WHAT ATTRACTED YOUR ATTENTION TODAY?

[Big Kev]

The fact that I got it in my head that my flu jab was at noon when it was actually 09:00. I will have to have a grovel tomorrow....

I managed to remember mine, they then surprised me with a pnuemonia jab in the other arm

[Thomo]

This afternoon I paid a second visit to the event at Earby. At 2.00 pm it was still well attended and I was even more impressed. This time I had a chance to speak with the organisers, and I applaud the effort that they have put into this. There was something for everyone, young and old alike, in short, there are lessons to be learned from what they have achieved in that smaller community. Personal feelings have been laid aside to produce something worthwhile. I have met old friends and made new one's and once again, "WELL DONE EARBY".

[PanBiker]

The fact that I got it in my head that my flu jab was at noon when it was actually 09:00. I will have to have a grovel tomorrow....

I managed to remember mine, they then surprised me with a pnuemonia jab in the other arm

Me too Kev, I had mine last week and also got a double whammy.

[Big Kev]

You have my sympathy, Ian. Both arms currently weigh in at around 3cwt a piece, at least that's what they feel like

[Stanley]

Strange how they affect people in different ways. I don't seem to have any problem with my arms but feel a bot tired the next day.... A small price to pay!
I shall be in there grovelling this morning!

[Tizer]

..I think the whole of social and health care now is riddled with examples that you give and that the whole caboodle is too complicated...

A follow up for Nolic - the head of children's services in Somerset has now been "let go by the council, ahead of another inadequate Ofsted rating" (BBC).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-29656979

It's to do with the settings on your user control panel Moh, you probably haven't adjusted for BST. If you wait for the clocks to change at the end of this month you should be on the right time again.

Remember OG member Bradders? He always looked forward to the clocks going back because the clock in his car then told the correct time for the next six months!

[Marilyn]

What happened to Bradders, I wonder.
( it has been a standing joke between hubby and I that I do the same thing with the clock in my car, Tiz. Mind you, we have switched to daylight saving now and I had great pleasure in pointing out my clock was now correct and the one in his car was now incorrect! We both know how to adjust them so I don't know why we persist with this nonsense.)

[Stanley]

The first digital watch I ever had was a Limit, cost a fortune but it had a fault. If you tried to adjust it for BST it played 'The yellow rose of Texas' and I had to take it to Fred Huppach for him to fiddler with it. Like you Maz I left it alone and it ended its days without a strap stuck onto the instrument panel of my Mazda pick-up truck with a knob of blue tack.
I did my grovel at the surgery yesterday and have three appointments written out in large letters with a black felt tip pen!
Today is the 49th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster. (LINK). 115 Children and five teachers killed in the 'safety' of their schoolrooms. This reminded me that I forgot to post a heads up for the 80th anniversary of the Gresford Colliery disaster on September 22nd (LINK). 266 men and boys killed, 255 of the bodies are still down there in the disused pit.... People agonise over the safety of nuclear power but forget the Price of Coal.

[Bruff]

Coal Board Chief Alf Robens at the time of Aberfan went on the lead the eponymous committee that looked at the health and safety system in GB in the 70s. He was a controversial choice as people remembered his reaction to Aberfan, turning up eventually the day after. The Robens Committee and Report led to the passing of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 and the setting up of the Health and Safety Executive and (now defunct) Commission. The 'etc' there in the '74 Act reflects the likes of the Aberfan tragedy. The Act places a duty on (mainly) employers to ensure that risks from work activities to the health and safety and welfare of those at work and those not at work but likely to be affected by the activities, are properly controlled. The Act is 40 years old this year, and it has a good case for being one of, if not the, most robust, proportionate and sensible pieces of legislation ever to appear on statute here.

Richard Broughton

[Stanley]

Richard, on the whole I thought that Alf Robens was a good man. He understood the mining industry and I think his heart was in the right p;lace. For some reason, probably acting on advice from others he appeared to be totally on the side of the mine owners and admitted afterwards that he was wrong.The worse thing in my book was that the NCB raided the Disaster Fund for part of the cost of making the spoil heaps safe. This was partially compensated for by Labour in 1997 when one of their first acts was to pay the money back to the fund but not the interest.
What attracted my attention this morning was the fact that some dead leg (or dead head!) had taken a brown recycling bin into Valley Gardens and tipped the contents out next to the beck. God alone knows how this benefited him or her, almost certainly him, or anyone else.
By the way, the first fireworks went off last night and upset my mate Jack, he will be getting lots of TLC over the next few weeks.

[Big Kev]

Hurricane Gonzalo Aftermath

[PanBiker]

[Tizer]

Brilliant, Kev, just brilliant. Thanks for that, it's better than any antidepressants!

[Stanley]

By the way... Nice to see you back Tiz, I hope you and Janet enjoyed Cornwall.
Very funny Kev but unfortunately, even though this is a spoof(or at least I hope so), many people do lose perspective, usually for selfish reasons. There's an advert at the moment for Rimmel cosmetics which uses the strap-line 'Get the London Look'. There are more important things in this world than having eyelashes that look as though they have been coated with gas tar or lips that are painted gloss Pillar Box Red.
What struck me was the way we can get used to something over the years and suddenly an external trigger lifts the veil and you see in quite a different light. It happened to me in the shed......

[Big Kev]

It did make me smile

[Tizer]

By the way... Nice to see you back Tiz, I hope you and Janet enjoyed Cornwall.

Thanks, yes we did enjoy the fortnight, especially because we were there while our kitchen and dining room were given the interior wall insulation treatment and new kitchen units fitted. They also built a new, insulated timber frame utility room. The builders, who we now know well and trust, did a marvellous job and on some days worked until 8.00pm and and on Saturday to get it all done in our absence. It's wonderful when you can give tradesmen full marks and also find them pleasant and with a great sense of humour. They are now finishing off the decoration and some outdoor work. It's satisfying too to be paying local men with families - the boss has three young kids at primary school (he rushed out yesterday morning without his lunch pack and his wife turned up on our doorstep and handed it to us - a kid's lunch box with colourful pictures of heroes like Captain Marvel and Superman! I had a good laugh but he got his revenge later when I tipped some water into the utility sink, forgetting that the waste pipe isn't yet connected and had to do a mopping up exercise.)

We spent the holiday (or was it a `retreat'?) in our favourite rented cottage high up the hill behind Praa Sands which is between Penzance and Helston, with fabulous views out to sea and across Mount's Bay. I've often wondered what it was like 100 years ago when the big fishing fleet would put out from Newlyn and when the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet used to anchor in Mount's Bay for review. Or when in the late 1940s the battleship Warspite ran aground on the rocks at Marazion while on her way to the breakers. We had mixed weather conditions during the fortnight; it started with a violent storm then the sea became like a millpond for about 5 days and then it got windy again with a mist and mild temperatures when that weather front came up from the Azores.

The stormy weather was spectacular and I didn't envy the people aboard the `Scillonian' when we watched it sail out from Penzance heading to the Scilly Isles - the bows would rise right out of the water then plunge out of sight! It travels in all sorts of bad weather and I've seen a photo of it a few hundred yards from the Penzance quay and heeled over at 45 degrees. The Cornish coast, like much of the UK, had a punishing time during last winter and many places are still being repaired - part of Penzance promenade fell into the sea and part of the Lido collapsed. Praa Sands always suffers rapid coastal erosion and the winter had a serious effect there. There is a low cliff rising from a few feet at one end of the mile long beach to perhaps 20 feet at the opposite end but it's composed of `head' which is a remnant of the Ice Ages, a soft material that's no match for storm waves. In the central area of the beach this is topped by sand dunes. There is a level area of land behind the cliff (about 50 yards) on which houses could not be built, then the steep hill with the houses. On the levelled dunes there is a car park running right up to the cliff top and during winter the end of it was washed away. There is still only an orange ribbon across to stop cars straying too near the edge! Another effect of the winter has been the washing away of sand from the beach and this has happened at other Cornish beaches too.

On the Thursday, 9th October, the storm was at its height and the following day the effects couldn't be missed. For example, the wooden steps leading from the dunes down to the beach now end in mid-air 5 feet above the beach. A massive amount of sand has been washed away into deeper water and we saw this happening - the sea was sand coloured for a long way out. This sand now lies about half a mile out from each end of the beach and must be acting like a reef - at low tide there is surf out there, where there never was any before. The loss of sand on the beach, from below the cliff, has exposed a raised, hard, black layer which some people probably think is tar. But it's peat, which was known to exist under the sand and was laid down about 1500 years ago and you can see the remains of the plant stems and roots in it. A few days later there were students from the local college surveying the new beach and we were able to tell them what had happened. It's not often we are on the spot when a geological event takes place!

First, a photo looking west along the beach after the storm, showing the exposed layer of peat. The steps lead down from the lifeguard's hut and used to end on the sand. You can just see, sitting on the peat, the lifeguard's red inflatable boat on its trailer - this used to sit in the same spot but on deep sand.


The next photo shows one of the sets of public steps which now ends 5 feet above the new beach level. You can see the black peat layer here is about 6 inches deep and below it is the `head' from the Ice Ages.


Further east the cliff is higher and it's mainly sand dunes on top of head and you can see the metal rails of the former steps, now washed away.

[PanBiker]

Excellent post Tiz and fascinating, sounds like you were in your element!

[Stanley]

A proper holiday snapshot! As Ian says, you were in your element! Geology, the sea and Cornwall.....

[Stanley]

The lady who has won her case against the Metropolitan police, getting £425,000 compensation, after giving birth to a baby fathered by an undercover officer. For years she tried to find the father but couldn't get anywhere by using official sources. In the end she found out by accident after the role of undercover officers became headline news. (LINK)

[Tizer]

What grabbed my attention today was several things. First, receiving a bill for £1,700,000,000...or more precisely the UK receiving a bill for £1.7 billion from EU leaders as an increase in our contribution to running the EU. Even worse is Greece and Italy receiving big increases too when they're on the verge of collapse. Meanwhile Germany and France get rebates. All this when, as I wrote yesterday on the Beware the Bankers topic, "Europe is back at 2007, about to hit the buffers again."

Another attention grabber - Steve Rosenberg reporting from Ukraine that people there are so disaffected with their politicians that they've been "throwing them into skips and wheelie bins"! I must admit, that had me laughing and thinking that UK politicians had better watch out. But then Rosenberg followed it with a more serious fact - as the Ukraine troop lorries pass by, the locals are giving the troops Nazi salutes and the troops are responding with the same salute. As Rosenberg concluded: "And this is a country that wants to join the EU".

Another focus of attention is Tesco. What a shambles! After several directors getting the sack we now hear that the chairman, Sir Richard Broadbent, has been booted out. I was surprised that Broadbent hardly got a mention in the early days of the Tesco `£250 million missing' crisis. You didn't hear about him on the news or see him mentioned in the newspapers. Yet Private Eye told it all...Broadbent was chairman at Barclays while Bob Diamond's lads were fiddling the Libor lending rate figures.

Closer to home, the dredging of the rivers in the Somerset Levels to prevent flooding is still under way. So far the Environment Agency (EA) has had to remove 132,000 tons of silt, not surprising to the locals when no dredging has been done since 1996 when the EA took over responsibility from the local Drainage Board. They've dug too deep in one of the rivers and are now having to put rock armour (large boulders of rock) in place to strengthen the river bank. Perhaps the 132,000 tons of silt should have been dumped in the offices of the EA. Or used to bury Tesco.

[Nolic]

I understand there is a programme about Baby P and Haringay on BBC1 on Monday 8.30pm - Panorama? I am led to believe it outs a number of agencies involved in the case in a poor light. Nolic

[Wendyf]

A visit from a young lady employed by Pendle Council to bring us news of how the latest EU regulations relating to private water supplies will affect us. Basically, the water out of both the taps and the source has to be tested every five years by the council to check that it matches the standards applied to piped tap water. They will, of course, charge us for service, and have the power to condemn the supply if it fails the test. They don't worry about single properties having a private supply, but ours is shared.
Luckily, we have a UV light and a filter on our supply, and Colin has cleaned out the two storage tanks involved in the system, replaced rotting wooden covers and fenced them off from sheep, but we could still find ourselves in trouble if there are minerals in it that shouldn't be there.

[Tizer]

Wendy, don't worry, before long we'll have fallen out completely with the EU and we'll be doing like many other members do - ignore the regulations. Either that or we'll have handed in our notice.

[David Whipp]

Barnoldswick in Bloom receiving the fourth RHS Gold Medal for Barlick and the trophy for the Best Town in the North West. We have also been nominated to represent the region in the national awards next year!

Pictured on stage for the awards at Southport are the eight members of the Bloom team who attended the event.

[Wendyf]