Alex K

Ms Hamvas, I too shall be grateful for a link to any published list of UK trees with invasive roots. Your post makes me think that Southwark Council maintain such a list. I hope that you will both share it and let us know the sources drawn on in compiling it.

Ragpickers. Once, I suppose, their finds were valuable to papermakers. No longer. Old clothes now are baled and sold either to far Eastern Europe or to Africa. Passport from Romania / Slovakia / Hungary, "gypsy" / Roma (I shouldn't wonder) -- among scavengers there, represented in numbers disproportionate to their contribution to those countries' overall population -- disadvantaged minority, etc.

You may be right. I saw it the other way round -- buyers clamouring at their doors and nothing to sell. So out they go to beat the bushes. But who's to say?

@SteveUK1978 -- might do. But. Six estate-agent approaches last week (five missives through mailbox, one telephone call): "May we sell your house?" More demand than stock, seems like.

Hurrah! Wish I were in your district. Keep on keeping on, eh?

This thread IS funny. Rabelaisian, even. And if some females are offended at being tagged as a solicitor... well, "soliciting" used to be a newspaper-printable term for a particular time-hallowed profession. No wonder they're all fluffed out and ears back.

Interested by how differently "social" and "anti-social" behaviour are construed. When living in Japan I found that tachi-shomben, pissing against a wall, was regarded as un-refined -- but no worse -- and was entirely excused if the pisser was drunk. Contributing as someone who with advancing age has been troubled by loss of capacity and increase of urgency: Sometimes it happens. Do as you would be done by, Celia, PokerTime, and others, and turn a blind eye, please.

@KalamityKel -- You're right. Boulet posts English versions of his work (click the flag) but with a lag of some days. I wish that one already were available for this strip. Still, I hope that at least part of the smug asociality of "But Esmeralda has to learn sometime!" comes through. (What? She has to learn to reload an Oyster card? At HER age?) Not when there's a queue and we're all trying to get to work, she doesn't.

http://www.bouletcorp.com

@Belle -- You sent me to Wikipaedia. The short-sightedness of ending railway service between Carlisle and Edinburgh... The new line is a scant thirty miles, a bit beyond Galashiels only, commuter trains: Better than nothing, though.

@Loz -- put me down for a GRASPING TOERAG T-shirt, please. XL, white on red. Thanks in advance.

When you think of what has happened to house prices since that was filmed... Sorry. Never far from minds around here, innit. M Martel, thanks for the posting (and for the good work in Tours).

I'd thought that the transit vans and those who dwell in them had been there quite some while -- in the car park proper till the expulsion, now in the bollarded area a few steps lower... "That's where the car-wash blokes live," I'd imagined. Must have got that wrong, because I can't imagine why they'd be sticking around when their work is gone. What that dog is doing, aside from being bored and noisy, escapes me.

Panicky... IF Co-op divest themselves of the LL property, ED is POTENTIALLY heading for X, and Y, and Z... That's two conditionals away. Relax! It may never happen.

@PokerTime -- "The 80% of private landlords with no mortgage overheads are the real beneficiaries [of the inflation of the last 30 years]. So for me, it makes perfect sense to regulate those rents." That is: Not private home-owners, but private landlords without mortgages to pay. I don't follow. Why should that class of persons be excluded from seeking the return on investment that buy-to-rent affords? Why should that return be reserved for owner-occupiers? Connect the dots for me. (Yes, I'm thick...) Thanks in advance.

Better, certainly, than lordshiplane.co.uk, which lists the East Dulwich Garden Centre as still trading.

Thanks, all. I know better now what to expect, and how to have those expectations met.

@numbers -- very reasonable, good guide for "next time". Thanks.

What are the unspoken rules here, the expectations? What's "well-of-course" and what's "we-don't-do-that"? Good clear dry weather and so the house-painters have been at the windows, doors, soffits. They have keys. They arrive after I leave for work, leave before I arrive from work. Yesterday evening I found the kettle full, the sugar reached down out of the cupboard and on the countertop, and the milk bottle on the inside of the fridge door nearly empty. Hmmm, I thought. No one to offer them a cuppa, so they helped themselves. No big deal. I had a carton of UHT milk in reserve, breakfast would not be a problem. But the experience left me... d?pays?. Not quite fish-out-of-water, but a bit uncomfortable. A bit mystified. The puzzlement, faint discomfort, that I felt arises from the fact that they didn't ask. Had they asked, I'd have said -- Help yourselves! (Same with the loo. Which they used. No problem there.) In Germany, in the USA -- "helping yourself" to the client's groceries gets you sacked. And the client's WC? Variable. Usually no-go; when I was part of a masonry crew one summer 45 years ago the foreman, even for a single-day job, arranged a Portaloo if we were more than a short walk from a tavern, a diner. Britain may be different. Seems that it is. Share your experiences, please.

Interesting -- "what a row of bunkers" I'd always thought on passing by -- the inside photographs much brighter and lighter than I had imagined possible with those shooting-blind windowslits. http://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/32303987

-- yesterday, K9 squad in abundance -- anyone know what's being sought? Clown activity is my bet, but...

Well, Flora -- Robert Poste's Child, may I call you Flora? -- monkeylite probably once saw something nasty in the woodshed. And the experience has incapacitated him / her from writing "with the help of". A phobia of the indefinite article, perhaps. We must strive not to judge, and to be kind.

@alice -- No fight; instead, surprise that someone would stir himself / herself to comment whose attitude is "In the long run, we're all dead, so why bother"; a bit self-contradictory that?; and pleasure, that -- East Dulwich being a large patch, and burbage possibly not being a near neighbour -- I likely don't have to avert my eyes regularly from what I can now imagine as the orderliness and beauty of what burbage calls home. **grin** In the interests of full disclosure: In East Dulwich for 13 years; owner-occupier and not looking to move; just finished having the back garden fences mended (thank you, windstorms of early 2014!) and putting arrangements in place to have the house painted and the gutters seen to this spring, the first time during my occupancy. Not for "prettification" only, although the place will look crisper when the work is done, but also as prophylaxis against weather damage (paint protects as well as decorates!), and as part of making sure that the house, as a machine-for-living, continues to work for me. The housing stock in this area is, much of it, more than a century old. It's falling into disrepair, and funds are not being ploughed into mending and replacing. Whether rentier eagerness to make the most of an investment, or, as burbage points out, short-term thinking ("I'm off to the next rung on the property ladder!") by owner-occupiers, or lack of cash because too much money each month goes out on mortgage payments for landlord or owner-occupier to spend on "prettifying", underlies the failure to maintain many properties -- who can tell? But I don't see the neighbourhood as likely soon to become more spick-and-span, because what burbage wrote about house-buying and -selling in East Dulwich may be in large part true.

Thanks, all. I came home determined to give my own front garden a tidy. Weeded and rosemary trimmed back -- it looks better. -- Political leaflets, DaveR. So yes; if I had a firmer grasp of economics I wouldn't be volunteering! -- My point exactly, healey: If your house had cost less, you'd have more "spare" income, more "spare" time... when every mortgage payment is a stretch (and the stretch seems likely to get longer and harder), money goes only for the essentials. So the walk tiles stay broken, the fence gaptoothed. No judgement passed; regret expressed, sympathy offered.

Just out leafletting -- up and down the streets off Lordship Lane, dropping flyers into post-boxes, shoving them (with a worried moment every time -- dogs! teeth! fingers!) behind furry cache-sexe "draught excluders" inside doors' mail slots. I came home disheartened by how poor my neighbourhood seems, how run-down, how badly maintained; or are we British simply not house-proud? Front garden paths a tangle of broken tile and crisps bags, fences in gaping need of picket-denture after picket-denture, gates off their hinges, wood rotten... If one can't afford to re-paint, then at least one might find the time and self-respect to wash down the grimy encasements of windows, enjambments of doors. But -- not. And the dank stench that wafted outward through some of those mail slots! ...Wherever humans den is, I suppose, Arkham. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has freed up pension pots: Take the money, he beckons those about to retire, and do with it what you will. Stocks? Bonds? Ah! Real estate! Another boost for house prices, then. But the higher those prices go, the greater the monthly mortgage payment, the fewer the monies available for improvements. For re-tiling the garden paths, re-hanging the re-made gates. For plasterwork and paint. To re-lay, to re-set the stoop stairs rather than to trowel-patch the tar swilled over tread and riser decades ago when first they cracked and chipped. And for want of those monies, I fear that East Dulwich will stay a slum, albeit a more expensive one.