Burbage

LondonMix Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Why does it bother you? If you've bought > recently, people can very easily estimate how much > you had to pay. Well, yes. But that only works if it's a normal transaction, reflecting the market price at the time. But as MrBen points out, transactions aren't always normal. Sometimes people have reason to want to lie about the price, over- or under-estimating it depending on whether they're trying to borrow money, get divorced, avoid tax, claim insurance, whinge about council tax, diddle a relative or anything else that still passes for economic activity. Some properties go for surprisingly low prices. Forced sales do happen, of course, but a knock-down private sale can be a neat way to disappear taxable income or inconvenient assets, whether criminal gains or the sort of pile that might keep you off legal aid. Some go for surprisingly high prices. Those significantly above market rates - which estate agents love, despite the delicate stench of palpable fraud, because they push up the reported market rates - don't happen just because some people have more money than sense. They can happen because it's a way of moving money from one person or company to another without it being too obvious. Stamp duty is less avoidable than it was, but it's a smaller hit than corporation or income or inheritance taxes might be, and is, though you have to be a bit clever, a great way to minimise outgoings. The tax regime, despite appearances, is a nice little earner for the chiselling scammers among us, and serves the legal and property industries very well indeed. This isn't entirely surprising, given that both MPs and their Whitehall masters tend to be selected, as they have been for centuries, from a restricted pool of privileged property-owners who, as the expenses scandal showed, have a vested interest in loopholes.

There are signs, and there was a consultation, and there are bits on Southwark's website to explain it. But, in short, some floods in 2004 caused the owners of houses in and around Dulwich Village to put in insurance claims of over ?1m. This has, as you'd expect, raised the premiums considerably, to the utter distress of everyone. To relieve this distress the Council and Thames Water have, between them, decided to donate around ?4m of the spare money we've paid in taxes and water bills to a Grand Scheme of Flood Defences, with the aim of turning the Park into a swamp when it rains, rather than letting the rainwater gurgle down the hill and frighten the rich folk. As far as I know, the insurance industry has not offered any financial help, presumably because the claims are no more than a historic blip on their radar from which they're handily profiting. Thames Water has been more generous, but as it's them that are doing some of the work, they can probably afford to be generous. Besides, a tax-deductible donation to a community project looks good in a way that fixing drains, especially drains that haven't flooded in a decade, doesn't.

It couldn't have happened to a nicer chap.

the-e-dealer Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Estate agents... I'm sorry, but this thread is about things that cause you irrational rage.

Jeremy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Yeah it's linked to an address, but helps to pay > for services which benefit all of us. So clearly > you could argue that it's unfair. Travelling is a > lifestyle choice, after all. It was a lifestyle choice, when council housing was available, rents affordable and home-ownership possible on an average income. Now, however, things have moved on, or not, a little and if you're more than two-weeks' pay away from sleeping in the park, you're in the small and lucky minority of grasping toerags.

???? Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Bagpipes - can anyone make a case for them? Oddly enough, yes. But I can't put the case any better than the glorious Kathryn Tickell who plays the Northumbrian pipes. The Highland Bagpipes are, of course, a different thing and, like the kilt, haggis, oatcake and shortbread, a rough-edged variety of the civilised version. If there's something I will miss about Scotland, it's the variety of sardonic tramps that constitute their chief export, but I can't say I;ll miss them any more than the corrupt, criminal, grasping, lying, fraudulent and venal national bank which it seems I've been forced to own. The referendum is a useful start, but I can't help thinking that if Scotland hand been tied to Ireland, towed out to soemwhere deep and sunk, the last two centuries would have been a whole lot pleasanter for both everyone and the fishes.

miga Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > To me the old divisions of worker vs. capitalist > don't ring true inside a service economy like > ours, although there is clearly a power > relationship between the wealthy and the poor. This is the core of any debate on class. But I think it's less to do with absolute wealth than access to credit. At it's simplest a person who owns a house can be worth less, in overall terms, than someone scraping by on a four-figure income. That's because they can secure loans and start a business on the basis of that house. On the basis of that business, they can take greater risks. Calling bankruptcy a 'safety-net' might be putting it a bit strong, but if things go belly-up, liabilities are limited, and there's a number of tax-efficiencies, grants and benefits that allow lifestyles to be leveraged. Home-ownership isn't the only way to access credit. Employment is another, and mortgages, the usual first step on the credit ladder, are measured as multiples of salary. But as full-time, permanent employment gives way to short-term, zero-hour and freelance contracts, many are finding them tricky to get, or renegotiate, even for those on average or above-average earnings. What we're seeing is a blurring of lines where status, or class, is no longer dependent on absolute wealth, earnings, qualifications or upbringing. It's more to do with hubris, self-entitlement and access to other people's money. Play a good game of office politics, and you'll get to a position where you can afford to live in East Dulwich. Fail to play, or fail to get a job in which office politics is possible, and you'll be impersonally forced to move out. East Dulwich is, according to some sources, still far from a ghetto of sharp-elbowed braggarts. But there's something oddly symbolic about the painted Madonna of the favelas who, from above a glittery new temple of self-indulgence, leers at the less-celebrated utility of the Wash 'n' Dry. There is, of course, nothing to be done. Credit is everything and, until the next inevitable crash, East Dulwich will continue to shift to a "middle-class" ghetto of estate agents and destination shops (such as the pantomime butcher and the inexplicable gelaterie) with an increasing dearth of police stations, post offices, greengrocers and the suchlike. It may not be an accurate label, but we know what it means. And, though it's scant consolation for the struggling, Marx was never fond of meritocracies. In that sense, at least, it's a change for the better.

Nor me

It's so sad to see people arguing over this. I don't, personally, think there's any conflict at all. Even though we are talking about two different places. The discussion began centred on Dulwich Park. Geographically speaking, that's a patch of land whose lower slopes slump to a halt in Dulwich Village, a ghetto of oleaginous profiteers, specifically and appropriately at the Chapel of God's Gift, the sanctimonious memorial to the tortured bears and south-bank prostitutes who gave such selfless service in the cause of founding what is now the Dulwich Estate. The upper reaches of the Park border Dulwich Proper, a mixed neighbourhood of mostly working folk who live in council estates, shoddy private blocks and the meaner variety of Victorian terrace. The Park therefore counts as middle class because it is in the middle. At the one end are people in mail-order tweed, who call their dogs Tarquin and point out the voles to their children. At the other end are those who call their dogs Geoff, play rounders and know a rat when they see one. It's effectively the demilitarized zone of the class war, and should keep everybody happy. Up to a point, at least. There is the small matter of the flood defences, which could potentially change that sunny outlook. For, when you think about it, it's merely a wheeze to force the poor, through water bills and council tax, to disproportionatly subsidise the not-very-poor-at-all. For it is only the latter who'll benefit, seeing their insurance premiums reduced, and being saved from the indignity of wading in their own, doubtlessly aromatic, sewage. But, so far, nobody has noticed, so it'll probably be fine. East Dulwich is somewhere else. It does not border the Park but nestles, a little further to the north, in the groin of Denmark Hill and at the upper end of the disappointingly mismonikered Goose Green. Although once inhabited by blow-ins, attracted by a pantomime butcher and quantities of Cath Kidston, that transient generation has now left, leaving their aspirational successors to live in the TV-inspired ruins of their fixer-uppity, overpriced dreams. The great lino-rush of recent years is, sadly or otherwise, now over and the money it generated is now being squandered on unsustainable smallholdings up and down the A40 by people who pretend to be writers, leaving those who lost out in the recession-hit game of musical houses still here, but without the moolah to support so much as a deli. Effectively, this means that East Dulwich is becoming, paradoxically, a bourgeois community of the unwillingly-working class. Which should keep everybody happy.

Jeremy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Flood prevention measures. Or so we're told... The fact that the workfolk have either been kept in the dark or sworn to secrecy is telling. The flood defences have been widely discussed and the plans exhibited, so I'm inclined to believe that this must be something else. I am told, however, that rumours, should they exist, that the whole project is a cover for a scheme to provide direct access to the Thames for a burgeoning population of reptilians near that end of the park are nothing more than outrageous fantasy, however eerily plausible they might seem.

Steviedulwich Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > well may be thats the case, although thats not my > understanding....So my question would be why Have > I always been able to collect parcels for the last > 24 years,never once has it been queried when I > show my driving license ? I think, perhaps, rumours of the existence of Houses in Multiple Occupation might have finally reached the Village. Sadly, the lax moral standards of the outside world mean it's now the rule, rather than the exception, for post offices only to hand over parcels to people without matching ID. Although some charmed backwaters have been able to resist the tide for many years - and almost never, contrary to low-minded gossip, on account of excessive kinship - such practices tend to become universal over time, and I'm afraid that seems to be the case here. It was always, therefore, inevitable that even the Village would one-day find itself host to forelock-tuggers reluctant to take its residents' good characters on trust. So, though painful and even shocking, it was unavoidable that the smudge of suspicion would eventually fall on the post-office queue, as the smoky glow of industry once fell upon Tolkein's Shire. But, if it's any consolation, progress brings benefits, too, and I hope you'll be pleased to learn that the postmistress can longer tell your neighbours about your phone calls.

You're more than welcome. But I can't help with the ducks. Unless they had tufts and blue noses, in which case they're, slightly disappointingly, called Tufted Ducks, of which the females and young are brown. But they're probably not, Tufted Ducks being renowned for their inveterate and irritating tootling. Oddly enough, those researches continued, and plant neurobiology is, near enough, an actual science (plant psychology, like the whistling bramble, remains a bit made up, I'm afraid). However, plants being what they are, it got complicated and not very telly-friendly and, as nobody's yet worked out how to make money from it, it doesn't get umuch funding. In either case, you can dry your tears now, as the experiments rarely get more aggressive than the occasional attempt to replace pesticides with inspirational music. Whether that's intended to inspire the plants or annoy the bugs remains unclear.

It looks like you've got it bad, but don't worry, it'll soon pass. At a guess, they might be little grebes which are small, as the name implies and brown, as it doesn't. They make a noise like a horse down a well, and that tallies with your description, even though they're not plants. Plants, even flowery ones, tend not to make noises if they can help it, as they're unable to run away from rampant herbivores and, at least until they've developed veils of leaves to hide behind, keep quiet. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, and the whistling bramble continues to baffle plant psychologists but, on the whole, the silence of plants can be taken as a given.

fazer71 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > If your house is worth 600,000k to 1,500,000 is > 2k too much to spend on what is probably one of > the most important looking Victorian features? > > I don't get it. Good grief. Look, it's bogus money. Only on paper. Not cash. The eerie flatulence of a chain reaction sparked by greed gone critical. For many, it doesn't matter if their house is worth a million. For the most part, it's not their million, it's the bank's. For some, who've done nicely, it won't all belong to the bank, and there may be a tidy, theoretical profit tied up in it. But that profit only becomes money if they sell their home, in which case it's not their home any more. While it is their home, they don't have the money. Just because someone convinced a bank to buy them a house, back in the days when their skills looked relevant and forty looked distant, doesn't mean things worked out all shiny. Optimism, the viperous beast that lurks in every brochure and behind each salesperson's grin, gave them no reason to think that savings would collapse, salaries would flatline or the cost of living go up. And never did they imagine that, rather than being appointed to the acronymical valhalla of senior management, they'd get given the option of flexible hours with or without their consent. So the upshot is, big house, borrowed money and nothing beneath the mattress. Unless they've hit negative equity, in which case they're worth less than nothing, and will have to put every penny they manage to scrape from the labours of others into paying things back before the bank starts asking why their income's gone lumpy, or rising interest rates force them to sell on an ebbing tide and go beg for a hostel in Stoke. To be fair, most won't have been entirely innocent of the predictable nastiness of the world, and some might have even been prudent. But for all of us there comes a time when we must meet the burdensome demands of those we used to love, and the young and the old cost a lot to look after, too. You try explaining to Granny why you blew her meals-on-wheels on a garden path or spent the Dignitas money on a palm tree. In other words, there is never a time when anyone can be sure that their disposable income is disposable, and that means discretionary spending is, as a result, shockingly low. This is, in a sense, roughly why the economy is stagnant. Those with cash are sitting on it in justified fear, and the rest of us are watching our pittances dribble into the coffers of governments and multinationals while stuff-all's coming in. We know we should be bolder, take risks, and strive for success. But we can't forget that the parks and pavements are strewn with the cider-sodden remnants of the last lot of highly-motivated, self-starting, enthusiastic risk-takers. And that's nothing to do with the fact that nobody, in two generations, has seen fit to scrub a doorstep.

It's not always money or spare time... The point of prettifying a house in this are has, for the last two or three decades, being so you can flog it as quickly as possible at a decent profit, and move on to the next house you fancy painting. To an extent, the graspery of estate agents and the credulous compliance of their victims has conspired to put the cost of second-hand house-paint up by a thousand percent, and force the occupants to apply it. But the market is stagnating a little now. There are sales, of course, but they're mostly sales of convenience and the tax-efficient shuffling of portfolios. So there's much less need to paint things. This is as it should be. All painting ever does is bring closer the time it'll need painting next. The same goes for dusting or cutting back rosemary. It'll grow again, and you'll have to cut it again, and eventually you'll get bored, or dead, and then it'll be as if you never bothered at all. So what, unless you've got the avarice of a moonstruck puppet in a nasty suit to pleasure, is the point? Go to France, and you'll see people living without any of the pretentious fantasies of whatever ICI has become. They paint their shutters to celebrate the end of every world war, and even more rarely bother with the walls. Yet, despite their reputation for shruggish misery, they're happier than Britons, who have to put up not just with the assumed snobbery of pretentious neighbours on the make but also, it seems, the snottiness of the leaflet-stuffing familiars of our lowest political pawns. So, Alex K, if you don't like it, do yourself a favour and keep off other people's land.

*Bob* Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Ultimately you have to pick your battles. Demands > for changes to the longstanding status quo won't > get anywhere. Complaints against changes to it > stand a chance (see previous abandoned trial). That depends on what, exactly, the status quo is. I may be wrong, and it may just be prevailing winds and so on, but it seems many more planes are turning overhead than used to be the case and, at least to my ears, a plane turning sounds much louder (possibly because the engines are going at different rates, but noise seems to 'spill' downward and the change in pitch doesn't help). There again, that might just be a return to normal after the trials last year, and I'd forgotten how bad it was. But El Pibe is right about the planes getting louder in general - the engines may be getting quieter per unit of thrust, but the planes have been getting bigger.

Sitting in my flat, listening to the howling wind, watching the damp run down the walls and wondering, of all the Valentine's cards I got, which I should have sent.

fabfor Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > The point is that experiencing the paranormal > inevitably makes you attempt to join the dots > (correctly or not is another debate) whereas > you're essentially walking blind on a long and > winding road without experience. In short, you > don't even start and dismiss it as unrealistic. That relies on you being able to tell the difference between an experience and an imaginined, hallucinational or delusional 'experience'. The well-documented and testable prevalence of bogus experiences (e.g. deja-vu, phantom limbs and false memory syndrome) suggests you can't. In which case, however you choose to 'join the dots', it'll only ever be correct by pure chance. Given that, you'd expect those who claim to have experienced paranormal activities to have more general problems with rationality, and that does seem to be the case. Although Musch and Ehrenberg* generously concluded that "Poor probabilistic reasoning skill may thus be only a concomitant of low cognitive ability and not in itself a decisive factor in the forming of paranormal belief." later work by Hergovich and Arendasy** found that "Subjects with lower reasoning ability scored higher on Traditional Paranormal Belief and New Age Philosophy". There may not be a lot in it, but that's the point. * British Journal of Psychology (2002), 93, 169?177 ** Personality and Individual Differences (2005), 38, 1805?1812 (a confirmation, in effect, of Blackmore's earlier work which can be found here))

The reason, simply, is that street trees can't spread too much or grow too high, or they become a hazard to traffic, powerlines, houses, children, buildings, roads, drains, sewers, insurers and kittens. If you look at old photos of Dulwich, or even Google's Streetview, you'll see that it's a regular thing done every so few years, especially to plane trees, and has been since they were little more than saplings, apart from a few periods when trees were simply felled rather than managed when they got in the way of buses. You'll also see that the trees in surrounding streets are managed in the same way, but in different years (the misguided got all upset about Heber Road last year, for example). And it's not just Southwark. Throughout London, with very few exceptions, all mature street trees have been regularly pruned, pollarded, reduced or whatever, to no obvious ill effect for decades and sometimes centuries. It's one of the reasons why so few of them have fallen over in the recent storms, compared with trees in parks. If there's anything to complain about at all it's that the published schedule of tree works hasn't been updated since October.

When it wasn't raining.

Jeremy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > There have been stories about the canal path ever > since the start of the forum. And even before that, though it might seem novel if you didn't grow up with teatime Westerns on the telly. The path couldn't have been designed for ambush any better, even with the lights. I have used it, twice, in daylight and with reluctance and bafflement. Like every other cycle 'facility'*, from Sustrans's cheerless routes to nowhere to the projects spawned of graspery that have left London a sclerotic palimpsest of half-arsed 'networks', 'grids' and 'superhighways', which even nineteen maps can't make sense of, it's a death-trap best ignored. * Apart from cycle parking stands, which I slightly love.

MagMag Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Co-incidence or synchronicity? Accident or > connectivity? Watch out Burbage..... we might be > quantum entangled!!! It's possible. Although it would usually require a bicycle, second-hand or otherwise, to be common to both our lives, the shocking state of modern enamelling, and the general disregard of bicycle-training, suggests parking-stands and lampposts may also be powerful vectors for the atomic mingling. But as I can't be sure (unless Louisa can find the time to consult the late Mr O'Brien on our behalf), I'm tempted to put it down to the fact that we might have happened to read books by the same author. And that's neither synchronicity nor coincidence. That's publishing.

Louisa Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Maybe you could inform the 2.1 billion Christians, > 1.6 billion Muslims and those who follow other > 'illogical' and unproven scientific understandings > of the universe of this Burbage. You're confusing ritual with belief. The former has a useful social purpose. The latter is what people are taught to say, typically from an early age, to avoid ostracism or, in some places, death.

Louisa Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- >.... So all the nay sayers > arrogantly using logic to dismiss another's belief > can carry on doing so. That's like accusing someone of 'arrogantly' choosing a spoon to eat their soup. For a start, it's not a belief. It's a hollow excuse by which people are encouraged not to seek professional help when they have hallucinations. At this time of the year, when the weather can causes hallucinogenic conditions such as hypothermia, sleep-deprivation and depression, that may not be as useful a message as you think it is. As I nearly mentioned before, admitting the baseless existence of spirits is harmful. For once you have spirits, you have to have good spirits and bad spirits and mechanisms, from the ouija board to the meat-cleaver, for driving them from one place to another. By the time the effects of that sort of nonsense get to court, it's usually far too late. Happily, the nature of the 'other world', the foundations of Rupert Sheldrake's theories and RPC's atomic theories were all neatly addressed, amalgamated and explained long ago through the tireless work of the philosopher-scientist de Selby, accounts of which have been laid accessibly before the public in the works of Flann O'Brien.

BVale Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I decided to share this with you and wonder if you > have similar experience. It depends which side of the park you're from - those from the Hole call them voles. But yes, there are a lot of rats about - cheerful, bright-eyed little souls that have got quite good at swimming and hide under the bridge in the hope of crumbs or coot's eggs. If you don't like them, then you can stop pretending to feed the ducks and put the crumbs in the bin. But the little Marmadukes and Maisys can quite enjoy the rats, and it's not as if they carrying the plague. Yet.