Never having had the desire to learn to drive, I’m reliant on the railways for long distance travel and follow all developments on the iron road with great interest.
To be able to accommodate the power lines serving the tracks, the redundant Royal Mail conveyor at the west end of Bristol Temple Meads has been removed in recent weeks.
Network Rail has just released the video below which documents these works at Temple Meads.
According to the blurb on the European Green Capital website, the “European Green Capital Award (EGCA) has been conceived to recognise and reward local efforts to improve the environment, the economy and the quality of life in cities.”
However, it would appear that there’s been little local effort – apart from protests by local residents and councillors – to improve the environment and quality of life in inner city areas such as Easton, Lawrence Hill and St Pauls, judging by the amount of fly-tipping that still goes on daily on our streets with no sign of a slackening or any meaningful enforcement efforts or action by Bristol’s seemingly impotent or uninterested city council.
The photographs below were taken this morning by local resident Hannah Crudgington and are typical of the grottiness we inner city residents have to endure every day. All the photographs were taken within a couple of hundred metres of each other in the BS5 postcode area.
Was Bristol awarded the European Green Capital award on false premises? Some in the city believe that to be the case. Judging the evidence of my own eyes, awarding Bristol with the European Green Capital award would have been more appropriate.
Dinner for One, starring Freddie Frinton and May Warden, is an institution on German television on New Year’s Eve, as well as in Austria and Switzerland.
Dinner for One was originally written as a two-hander comedy sketch for the theatre in the 1920s. Its author was Lauri Wylie.
In 1963 German television station Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) recorded a performance of the piece in the original English with a short introduction in German.
The sketch presents the 90th birthday of elderly upper-class Englishwoman Miss Sophie, who hosts a celebration dinner every year for her friends Mr Pommeroy, Mr Winterbottom, Sir Toby and Admiral von Schneider. However, due to her great age, Miss Sophie has outlived all her friends…
What could have been a fine report on a local space technology story has been ruined by poor writing in the Bristol Post.
Yesterday’s Post carried a story on Bristol SpacePlanes and its efforts to develop a reusable orbital vehicle.
A CGI impression of the Bristol SpacePlanes Ascender craft
The Post’s journalist gets off to a bad start in the first sentence:
Bristolians are being invited to help launch planes into space in a new crowd-funding [sic] campaign.
Just Bristolians, Bristol Post?
I thought the idea of crowdfunding (minus the hyphen. Ed.), was that anyone can be part of the crowd that provides the funds, irrespective of geography.
This suspicion is borne out by 30 seconds research. The first item on crowdfunding I found, from Wikipedia, states: “Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising monetary contributions from a large number of people, typically via the internet.”
Nowhere in the Wikipedia entry is there is indication at all that crowdfunding is to be restricted solely to Bristolians.
Or am I just misreading to local media’s propensity to find a local angle to a story? Here’s a hint: it already has one, featuring a local high technology company and doesn’t need a second one! 🙂
Earlier this morning a delivery lorry for cake manufacturer Mr Kipling got stuck under the railway bridge on Stoke Road, Stoke-on-Trent, as shown below and as reported by The Sentinel.
Mr Kipling still uses the advertising slogan – as seen on the side of the trailer – “Exceedingly good…“. That phrase presumably does not extend to (one of) its drivers. 😉
One thing living in Bristol for nearly 4 decades has taught me is that Bristol City Council is profligate and lacks competence.
This was once again brought sharply into focus earlier this morning in a dead-end street called Clifton Street (map) leading to the back entrance of Easton CofE Primary School where I encountered the roadworks shown in the photograph below.
Bristol’s most pointless dropped kerbs?
The view shows the entrance into the staff car park of the school, the approach to which has just been enhanced by 2 dropped kerbs and textured paving on each of the street’s two footways as part of works to replace the street’s kerbstones.
There are only going to be two times in the day on weekdays when there is likely to be any traffic at all on Clifton Street – before and after the school day.
As for the use of textured paving, this is generally installed to assist the visually impaired and I cannot see many visually impaired people using dead-end streets in Easton anyway.
I wonder how much this municipal largesse by the city’s highways department has cost the public purse.
If the city council really wanted to spend money on roadworks in Easton, there’s plenty of other stuff that needs attention, as shown in the example below.
Picture courtesy of Hannah Crudgington
The damaged pedestrian refuge shown above is on Stapleton Road, just a couple of hundred metres away from Clifton Street. Local residents have been attempting to get the council to repair it for over 6 months, after it was damaged by a bus driver with delusions of driving competence. These efforts have so far come to nought.
In the recent TidyBS5 residents’ rubbish summit (posts passim), it was stated that council officers frequently intone the words “It’s the inner city” as an excuse for lack of action. Clearly this only works one way, i.e. when the lack of action concerns something either highlighted or desired by residents; when the initiative comes from within the council, there’s apparently no object, no matter how pointless what is proposed. I’ve encountered this ‘not invented here’ syndrome before in local authorities.
It’s normal to see a spate of daft council spending in March each year, just before the municipal financial year runs out. This year it seems that Bristol City Council is providing the residents of Easton with an early Christmas present in the form of dumb expenditure.
Ewe-Kip, one of the works on the Turnip Prize shortlist
This annual award goes to the person who has created something they perceive to be rubbish art.
The shortlisted works for this year’s award are: Ewe-Kip by Drunken Shepherd; Gogglebox by Abby; Pensive by Leafy; Stick another Shrimp on the Barbie by Aunt Sponge; Ginger Nut by Trees R Green and Breast in Plant by Mike Atkinson.
The Bristol Post has come up with a classic mix-up today. A report on the city’s Southmead Hospital has been illustrated with a photo of cars vandalised in Long Ashton, the report of which the Post carried yesterday.
Still, why let a good picture go to waste? Use it often… and everywhere! 😉
Update 28/11/14: the correct photograph has since been attached to the article.
