Erm…Mrs Bugle speaking… As Mr Bugle pointed out nicely in his previous post, he is travelling the world – and of course will come back with all sorts of presents. (Since I am jealous he should!)
Anyway, whilst the real owner of this blog is away, I hereby declare my own kingdom and I invite you all to the farmers market, as there is a plant fair going on! I bought some lovely trailing verbena (some call it verbana I suppose ), nothing too exciting but it is surprising to see they have a nice variety of plants in such a small area.
Anyway as most of you might know, the Farmers Market closes at 2 pm, so hurry up!
I’m off travelling the world for a week. Maybe Mrs Bugle will post something here whilst I’m away, if you all behave yourselves… Please look after Blackheath until I return.
You need some red-green 3D glasses to view it (I have some, and can confirm that the video is pretty convincing… Not quite Avatar, but then not much is).
They were made with one of these Fujipix 3D cameras, but at £430, I think I might have to wait a bit until the prices drop before moving this blog into the third dimension…
The perfect tacky adornment to your mantelpiece. Your very own, genuine original Blackheath Pagoda figurine. For only 110 Australian dollars. I have no idea why this is being sold in Australia, or how many of these have been made. (here’s the real thing). What an extremely strange object. God bless eBay.
And you thought that the election finishing had brought an end to interesting leaflets… Look what’s appeared through my letterbox….
The longer I live in Blackheath, the more I think that a secret to a well looked-after area is a good number of rich old people. I mean, who else would have the time or the cash to leaflet-bomb the whole neighbourhood? Looks like the work of a Blackheath Society member gone rogue to me…
Not that I’m against it. There’s no way that we need another estate agents in Blackheath. So if you want to stop it happening, take a look at this. Maybe they can go and put their branded minis somewhere else.
Foxtons planning to invade Blackheath – Abbie commented:
Interesting anonymous note regarding the recently closed down Army Recruitment Office just dropped through my door reading:
WARNING!
Foxtons Estate Agents have brought the old Army Recruitment Office at 9 Lee Road, SE3 in the Village & have very quietly applied for change of usage.
TWO POINTS:
1. Change of usage is a virtually impossible task for anyone apart from foxtons for some reason. By granting this the council will be setting a dangerous precedent which could lead to the demise of your already beleaguered local shops.
2. Foxtons would require parking permits for a very substantial number of cars for the station car park which is already overloaded. Should this happen parking in the village will become virtually impossible. This will be further aggravated by the planned closure for redevelopment of the Blackheath Grove car park.
If this is of concern to you you MUST write or email by Wednesday 12th May at the latest to:
Kemi Erifevieme
Planning
Greenwich Council
Crown Building
48 Woolwich New Road
Woolwich
London
SE18 6HQ
Make sure nothing stops you voting. Unless we run out of ballot papers, don’t have enough people available to hand them out, or end up turning angry voters away towards the end…
“Police were called to a polling station in Lewisham, south London, where about 300 people had still to vote by 2200 BST. ” BBC News
Spotted outside Lewisham Library, on the way back from TFC, near the people handing out Islamic leaflets, within earshot of the plaintive trumpeter…
If you haven’t played with The Straight Choice website yet, then you should. Above is a map showing the number of leaflets delivered in the Blackheath area. Greenwich and Woolwich are the purplest, which means they’ve received the most leaflets, followed by Lewisham Deptford, then Lewisham East. Thanks to the opening up of the Ordnance Survey electoral boundary data, you can also see the constituency boundaries very nicely too. If you receive any leaflets from any parties, scan or photograph them, and add them to the site! (Especially if you live in Eltham – there’s only one so far). And when you’ve done all that, don’t forget to look into their eyes!
Dear India Jane,
Whilst it looks like you do a lovely line in furniture I will never be able to afford, do you think you could hang on to the sign above the letterbox? It would be a happy reminder of the movie rental shop that we knew and loved. And you never know, maybe you’ll get some late returns… Thanks.
Regardless of your political beliefs, it’s not every day that the leader of one of the three major political parties shows up in Blackheath. Indeed, there were several tweets and commentators suggesting that it might have been a hoax. So I headed down there, expecting to see a few people standing around. The place was heaving with supporters, and news gathering trucks. So it was on.
There was a long wait – he was late. In the meantime, there was the truly strange scenario of labour councillors, and a few supporters attempting to hold their banners in front of the LibDem banners. This was a strange situation, with lots of (polite liberal) harrrumphing from the crowd, eventually turning into some booing. Then a 19 year old started shouting at one of the labour councillors about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I began to feel quite sorry for the guy “I’m only a local councillor, you’d have to speak to the immigration minister” was a reply at one point. An old lady told the young man to calm down, and he apologised. It never got nasty, but it shows the level of political frustration around at the moment.
I couldn’t work out if the Labour banners were there on a whim- in order to try to represent another point of view, or because they’d been told to be on display, so that the cameras would see both banners in the background – to help labour to ride on the libdem’s coat-tails (a few week’s ago, this situation would have been unthinkable, but now I’m not so sure).
So Clegg arrived, lots of cheering, and the sun came out. I’m not making this up.
A very weak PA system relayed a fairly standard talk, until Clegg started endorsing Pete Pattisson, the LibDem candidate for Lewisham East (who spoke marginally better than the other two at the hustings last week). This is interesting to me. It clearly shows that the party bigwigs view Pattisson as a contender, for a seat that has been solidly Labour in the last three elections. If you look at the graphs, perhaps they believe that this time they’ll swing it. I guess it is possible.
The speech took a turn for the weird side (about 1:05 in the video above), when some very angry people started asking Clegg about “organised paedophile rings”, clearly not a subject that he wanted to talk about, and (forgive the observation) the man shouting it didn’t have the upper-middle class accent that perhaps Clegg was expecting to hear in Blackheath. It did seem like an odd question, and I’ve no idea why he was so angry about it.
At the end, having spoken to the Gurkhas, and some more press (one press photographer commented “Politician surrounded by the press, that’s never been done before, has it?”), he jumped onto the bus, which eventually managed to get past the throngs of people. (Although it did look as though an Ocado van was going to block it in at one point. A terrible problem that many Blackheathens may have seen before, and I’m sure will form a key part of their manifesto next time).
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