March 14th – At the traffic lights on the junction of Hatherton Street and the New Ring Road, Walsall, lunchtime. Waiting at a red to turn right.
Why is it so often the most uncourteous drivers are those charged with teaching newcomers to the road the tenets of good driving – respect, obeying the law and consideration for others?
I despair sometimes. Not indicating, either.
This journal is moving home. Please find out more by clicking here.
from Tumblr https://ift.tt/2Hl1DGI
via IFTTT
January 24th – There is a madness afoot in the country, and possibly the broader western world in the last 10 years or so, and I can see no solution in sight.
Governments come to power on the promise of austerity and cutting spending, yet close used and needed public facilities that took decades to be obtained – in a flash. And so we lost the police station in Walsall on Green Lane, built in the Brutalist period of the 60s, which was closed in response to spending cuts in 2016. Police now have to take suspects to Oldbury when arrested, which is impacting officer availability and causing great inefficiency.
The building itself – an unremarkable modernist structure – was sold to developers and is currently being demolished.
We will need a police station again. The situation as it is is not working.
And it will cost us far more than closing this one saved to sort the mess out.
And when some politician grasps the nettle and does it, they will be derided for financial profligacy.
But the real crime is cutting things communities need, in the interests of short term political gain.
It takes years to build communities, and days to destroy them with cuts. The recklessness seems in the axe-hand to me.
This journal is moving home. Please find out more by clicking here.
from Tumblr http://bit.ly/2TjyVbL
via IFTTT
October 13th – Have you had a new bathroom fitted lately? Does your house now look splendid and fresh? Great.
Sadly, if you paid a chancer to remover the rubbish, it’s now in Green Lane, on the Walsall Wood/Shelfield border in a field gateway, because you were too cheap to pay fro proper waste disposal, or they were.
Since the partial closure of Green Lane for sewage repair works last week, the lane has been blighted with such flytipping.
If you paid someone to dump this stuff, you could be prosecuted on the same basis as the flytipper., because under the law giving waste to an unlicensed carrier incurs the same penalty as fly tipping.
The other possibility is you dumped it yourself. In which case you’re beneath contempt.
There’s a lot of packaging in there. Hope none of it has your address on it.
January 17th – Recently had a new fridge or freezer? Left the old one out for the scrap man to collect? Well done, this is where the bits they couldn’t weigh in ended up.
This is the ditch running beside Green Lane at Bullings Heath, Walsall Wood.
If you leave stuff out for tatters and scrap men, you aren’t recycling, and it’s not out of sight, out of mind. We all have to pay to get this stuff cleaned up. The rubbish fairy doesn’t exist.
Leaving stuff out in the hope it’ll disappear as if by magic renders you no better than a flytipper, which is, incidentally, the way it’s considered in law.
June 4th – A spin around Brownhills in the rain. I had errands to run, and I took a shortcut under the loading bay of the old Tesco at Ravens Court. There, no doubt pushed off the back of a truck under the cover of the fences and scrub, the carcasses of two scrap fridges.
The plague continues. The old appliances have been stripped of any metal with commercial value, and that will be kept by the tatters and weighed in for cash. The remnants are just flytipped anywhere they can offload them.
There is no defence of this; it’s what happens when recycling legislation is thoughtlessly altered, but the people doing this are scum. They don’t care for anything but the cash, and everyone who leaves old appliances out for the scrap men to collect is as guilty as those who dump the remains.
Stop leaving stuff for tatters and get your waste disposed of properly, because we all up up paying if you don’t.
BrownhillsBob's #365daysofbiking 