Travellers at East Surrey Hospital - Update

A quick update - not a lot had happened in the meantime (by any authorities) - but plenty of laudably energetic progress by the traveller folk -

- they have constructed a very nice (and perfectly effective) bridge over the ditch and have begun making a nice little camp right by the children's play area in Whitebushes (also right where the football coaching takes place on a Saturday morning for all the local tweens)...

I know it's Friday afternoon, but does anyone have a bit of time for some action now?  Other than the demonstrably industrious?

@surreymirror
@BramhallNatalie
@InspHaycock
@RedhillCouncil
@SaSHDirector

Update - Tweet from @RedhillCouncil - 
Council officers on site and working to have them evicted - fence was damaged to gain access.

Update - Tweet from @BarbaraT09
police have arrived to Whitebushes Common


Update - Happy ending! Great job everyone! Tweet from @colh8756
police have just removed 9 travellers from Whitebushes common

Travellers at East Surrey Hospital...

...spotted yesterday evening, still there this morning...

Update - you have got to love Twitter, I've already heard back from the police and the council...they are working with the land owner to resolve the situation... ;)

Dog Poo Fairy - Keep Britain Tidy

Spotted this in Whitebushes the other day - "Keep Britain Tidy" sure has come on a way since I was a kid...! If memory serves the catchy line used to be something like "Please take your litter home with you" (slightly lacking in the amusement/shame stakes in comparison)...

More snow in Whitebushes...

...it's been coming down pretty steadily since 0700hrs (when Thomas decided it was time to get up and watch his new Peppa Pig episodes on his laptop - zzzz), so from 50% clear last night everything is starting to get a hearty dusting again...thought we had seen the back of all this! Oh well, it's a good excuse to post a couple more pictures from Friday I didn't pop up at the time-

Whitebushes Snow...

Well, we had quite a bit of snow last night, certainly not a patch on last time, only about an inch overnight, but enough to make everything look very festive (shame it's over a month too late)...

Anyway, cars seem to be getting in and out of the estate okay, and the recycling truck just rumbled past the back fence, so Thomas has been all dressed up ready for pre-school and we are heading off in a little while, wish us luck!

New Surrey Streetlights - Update

Time for a quick update on the new street lights, as (I guess) it's going to end up affecting everyone in the UK (eventually), in the past few days, I would estimate 80% of the lights on the estate have gone from looking like this -

- to looking like this (if you click that picture below to zoom it in, you will be able to more clearly see the little radio antenna atop the lamp used, presumably, to remotely control it) -

As well as being impressed with the speed and smoothness of installation, I'll have to admit to also being slightly bemused as to (a) why they were still blazing in the middle of the day (and b) quite why I was continuing to refer to them as "lights" when they weren't actually doing a terribly effective job of illuminating everything when it was dark-

However, as luck would have it both questions were answered when I bumped into our resident representative from Southern Housing as I was out taking these pictures - apparently during this testing phase the lights are set at about 50% of their capacity, and to run 24 hours a day so they can eliminate any (unlikely) failed installations/faulty kit, once they have run for 3-4 days like this (and passed an inspection) then they will be switched to "normal" operating mode, so (if you are interested) watch this space for a further update coming, probably, later on this week...

Earlwood Crime Map!

Well, here it is, after trying (on and off) for almost 36 hours I've finally managed to get a completed search out of www.police.uk...the decidedly dull result? Lots of "Antisocial Behaviour", or ASB as they are calling it (unsurprisingly mostly at the nearby hospital) and a few miscellaneous crimes which aren't embellished with any sort of interesting detail...I'm not sure what I was expecting, but actually this doesn't tell me very much that I didn't already know - for example, I'm well aware bored kids on the estate muck about outside smoking and drinking 10p taurine drinks while they are waiting for Mum to finish burning their turkey twizzler dinners, and I'm also well aware drunk teenagers (air lifted en masse from Redhill/Horley town center) regularly express their displeasure at loosing their fight (outside the pub) to the kind doctors and nurses trying to stitch them back together...but just categorizing everything else as "Other" makes all the rest of the results rather pointless, worse still is the fact that there isn't any information about whether any of these crimes were investigated (after they were reported), let alone solved...so basically (in office/twitter banter) it's come down to a numbers game - "Oh, you had 1260 crimes in your area in December? I only had 3"...but none of us are really any the wiser, it's just a list of how many people rang the police to report a crime...For the insight I've been afforded, I'm not entirely sure that was worth £300k of tax payers hard-earned, frankly...

Still, no doubt it'll do wonders for certain parts of London's house prices... >;(

Surrey Street Light Improvements

We had this letter posted through the front door the other day (a little bit out of the blue) letting us know that all of Surrey's streetlights are being replaced with environmentally friendly "smart lamps"...interestingly, not only is our little part of Surrey the first part of the county to get them (the rest being rolled out gradually over the next five years), but it turns out that Surrey is the first part of Great Britain to do this...(the words "Guinea" and "Pig" can't help but plop uncomfortably into the worry-centre of my mind)...meh...

There are (admittedly) a lot of positives - All the lights will be (individually) linked to a central giant "dimmer switch" in Guildford, so rather than each light just switching itself off and on in good time for dusk (based on a mechanical timer), when sunset approaches (which obviously varies day-to-day throughout the year) Guildford control center can just issue the on/off command to the relevant area, then, at the sort of time when everyone is usually in bed (2300hrs) they dim the lights to a soothing level (saving lots of energy) until the first early risers might need to be setting off to work (about 0530hrs)...or, and I speculate here, if Police/Fire Brigade/Ambulance service suddenly need to flood an area with light (e.g. to catch an escaping criminal, or deal with an accident) this can be achieved just as easily. So all good (in theory) thus far, but lets take a look at the (predicted) socio/environmental impact-

• The new lights are spotlights, pointing directly at the floor - so much less ambient light pollution should occur
• Lights can be kept bright in areas of need (underpasses/trouble hotspots) and dimmed elsewhere
• Lower electricity bills mean a collective saving of around £12 million in tax (over the next 25 years)
• We also stop 60,000 tons of carbon flooding the atmosphere (same period), which is actually quite a mind-bogglingly large amount when you stop to think about it

Nothing to complain about there then, but there are actually just a couple of things that do worry me - The lights are *white* and are (and I quote) "much brighter" than the existing (yellow/orange) sodium lights we have all grown up with. We'll have to see how this one pans out, but actually I quite like it being dark at night (for no particular reason other than that it is supposed to be dark at night)...I guess I'm just not sure I want the whole of Surrey to resemble the inside of a football stadium...secondly (and lastly) especially as all this is *extremely* new (and Murphy's law states that there is *always* at least one bug) I'm sure there will be "issues" to iron out...how long until the system at Guildford mucks up and plunges the whole of Redhill into complete blackness at 7pm, or we are awoken at 3am by blazing lights shining through the curtains (making us think we are being abducted by aliens à la Close Encounters)...

I'll keep you posted with developments as they occur, but it looks like we'll be all converted (to the most modern street lighting system in the UK) within the next two weeks...oo-er! ;)

Whitebushes Snow

A Happy and prosperous New Year to everyone! Just realised I forgot to post any pictures from home from the snow from the start of December, this little lot all settled in the space of about 3 hours (it ended up roughly a foot and a half deep in the back garden)!

Thomas had great fun on our borrowed sledge, keeping snug and warm in his snow suit -

- despite the odd mishap... ;)

Brrr...still, it's all melted now, and to be honest I'm not missing it much...thoughts can now turn to warmer times and warmer climes, southern Spain is looking tempting (and unless I am very much mistaken our last holiday abroad was back in 2008, so it's long overdue) - according to my boss, who was there over Christmas, it's 19 degrees at the moment, leave it a month or two (Thomas travels free until he is two years old, so we can't leave it too long) and it's mid twenties, which suits me just fine! ;)

July 2010 Neighbourhood Watch

How exciting! Rather than the usual sort of things (6 incidents of old dears reporting the new postman as a "suspicious person" and 2 naughty kids playing with a tennis ball (a "nuisance disturbance") on the ("no ball games") green) apparently we have had an...actual crime...! *Gasp*!

It was only two roads away from where I live, two guys arrested - one with 13 bags of "a green herbal substance" in his car and another with two similar bags and five (rather-difficult-to-explain-but-not-actually-illegal) coffee grinders in his house...in response police have "stepped up patrols in the area" (to everyone's great relief) - stoners (of course) being renowned for the trouble they cause eating everyones cheese, listening to the Ozric Tentacles and falling asleep) - the nosy swish of the curtain means we can stop camping out in front of our fridges and biscuit barrels... ;)

Seriously though, I wonder if anything similar to this will happen? It's actually a pretty big deterrent...

Volcanic Sunset

So last night, with the promise of a spectacular sunset on offer (thanks to all the particles of sulphur in the atmosphere) I ran out with the camera to see if I could get a snap...and while the sunset wasn't actually much more impressive than a normal one, I did get a couple of shots I was pleased with...apart from that I also managed to attract rather a lot of attention (sat, where I was on top of the sign at the entrance to our estate)...namely one curious footballer, two suspicious traffic policemen in a patrol car and two neighbours kids (to be precise), all of whom (thankfully) were satisfied by my reasonable explaination...

It's actually affected me slightly personally, this volcanic event, as two colleagues from the bank of desks next door to mine are trapped in Madrid (having flown there for a meeting with not even a change of clothes - whoops!), so I felt inclined to do a bit of research...apparently the last time this happened (about 200 years ago) the eruption continued for over a year and 23,000 people in Great Britain died from inhaling deadly poison gas...so a couple of days of disruption is actually not so bad, in the great scheme of things... ;)

Oh and that first screen grab was about half past two yesterday (showing all flights actual positions) the one just above here was taken this morning...

Now that's not the sort of thing you see every day... ;)

Whitebushes Big Freeze

I know, I know, I've been very naughty with the blogging...promise I'll get back into the swing of things soon, it's just been a super chaotic re-boot to the annus (if you will forgive my Latin)... ;)

Last few days we have been completely snowed in, had over a foot of snow, just a couple of shots here, this was at about 8pm on Tuesday when it all started -

- basically, this level of snow didn't stop for 24 hours, when we got up the next morning it was to hear that Surrey and Sussex had run out of grit (not that they ever get as far as our estate anyway) -

- and that all buses, yes -*all* buses were cancelled in both counties-, Gatwick airport was closed (14 inches of snow) and East Surrey Hospital had cancelled all appointments and non-essential operations, so it's been a couple of days working from home -

- as official advice from Surrey police had come on the radio saying not to leave the house unless it was "a matter of life and death"...

...still, on our one little walk out yesterday lunchtime to assess conditions it does appear that *someone* has been making good use of all the snow... ;)

Wish me luck with getting home tonight! Brrr!

Oh and more pictures here if you like this sort of thing... ;)

Sunset time Redhill

Oh well, that's it...over the weekend local sunset time crept (it moves by 2-3 minutes per day) sufficiently backwards that I now conclude my bus journey through Redstone Hollow in almost total darkness, so Autumn is definitely upon us (even though British Summer time doesn't officially finish until the 25th October - when the clocks go back I'll be sat at my *desk* in the pitch black)...I don't normally mind this too much at all (as, of course, there is Christmas to look forward to), but this year I'm really loath to wave goodbye to the summer sunshine (probably because we've only had a couple of very short breaks to actually enjoy it)...

Anyway, we're going to have a go at getting out to show Thomas the trees starting to change colour on the weekend (and probably take some pictures too)... ;)

Whitebushes in the sunshine

England Blizzard - Failed Commute

Well, we thought we would give it a *try*, despite getting up and seeing that there had been even more snow overnight -

- we swept Poppy the Beetle off with a broom, followed by the scrapers, as much of it had indeed turned to ice -

- and then made our way *extremely* carefully (no gritting *again*) to the main road, where we found evidence of what the kids had been up to yesterday-


- got caught in the enormous traffic jam up the hill, absolutely crept up, almost stationary the whole way -

- finally reaching the sign for the station -

- (it started to snow again on the way, well not so much snow as pelt down with ice pellets), spotting casualties, not sure if they were abandoned or just crashed, but this one was in the middle of what normally qualifies as pavement(and there must have been more ahead, judging by the speed of the traffic) -

- crept along the un-gritted roads and pulled into a parking space at the station (there are normally zero) -


- and slid our way down to the door, which looked like this -

- not a good sign -

- so we snuck in the back way, and the platform looked like it had been abandoned for some time - the sign sort of said it all -

- not a long wait, just nothing...THIS STATION IS CLOSED - the radio had hinted it was the case, and all the websites one normally uses to check these things were down (again), but this just confirmed it...it wasn't going to happen today either...guess we are just too rural to be a priority...

Still, the ice has largely melted in the garden now, so hopefully the railway get it together for tomorrow morning...fingers crossed!

OMG! It is COLD!

Seriously, -6.5C in daylight...that is pretty cold! I took a little walk around the place (wrapped up very warm indeed) -

70 to 30 in 5 secs - car sticker

- spotted in the back of a (distinctly un-sporty) car in Whitebushes the other evening...reminded me of this one I found at Volksworld back in (wow!) 2005 -