A Real Pea-Souper

You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. It looked like something from a Sherlock Holmes novel. Fog. Everywhere. Of course, as Mrs Bugle pointed out; maybe it looks like this every morning, but we never get up this early! Anyway, send me your photos of Blackheath in a Victorian fug.

Chapters All Day Dining

Still haven’t made it into the new version of Chapter Two, now called Chapters All Day Dining.  It looks very nice from the outside, and the menu looks… well, er, cheaper!  Which I guess is good news… Is this is a credit crunch decision?  Have they dropped the quality and gone down market?  It doesn’t look that way from the outside, and I’m away for a week, so will not be able to let you know for a little while yet…

I’m looking forward to finding out – let me know if you have anything to say!

Never did win that trip to New York…

Say Aaaargh

This has always puzzled me… It sits outside the dentists in Blackheath.  You can’t really tell from the terrible photo (yes, one of mine, how did you guess), but he really looks like he’s in pain.  I guess it depicts the patient before treatment, rather than after, otherwise they wouldn’t get many takers?

Having said that, they clearly don’t need many customers…  Or are they patients?  Last time I phoned, they were completely full, and not interested in taking any more NHS people.  I can’t help wondering if these places fill their quotas with NHS patients, and then never remove any non-attending people from their lists.  People move around so much in London that it seems very likely that the majority of the list are zombies.

But I suppose you wouldn’t want to clear down a list of non-existent patients, if it meant that all your new customers have to go private, would you?  I just don’t understand when your teeth no longer became part of the rest of the body, and the government stopped being interested in the dental health of the population.

NHS rant over… They both do it much better than me anyway.

Station being painted… Again

The station again appears to be getting a lick of paint. There didn’t actually seem to be much activity when I struggled past with my suitcase (bugles are going away for a week), but maybe they were on their lunch break or something.

It really does need cleaning up though. Both outside and in are looking pretty shabby these days. Maybe they are holding off until the estate agency is demolished to make way for the disabled lift that is planned?

Mysterious messages

UPDATE UPDATE:  The cache is back – perhaps it never left?

UPDATE:  The cache has been pinched – so don’t go looking for it right now.  I’ll replace it soon!

The Blackheath Bugle Geocache has been a great success, except for this cryptic report:

Found the cache easily enough and it’s good to be able to support a new cacher in the area. There are more logs in the cache than here on line and I think at least one of the logs was by a muggle due to the content of the comment.

Which is intriguing…  Have some grumpy teenagers written something rude in there?  I’ve been really busy recently, so I’m wondering what on earth has been scrawled in the log book!

If anyone else manages to find the cache, please take a photo of the log, and send it to me!

Wol

I’m sure I heard an owl last night… Am I going mad, or does Blackheath have owls?

Photo by Flickr user law_keven

Spare Saturday Afternoon?

If you’re not busy on Saturday, there will be a team of volunteers getting together in the station car park at 2.30pm. It’s organized by The Blackheath Society, which sounds very posh, but I don’t think you have to subscribe to join in… And I don’t think you have to be a member of the aristocracy either, despite the impression that the name may suggest.

It’s a great idea, and although, in my experience, the local council are pretty good at getting rid of graffiti quickly (especially when using this), it can’t hurt to have a few extra hands on board.

Of course, graffiti done well can be an amazing thing, but a few scrawly tags along a wall don’t really count.

Blackheath Geocache

UPDATE UPDATE:  It is back!  So hunt away!  See here for more info.

UPDATE:  The cache has been pinched – so don’t go looking for it right now.  I’ll replace it soon!  See here for more info.

So this may look like a tube of vitamin pills, but is actually a secret stash of treasure, hidden somewhere in Blackheath.  If you go to the Geocaching website, you will find these mysterious coordinates:

N 51.469048

E 0.006244

These correspond to a precise location on Planet Earth (note the extremely low “East” value, that should give you a hint).  If you programme these numbers into a GPS unit, it will take you to the treasure.

When you get there, open it up, and mark your name on the log book inside (there is a pencil there too).  If you want, you can also take the (extremely exciting) treasure inside.  But you can only take the treasure if you replace it with something else.  It can be any treasure at all, so long as it is legal, and isn’t perishable (no food or drinks).

Let me know if you find it!

The Umbrella People

To the couple waiting for the 7:12 to Charing Cross at Blackheath Station…  It had been raining, and it was really windy…

They threw their umbrella on to the grass verge, because it had turned inside out.  No need to keep it with them, or find a waste bin.

I’ve seen the people who give up their weekends so that “professional couples” like this can litter their own public spaces.  Stupid suit-wearing troglodytes.

Of course, I didn’t actually say that.  I said “Someone’s got to tidy that up, you know”, and the response was “shut yer face”.  England prevails.  Though sometimes I wish it didn’t.

Non-Blackheath photo by Flickr user B Tal.

Spire of St. Michael’s Church Blown Down

Wonderful pen and ink drawing found at londonancestor.com, this was the result of a storm in October 1881. It is from the Illustrated London News. There’s something about these scratchy illustrations – they seem to have a lot of character. I suppose if every one of the images found in today’s papers was drawn by hand, the papers might be a bit thinner…

The church was (is?) known as “The Needle of Kent”.