Brent Blogger

When I discovered schoolkids could travel all day and night for nothing, but I and my aged friends could only travel during daylight hours. Obviously, I penned a note to our new Mayor of London. Herewith his office's response!

"The Mayor has announced that the Freedom Pass for elderly people will be extended to 24 hours a day from 2 January 2009 on the Bus, Tube, Docklands Light Railway, Tram and London Overground networks.

All Freedom Pass holders will be automatically entitled to this concession and do not have to do any thing in order to receive this entitlement.

The Mayor does not have the power to extend 24-hour use to the remaining overland networks in London, which will continue to accept the Freedom pass for travel during off peak hours. However, the Mayor intends to discuss this with the Train Operating Companies when he meets with them later in the year and will encourage them to embrace it."

Cheers, Boris, thank you.

My dear mate is a councillor for Brent and lives two houses before the edge of a local conservation area. His windows are wooden and two houses away, theirs have been replaced with upvc (polyvinyl chloride) material and have been double glazed.

Their windows look better, will last forever and certainly allow the occupants to be warmer in winter and cooler in summer. They also will never need scraping down and repainting. Thus the 'carbon footprint' of his near neighbours is considerably less than his own.

"I can't see why rotting old wooden window frames covered with enough paint to hold the wood together, can be any more good for the area than the newer products, but I was refused permission to replace mine because I live in this conservation area." he grumbled at me over a pint in the Windermere pub.

Even thought he is a councillor, he couldn't sway the decision. But also, because he is a councillor, he won't disobey the order. I certainly would, but I've always been considered a bit of a rebel - even if I am balding!

Upon further questioning, I discovered that although he is in one of those confounded conservation zones, the making of water pipes out of lead as they were in days of yore is forbidden, as is the use of asbestos to make things fireproof.

Seems somebody in the upvc business must have upset a bunch of Brent councillors. Maybe it was that bunch of double glazing salesmen I saw a few years ago!

Depressing isn't it? Between my house and the railway station there about 60 houses on each side of the road. At last count, there were only six front gardens.

I've got one, which my brother kindly tends and it is so pleasing to hear people who pass, compliment me on the sight. All of us have back gardens, but at the front of our home we have hedges, trees, bushes, flowers and even the odd bit of wildlife. I spotted a squirrel, dashing across the lawn to scuttle over the garage towards the back of the house yesterday morning.

All the front lawns about our place have turned into parking spaces. Alright, I know we are within the restricted parking area for the stadium, but even so, the house on one side of me has six cars plus two wheelie bins on the concrete apron out front. On the other side there are four cars. However across the road every house has only one car, but they are all parked almost in their front doors.

During the last council elections, I spent much of my free time delivering leaflets, in and around the Wembley area. Some streets have absolutely no street parking available so they all have paved their front gardens in order to park assorted vehicles, varying from massive 'Chelsea Tractors' down to tiny cars not much larger than my mother's shoes.

This saddens me. When I was a lad, not only did I enjoy the sight and smell of the flowers along the road but also I would admire the butterflies and birds which would dance around me on my way to school. Nowadays there are more gardens in the TV soaps than there are in real life and there aren't many in Coronation Street!

Did you notice Brent's powers at the town hall conducted a survey to discover if we preferred to be Brentists or Wemblites?
For some unfathomable reason to me, the vote was very highly in favour of us being in the Borough of Brent.
Obviously my address is still Wembley, Middlesex, but I now seem to be living in a place named after an insignificant creek.
Okay, I know there are the folk from Kilburn, Willesden and other places who are covered in the umbrella term of Brent, but I don't care.
We live in Wembley!
I don't really slobber about the big Red Riding Hood's shopping basket called the "New Wembley Stadium" and even less with all the moaning and screaming about the cost of changing the name back to Wembley.
It was Wembley when I moved here some 55 years ago and I dislike going away for a while to return to the same place where my home has migrated into a new region without changing address!
In days of yore, I lamented the demise of the London County Council and later my school having to relinquish the word Grammar from its title made me wince.
Now, our locals WANT us to be from Brent.
Hm!
Maybe it is time to migrate - again.

Manhole covers are being turned into cash in an attempt by our local thieves to join the band of folk who are illegally assisting third world countries in their hunt for metal.

Seems pretty silly to me.

To me, the most stupid thing I've heard recently is the rush to stick a price tag on a plastic bag at my local supermarket.
They claim it is to make shoppers buy more expensive bags which are curiously named, "Bags for Life"!
Whose life, I ask, mine or the darn shop's life?
They can't fool me, this is not really a concern for reducing the use of the bags, but rather a cute way to make money.
There is a frighteningly easy way to ensure used bags do not end up in landfill.
If the shop puts its name on the bag and then charges the person 10p to purchase it, wouldn't it be a very simple task to advertise that they would pay 5p per bag to anybody who brings one into their place.
Like in the 'good old days' of yore when there was a deposit on bottles, children would delight in collecting as many bottles/bags as they could carry to supplement their pocket money.
Turn bags into valued commodities and they would completely disappear from all the rubbish bins
Plus, the darn shops would have spend some of our precious cash which we paid them for the blooming bag in the first place, in disposing of the offensive item.
When, many, many years ago I was a young lad, my Mum would pack me off on a shopping trip with a string bag in my pocket.
Shopkeepers in those days wouldn't ever dream of giving you anything to carry your purchases home with you.
Simplest way to get rid of the plastic bags is just to stop supplying them.
I have tried, unsuccessful, I hasten to say, to buy one of those string bags of my childhood.
Anybody out there in the internet world know where I can get one?

Did you see that drivel complaining about there being one CCTV camera for two folk in this land and this is considered an invasion of privacy!
The idea was probably touted by the same folk who don't want us to carry ID cards.
During my wandering around this planet I discovered, most lands require you to carry your passport or some locally issued ID card at ALL TIMES - even swimming!
During one of my 'off' days in Japan, I made the mistake of going to the airport to meet a mate without positive proof of identity and the Authorities jumped on me.
Obviously, I didn't speak the local lingo, but luckily had half a dozen of my business cards showing I was an employee of a small company in Tokyo.
If you carry more than three of the same card, you are considered to be that person..
The airport police who are SCARY, called my office, talked to my boss and then they got him to chastise me over a speaker phone.
Now, there is a land festooned with CCTV cameras.
Our efforts in Wembley are pretty good however.
In one of my odd volunteer posts in this borough, I managed to visit the CCTV HQ at Brent House - Whow!
The video pictures they look at are of television quality, and can follow you along most of the major roads with a central large screen on the wall where they can blow up the image to small cinema size.
Of course the proliferation of cameras are really necessary for crowd control during our assorted 'Event Days' at the stadium when they are in the control of the police.
Talk to your local councillor and see if you can chat him/her into taking you to the HQ, it is quite a surprise.
I tell you what, I'll never scratch myself or pick my nose in public ever again!

Did you hear that English Heritage is using criminals to work out the age of some ancient trees.
It turns out many of our ancient manor houses which contain most of our large magnificent trees are now used as prisons by our Authorities.
As the Heritage would not ask their members to commit any crime to get onto the property, they are getting the inhabitants to hug-a-tree.
Calculating the length of the average prisoner from fingertip to fingertip, they can work out the age of the trees they hug.
Also, they need to know the type of tree because a four armed circumference of an oak would be many years more than the same measurement of a beech tree.
Obviously, the tending of these trees is a matter of pride for the local forestry commission, but not so for our council workers.
When our Borough woodsmen come around to hack at branches of our street trees, they seem to care more about not impeding the bus lanes than anything approaching aesthetic pruning.
These poor plants are turned into sterile balls of leaves on trunks which are often festooned with stringy suckers.
They are like some sort of giant vegetarian lollypops for a jumbo Kojac
Brent, apparently, is now trying to be more green, thus if you walk along many of our streets, like Grassmere Avenue or Thirlmere Gardens you can find plenty of greenery on their own land.
The pavement is strewn with hundreds of weeds which nobody in the parks group looks after - or bothers to dig up!

We have been preached at by our 'powers that be' about the distinct lack of dental services in our fair land.
Having been born in India to an English Dad and a Finnish Mum, I developed a penchant for all the sweet products available in that country and, obviously, acquired a bunch of rotten teeth.
In those far off days, dentists were thought of as some form of torture experts and I firmly believe mine had a hand cranked drill to perform excavations on my molars.
By the age of seven, I had so much metal in my mouth, I firmly believed that if I fell over, my head would automatically point north.
Some 56 years later, living in Wembley, two of my front teeth, wobbled and then fell out, which to me was like losing two members of my family.
I panicked.
Following the government warning, I feared there were no available NHS dentists in Brent so I rang a midnight programme on Radio Five Live to chat to their dental consultant.
He advised me to visit my local library, who would have a list of all dentists in my area with available space in their surgeries.
Certainly easier than my thought of traipsing the streets around my home, knocking on dentist's doors pleading to get admitted.
With list in hand the next morning, after only one call, I had secured my place a couple of days later for a visit to a very cheerful lass in my own street only one hundred houses away.
Some two weeks after that. I could again talk without whistling and chew my food properly.
My daughter has been complaining at me for weeks since, because I am smiling too much.
So, now you know, if you need a dentist, visit your local library!

It seems that Banksy, London's most famed street, wall and pavement artist has been unmasked as a former public school, middle income, middle aged bloke called Robin.
As he doesn't live anywhere nearby, we can't look forward to selling off bits of our new Wembley town centre to bemused American collectors
We have our fair share of graffiti scribblers and provided it is not on their own private property most people don't care about it.
Brent Council does care however and will remove any obscene scrawl within 24 hours of it being reported to them.
My problem is, most of the rubbish written on street furniture is small and thus is passed virtually unobserved by the authorities.
Unfortunately, none of our local 'artists' have any aptitude at drawing real images they just miss-use our alphabet.
Also irritating is the fact that most of the writing is unintelligible and even though I do not read nor write all of the 63 common foreign languages spoken in Brent, I can swear that the writing is not in any one of them.
It is a lot like trying to comprehend the meaning of the keys on a keyboard, if just read out aloud from left to right - or even from right to left, but I've been informed, QWERTY is now in the Oxford English Dictionary as an acronym for Typewriter.
The best bit of graffiti I have seen was actually a computer generated image of the White Cliffs of Dover, with the words, "GO HOME - WE'RE FULL" scrawled along them.
I complained to one of the regulars at the Windermere pub about some idiot who had scribbled all over the bus timetable outside the building.
"If you end up standing around waiting for a late bus," he advised me sagely, "even you might be tempted to vent your anger on the signpost."