and Dad

Family group

Here they are again

Let there be light

Recently, I posted an item about Peabody taking over the running of Thamesmead. There was a picture of the footpath running along the back of Castilian School which showed a broken pavement, badly damaged by tree roots and covered in rotting leaves that had been left there for months. It also mentioned the street light which, in my experience, has never worked. 

This is my usual route between home and the pub so lets just say it gets used a lot.

Imagine my surprise then when, just a week or so ago, what did I see, but a brand new street lamp, shining like the clappers and illuminating what has never been seen before, i.e. the ground after the Sun has set.

The path is still the litter strewn and uneven death trap it always was and the street light at the end of the footpath which has also never worked still doesn't. It's a start though and who knows, they may fix the rest of it one day.

You said... we listened...

Just before Christmas, a leaflet came through our letterbox, addressed to "the  Occupier". Nothing new about this, we get about a pound and a half of waste paper a week shoved through our letterbox and it all goes into the recycling bin (or used to, more about this later).

Happening to glance at it, I noticed that it came from Peabody, the housing trust brought in to try and sort out the dismal state of Thamesmead, it's housing and infrastructure. Instead of disposing of it with the other junk, I put it away somewhere with the intention of reading it later and promptly forgot about it. 

Well, I've just found it again. It's a curious bit of origami that needs both hands to unfold and frankly, promises more than it delivers. I don't want to be a killjoy and it's probably early days yet to dismiss them altogether; it's a fact that Peabody Trust has been around for a long time and against all odds, seems to have a good reputation when it comes to turning round failed estates. Having said that, the leaflet contains nothing other than vague promises to "identify problems", "carry out comprehensive assessments", "work with partners", etc.,etc.

Given that those partners include both Greenwich and Bexley Councils, you will forgive me if I don't hold my breath. For years, Greenwich Council policy has been to stifle commercial development of Thamesmead in order to force residents to use Woolwich as a shopping and leisure hub. The Bexley Council approach to Thamesmead seems to be to cross their fingers and hope the fairies make it go away.

Here, pedestrians slip, slide and stumble along
an uneven footpath covered in the slippery
remains of dead leaves that fell last September.
The street light on the right of the picture has
never worked.

Frankly, I don't think they are going to make much headway. The problem with Thamesmead has always been that it has been developed on a piecemeal basis with responsibility for it's infrastructure belonging to various, and sometimes competing, institutions. Their programme to "improve play spaces for young people" may find itself at odds with Bexley Council's current programme of selling off it's open spaces in a desperate attempt to balance it's books.

Responsibility for the lighting of public spaces is shared between the owners of whatever land the lighting is on. While I applaud the stated aim of Peabody to make sure all the lighting they are responsible for is fit for purpose, the decision to "work with others to try and ensure lights we do not own meet the Peabody standard", is likely to be met with total indifference. The lights along the alley between Castilion School and Marlborough Court Care Home for example haven't worked in the last twenty years and I can't see Bexley council doing much about that just because Peabody say it might be a good idea.

Foot and cycle paths meander around the place, often blocked by years of vegetation growth and accumulations of uncollected litter and, as often as not, coming to a dead end at a pile of rubble or a broken down chicken wire fence left behind by the last developer who managed to flog off the homes they just built and left the site as it was. If Peabody want to do anything about that, they will almost certainly find it impossible to identify who is responsible, or if they do, get them to do anything about it.

This mass of undergrowth was never cleared
from this cycle path in the whole of 2014. It
falls over a fence from land owned by EDF.

Apart from that, there is little more than their claim that they will "work with local residents, the Royal Borough of Greenwich and Bexley Council to identify problems and make improvements in all of Thamesmead's neighbourhoods". A statement so generic as to be virtually meaningless.

In the mean time, Bexley Council continues to ignore the whole of the northern part of its borough in general and Thamesmead in particular. Greenwich Council seems to be on a mission to make driving in Thamesmead even more hazardous than ever with it's idiotic bus lane programme.

Footpath and cycle paths remain blocked by accumulations of rubbish and vegetation; the town centre bus stop remains as lethal as ever; the town centre itself is a woefully inadequate facility for the population it's meant to serve.

Good luck Peabody.

bexley council and it's recycling policy

I was going to show you another picture of our overflowing recycling bins, but honestly, what's the point?

It would be exactly the same as all the others and why would you want to look at it? I have given up phoning them to tell them to come and empty it; if they don't care, why should I? We never did get our garden waste bin back and from what I understand, Bexley Council is going to stop collecting garden waste altogether soon. Serco is the company that collects waste for recycling but the recycling itself is carried out by another company called Veolia who I understand are less than happy with Bexley Council at the moment. Perhaps someone knows more about it than me.

history? channel

I wrote a less than charitable piece the other week about some of the (so called) documentary channels you will find on Sky. 

One of them  that used to really annoy me me was the History channel with it's obsession with cretinous "fly on the wall" type documentaries and a predilection for programmes featuring barmpot conspiracy theories.

It seems I'm not the only one and I recently found this cartoon on one of my favourite Facebook pages and stole it. I am confident they won't mind as long as I give them a plug.

The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe

Actually, I think they may have stolen it from somewhere else so the hell with it.



I am writing this piece on Friday evening and I thought I would take a look at what I am missing.

On the History channel, it seems I am missing this

And on H2, which is it's sister channel, I could be watching this

The sacrifices I have to make to get this blog out on time.............................

Local wildlife

It wouldn't do to have a post with nothing about the local wildlife in it. Here is a small selection of pictures I have taken out and about this week.

I took this picture of some rather puzzled birds on a frozen Morrison's lake early this week. Some baffled
Coots wondering where the water went; and a couple of Lesser Black Backed Gulls.

This rather strange looking fellow seems to be a cross between a Mallard and some domesticated
variety of duck. Rather unfortunately described in the 'birding' community as a "Manky Mallard",
 it looks very like one seen last year in Mordon Hall Park and was a cross with an Indian Spotbill Duck.
Might even be the same one.

Curious Robin. Probably wondering whether I was going to try and steal any of his worms.

Lapwing in the air. You get lots of these along the river at this time of year. They can number in the hundreds.

Here is one close up. Brilliant colours in the low Winter Sun.

You would sometimes see a Peregrine Falcon flying around the area and it would perch on some high vantage point.
Recently, we have been treated to a pair roosting on the top of the incinerator chimney. If we are really lucky, they
may stay and breed. That would be a real treat.

and finally........ my latest header

What these two Mallards think of my bird photography