Yesterday evening there was dark smoke on the skyline as your correspondent returned from an early evening pint. However, it wasn’t until this morning that its full significance and exclusive nature was revealed by the Bristol Post, the city’s newspaper of warped record.
As per the screenshot above, the Post duly reported a fire at a scrapyard in the Fishponds area, although a later report moved the fire to nearby Speedwell.
Furthermore, the conflagration must have been painful on the ears for anyone in the vicinity or downwind as the smoke was “bellowing“.
However, as the witnesses interviewed by the paper make no mention of noise, it can only be assumed that the hapless hack had an unfortunate vowel movement.
The later report did state correctly that “A scrapyard in Speedwell left dark smoke billowing over parts of Bristol,” but not until the hopeless howler had caused much merriment in the reports comments section.
If the reporter in question happens upon this post, the definitions of bellow and billow are given below for future reference:
Bellow: (of a person or animal) emit a deep loud roar, typically in pain or anger: e.g. “he bellowed in agony”
Billow: (of smoke, cloud, or steam) to move or flow outward with an undulating motion: e.g. “smoke was billowing from the chimney-mouth”.
Maris Dombovskis of Longton is charged with failing to provide a specimen of breath for analysis, driving without insurance and without a licence on January 19.
District Judge Jack McGarva adjourned the case until February 29 to arrange for an interpreter.
This was the second time last week that a court case at this court complex had to be adjourned for lack of an interpreter.
On Tuesday 23rd February magistrates adjourned the case of a Polish resident of Smallthorne charged with assault for 3 days to arrange for an interpreter, The Sentinel also reported.
While the Bristol Post’s report concentrated on the 4% increase in council tax and Bristol’s donation of £500,000 for a Concorde museum in neighbouring South Gloucestershire, its political editor, Ian Onions, somehow managed to omit some important news for those fighting environmental crime in the city.
This news was that the city council will be employing two more so-called “streetscene” enforcement officers next year, bringing the total number of these officers employed by the city council to 8. These officers are responsible for bringing fly-tippers and litter louts to book.
Lawrence Hill ward councillor Marg Hickman conveyed this news to Tidy BS5 campaigners yesterday evening, stating that the Labour group’s amendment calling for the 2 additional officers was the only amendment to the Mayor’s budget to receive 100% support in the council chamber.
Marg was one of 2 councillors to speak to the amendment (another colleague spoke on dog fouling, another of the blights of urban life, in support of the amendment. Ed.). Her speech is transcribed below and conveys many of the sentiments that Tidy BS5 campaigners have been voicing to the council for the past 2 years, with the local authority’s lack of action to date neatly summarised by the phrase “glacial speed of change“, although your correspondent reckons that glaciers actually move faster than Bristol City Council and a more accurate comparison would be with tectonic plates.
Institutional neglect has been the impact of Green Capital on parts of the city. What is certain is that, when it comes to the cleanliness of most areas of the city, this much-praised initiative has had minimal effect.
In 2013/14 Bristol had the unenviable status of the dirtiest place in the South West. According to government statistics, Bristol residents reported 10,472 incidents of fly-tipping – can you imagine how many more unreported incidents there must have been? It was with this statistic as a backdrop that the number of street scene enforcement officers was cut in 2013 from 10 officers, plus support staff and 3 dog wardens, to approximately 6 today. In comparison I can reveal that during our Green Capital year we had an army of PR experts – 45 in total – all employed to make the council look good. Well, I know, and I am sure many of you would agree, that our residents would prefer it if we employed more people to keep our communities looking good rather than ourselves.
There seems to me to be complacency in the council regarding the unacceptable levels of fly-tipping and litter in areas from Lawrence Hill and Eastville to Lawrence Weston, and it is compounded in the south of the city by the Mayor’s refusal to sign off the waste recycling centre in Hartcliffe.
In BS5, one of the city’s fly-tipping hotspots, which stretches from across the road from Cabot Circus to Eastville, there have been 32 enforcement actions taken against people. This low level of enforcement is because of the cuts and the lack of ongoing training and development of the enforcement staff. We need to augment our street enforcement officers and provide proper support and training, and learn from best practice from around the country to deal with the issue of waste at a time of shrinking budgets.
We have to support communities across Bristol blighted by this environmental eyesore and come up with solutions that work. We need to consult affected communities, speed up the glacial speed of change, and increase the number of properly trained and supported enforcement officers.
We have before us an amendment that will get the ball rolling and help kick-start the change we need to clean up our streets. Surely money would be better spent on this rather promoting more and more PR people.
We would all benefit from this amendment. The communities you serve would benefit and Bristol as a whole would be a cleaner and happier city. Please support this amendment today so that Bristol can be the cleanest city in the South West and not the dirtiest.
Where Bristol has the Bristol Post, formerly the Bristol Evening Post, as its newspaper of record (warped. Ed.), the Potteries has The Sentinel, formerly the Evening Sentinel.
Both newspapers now belong to the Local World stable and share many common features: the content management system running their websites, difficulty in distinguishing editorial content from advertising, a cavalier attitude to the correct use of the English language and so on.
Yesterday’s Sentinel carried a report of a railway signal failure in the Stafford area.
The report was helpfully illustrated with a photograph as per the screenshot below.
The photograph is also helpfully captioned, as follows:
DELAYS: Rail services have been hit by signalling problems at Stafford.
It is evident for a number of reasons that the anonymous members of the Sentinel’s “Digital_team” who put together this report are no great users of the railway network.
Firstly, the photograph shows semaphore signals. These are not used at Stafford, which lies on the West Coast Main Line, where semaphore signals were removed and replaced with colour light signals many decades ago.
Secondly, the plate on the signal mast identifies the signals as part of the Severn Bridge Junction signal complex.
Thirdly, what is the Abbey Church of St Peter & St. Paul in Shrewsbury doing in the background, lurking behind the largest sempaphore signal box in the country? 😉
On Wednesday evening Bristolians had an opportunity to question the city’s elected mayor, George Ferguson, at the City Academy on Russell Town Avenue.
Your ‘umble scribe attended, hoping to ask George a question on the city council’s dreadful record on keeping on top of fly-tipping, litter and other environmental crimes within the city as a whole and east Bristol in particular.
The session was chaired by BS5 resident and freelance journalist Pamela Parkes, who did an excellent job.
Your correspondent was successful in putting his question to the mayor, which read as follows:
This year Stoke-on-Trent City Council managed to find £750K of additional funding to tackle environmental crimes such as fly-tipping. What additional budget allocations will the mayor be making this year to emulate the Potteries?
Needless to say, the mayor ducked answering the additional funding bit (from which one can infer that no additional resources will be made available in Mr Ferguson’s forthcoming budget. Ed.) and laid great emphasis on £80m cuts imposed by central govt. on Bristol and how much Bristol City Council was actually spending on waste management in Bristol. I thought most of his answer was emollient waffle, blustering about the establishment of Bristol Waste, early days for them etc. However, facilitator Pamela Parkes pointed out that despite all the campaigning by residents, both informally and formally under the banner of Tidy BS5, the situation locally hasn’t improved at all. To be fair to George Ferguson, he did make a good point about the need to promote the repair and reuse of consumer goods, to reduce the amount going to landfill.
George then handed over to the head of Bristol Waste whose name I cannot remember. She made the point that fly-tipping had remained constant in Bristol over recent years. When challenged about the level of fly-tipping – four times that in neighbouring local authorities, back came the defeatist line that fly-tipping is always higher in cities.
So overall it looks like there will be little change in the council’s competence or motivation in tackling fly-tipping in the city
Besides my question, others tackled the mayor on education, housing and homelessness, the treatment of BME communities (following the cancelling of this year’s St Paul’s Carnival and current management problems at the Malcolm X Centre) and transport.
At the end there was a lively open session, during which there was a lot of hostility to the mayor from the public on various matters – the previously mentioned carnival and Malcolm X woes, growing Islamophobia, declining community cohesion and the total waste of Green Capital (which GF characterised as the most successful Green Capital year yet. Ed.), to mention but a few.
George placed great emphasis on his listening skills, stating he’d listen to anybody. However, he has past form in his post-listening dismissals of members of the public. This was not lost on his audience on Wednesday, one of whom queried along the lines of: “You may be listening George, but are you hearing what they’re saying to you?”
A T-shirt design produced after George’s dismissal of a member of the public in 2013. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
In the end the session overran and City Academy staff were heartily thanked for sacrificing their time so generously.
From your correspondent’s vantage point in the inner city, it has to be said that Bristol’s year as Europe’s beacon of best environmental practice has hardly been crowned with glory, with money wasted on pointless art projects, widespread wildlife habitat destruction and the continuing blight of fly-tipping.
Will George Ferguson be collecting his award in person from Lord Gnome? 😉
News emerged today in the British national press of a 36-metre tall statue of the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong being built in a village in China. Here’s The Guardian’s report of this story as an example.
The statue of the so-called “Great Helmsman” is being constructed at Zhushigang village in Tongxu County in Henan Province.
It is reported to be costing some RMB 3 mn. (approx. £312,000). The materials used in its construction are steel and concrete, with the exterior being coated in gold paint.
History is looking on your works and despairing, Mao! Photo: CFP
Reading about the statue and thinking about its future, not to mention what has happened to statues of past powerful leaders (particularly dictators. Ed.) around the world, Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s 1818 sonnet, Ozymandias came to mind.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
In antiquity, Ozymandias was a Greek name for the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. Shelley began writing Ozymandias soon after the announcement of the British Museum’s acquisition of a large fragment of a statue of Ramesses II from the thirteenth century BC, leading some scholars to believe that this had inspired Shelley.
In more modern times, Mao’s record is chequered. His supporters credit him with driving imperialism out of China, modernising the country and building it into a world power, promoting the status of women, improving education and health care, as well as increasing life expectancy as China’s population grew from around 550 million to over 900 million during his leadership. Mao is also known as a theorist, military strategist, poet and visionary.
On the other hand, his critics consider him a dictator comparable to both Hitler and Stalin who severely damaged traditional Chinese culture, as well as being a perpetrator of systematic human rights abuses who was responsible for an estimated 40 to 70 million deaths through starvation, forced labour and executions.
This morning saw a typo as bold as brass courtesy of London’s Evening Standard.
The Standard’s tweet intimates the raid on Ms Ora’s home was carried out by a gang which recently raided the home of Simon Cowell, an event which caused orthographical problems for Bristol’s own Western Daily Press (posts passim).
Lawrence Hill ward councillor 
On Wednesday evening Bristolians had an opportunity to question the city’s elected mayor, 
