Brentford Blogs

This will be the last of these for a while, because next Wednesday I will be embarking at Dover (if white blokes in black uniforms allow) for a holiday which involves me driving to the heel of Italy, spending a week there, and returning on Thursday 8th October. Those who have been round for a bit will remember 4 years ago I planned a visit to the same place but ended up passing 3 weeks in hospitals. I hope this trip avoids such pitfalls! I will likely be blogging my travelogu

Turns out it has been quite a busy week. Starting with the repeated delights of planning. I sometimes worry why I fought to get myself on the Planning Committee (thank you to Liberal Democrat Roger Crouch who agreed a swap) because the meetings are often acrimonious and lengthy, and I am usually in a minority. sometimes the lonely one opposer! This time I was in good company on the matter of Gunnersbury Park. For the record, I don't think commercial events are the golden solu

These days I am making a new habit of actually walking (!) around Brentford from time to time rather than usually cycling. This is good and bad, because on old geyser like me makes slow progress. I still cannot enter the paradise known as Brentford Dock, because the public footway is still locked out, hopefully for not much longer thanks to the determination of my Green colleagues and the Brentford Walks initiative. The good bit is that I keep meeting people: one of the benef

Well now, the bus shelter debate has broken out!. I did a bit of informal research and came to the conclusion that if you are heading to Ealing nearly every bus stop has a handsome shelter (with seat) but if you're heading for Brentford you need to bring your umbrella and a folding seat. All I can say is Well, following a bit of kerfuffle in social media I'm delighted to see Salman Shaheen has picked up the baton and demanded action. I have of course offered my two balcony ch

This has been a quiet week - perhaps everybody is on holiday!. OK I started with an evening meeting on the thorny problem of Holly House. I attended a session at our friendly local University in a room I am becoming very familiar with - perhaps I can claim some qualification? There were two representatives from the builder Niblock, 3 (I think) from the council housing team, 4 tenants and one councillor. Usually there are more residents but the usual very active leaseholders a

It is a nightmare to find planning documents but out of the 200 documents for Charlton House redevelopment I have found documents that show the general layout, and the commercial - probably shop - spaces on the ground floor. They add up to 1059 metres square which is quite a lot! Site Block A Block B Block C Block D So good provision for shops. Whether the council will ever let them is another matter!

A week ago I said "Planning meeting which is likely to be long, bitterly contested, and no fun. And I was eager to get back on planning. Am I a masochist? Answers on a postcard." No postcards received (Royal Mail ain't wot it used to be) but perhaps I should apply for the post of Oracle (not the software oligopoly, but I've just been hearing something about the real oracle at Delphi - not the global aftermarket car parts leader, either. I need to stop this before I disappear

Quite bizarrely I got myself very confused with my diary last Thursday. Cabinet member Sue Sampson had organised a Teams meeting about a matter that has been infuriating me for more than 4 years - the parking situation related to Orchard, York and other roads in the area which came impossibly tight when the small car park was closed in favour of new council houses on Windmill Road. We were promised action to improve this involving some existing little-used garages 3 1/2 years

On Friday I spent some time at Holly House, that small council block that has been so severely blighted ever since it appeared in my ward. It came after the boundary changes and I don't blame its blight on me becoming the relevant ward councillor, but as so often in the councilloring trade my inability to fix things in less than a century is frustrating. I'd love to share my wonderful photos but Google photos seems to have indigestion and gets stuck on downloading photos. I i

This will be a different one, because it will cover a bit of councilloring with a week of leisure in between. So I go back to Thursday 26th of flaming June. There were times during June when we called it flaming in a way some less prim people use another f word. I went to Lambert Lodge to talk to a resident with certain woes which I will keep private. Productive I hope, though the matter still needs work. I had an excellent cup of tea though. Saturday 27th because it started

A friend of mine who has the loyalty or insanity of saying she always reads my blog, (or is a liar) told me that last week's completely lost her. It didn't seem all that different to the others I do each week and I only know that some people read it because they tell me. But I notice on my website, I get the numbers who read it there. I suspect more people read it on TW8 or from the newsletter TW8 send out. Still, my numbers over the last 3 weeks for online readers are 118,

So where I left you I was off to my first Planning Committee for more than 4 years. We covered 3 applications. One was the former leader of the Conservative group who has now lost his seat to Green Councillor Rick Rowe. He wanted an uncontroversial extension to his home, but the convention is that Councillors' applications are formally reviewed. It was quite unnecessary since he is no longer a councillor, but of course we passed this with no discussion. The next one was a rat

I did go in search of heavy horses but they hid from me. Well, technically the person who invited me was not around so I had a luxury sausage sandwich in the Tesco cafe, perused a copy of Practical Classics and dreamed that one day I might buy an iconic Austin Allegro. Except it would be a nightmare because my days of even replacing a bulb are far behind me. I had to buy some booze and nibbles for my (then) upcoming celebration. There is no Harrods branch in North Feltham so

On Friday morning I was up in the Potting Shed having a coffee and the evilly irresistible bacon brioche (wrongly described IMO as a bap) with a friend of mine. We discuss matters of Brentford and (less obviously) Armenia and Georgia. Always a pleasure being in our lovely park and having been there through the difficult period when many were telling me we were destroying it, I am proud of the park. A friend of mine had been on some course or event at the Manor and said unprom

A friend of mine suggested that I should consider the idea of 'burnt out'. She has actually written books about that but I don't think it applies to me. But I am a little 'worn out' at present. The campaign was over several months and quite intense, getting to know how a new party works, getting to know new people whilst at the same time old friends being critical of my new party. Trying also to keep strong relationships to the many Labour councillors who have been my friends

Well I am rather busy being half on holiday so less real action than normal. In terms of action around the ward - not much, though I did attend a meeting at the University with the unfortunate residents and leaseholders at Holly House. I was pleased to see 4 representatives of the recently-appointed builder and generally I thought they presented helpfully. They also say they have 2 of their people on site most of the time, and their plan to actually finish the job were reason

Here I am again. Sorry. But don't blame me. You could have done the decent thing and put me and a lot of other people out their misery, but you insisted on voting for me to continue like Nigel Farage's hero Vladimir Putin into another term. I did not get 99.8% of the votes as Vladimir and other political giants do in other highly democratic administrations like North Korea, but I have to say I was greatly heartened by winning with quite a comfortable margin above my main oppo

This turned out to be a very health week. Starting on Thursday I had an annual update with a nurse in the Wellesley Road surgery in Chiswick. I was diagnosed a year or two ago with a lung condition, though in truth it has caused me no problems at all. Last year the nurse made me blow into various devices but she couldn't find anything interesting, other than possible asthma. Did I want an inhaler? Well no, because I couldn't see any point. This year she didn't do much in the

My last company car was a BMW 525i. I went to France on business and left it outside my house in Chiswick. My (then) wife rang me and asked me where my car was. I said it was outside our house. She said it wasn't. We reported it to the cops and my business trip was truncated. The cops from Brentford Police Station (this was 2001) first said it would have been stolen to order from Eastern Europe. Then they said they had found it in Slough. I said when will I get it back? They

We are now in the period known colloquially as Purdah. It is formally known as the 'pre-election period' because (according to my bible Wikipedia) Purdah has a sexist taint. I have never taken too much notice of this over the last n elections because it refers to new announcements by public authorities (ie the council) of new policies which might affect democracy. That of course is why the council (and its political masters) have churned out masses of announcements via its ov