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steveo

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Everything posted by steveo

  1. All I'm saying is that it's expensively made crap. I could make crap like that far cheaper
  2. If it's for council tenants why then don't they restrict distribution to council houses, or doesn't the council know where they are?
  3. My 24-page Southwark Life magazine has just plopped through the letter box - full colour, nice paper and high production values to the tune of 12 staff plus designers, printers and distribution. It tells me that we have a library, that the police want Southwark to be safer and that Southwark is a great place to be gay. It is completely free of paid for ads. I know I'm a misery guts but who the hell reads this, needs this information, wants to pay for it in their council tax? I used to work on magazines and they cost bundles to produce believe me.
  4. What you've got to ask yourself is what kind of life have the animals had. In Brixton they sell chickens for ?2.50. At that price they will not have been nibbling on corn in a sunlit meadow
  5. steveo

    Scam

    Beware Google Money Master. It isn't Google and you won't make money.
  6. steveo

    Fish

    Scoff list: Scottish pot caught Langoustine/Scampi, Black Bream, Grey Mullet, line caught Mackerel, Seabass, Pollack, Gurnard. Also Sprats and Mussels Say no to Tuna, Atlantic Cod, Haddock, Halibut, Hoki, Marlin, Plaice, Red Fish, Skate, Sole ? just for a while. Give ?em a break... or we're dead in the water
  7. steveo

    Fish

    Then show solidarity and let's rouse this sleepy parish
  8. steveo

    Fish

    Blah, WTF? What do you care about?
  9. steveo

    Fish

    Fish or no fish Ted, that is the question
  10. steveo

    Fish

    Moxons and Sopers are great fish shops and we're lucky to have them. They maintain they sell only sustainable cod and I think they think they are right. But this film The End of the Line says that nearly all the fish stocks in the European arena are on the point of collapse, whereas the Americans are in far better shape. The reason? All the countries of Europe have a different agenda and can't sort out a proper policy. Whilst they bugger about, show some outrage to your MEP and the fisheries minister ps.huw.irranca-davies@defra.gsi.gov.uk And please vote with your feet. Ask the chip shops to stop selling cod and haddock and request pollock, hake or rock salmon (all delicious). C'mon PS and no blue fin tuna, not ever, not any, none Edited because rant wasn't finished
  11. Spot on Bawdy-nan. I watched that slimy, policy free, shyster Cameron performing on TV at the weekend urging a Gen. Election. He is up to his neck in expenses claims while Gordon is relatively clean yet he might well do it. They'll all vote themselves a wage rise, kick the scandals into the long grass and that will be that. If we're nor careful this is all going seriously tits up. MEP's expenses should be out there now. Perhaps the forum should have its own MEP. let's have a whip round.
  12. This is a long one but nicely revolting (I had already written it) As a schoolboy in the late 60s I worked on a couple of farms in Essex - next to each other and owned by the same family. One kept chickens, the other pigs. The chicken farm was basically two innocent looking aircraft hanger-sized sheds. Inside were tiers of chicken cages stretching off into the distance. The hens were jammed in tight, standing on mesh bars, with just enough space for them to stick their heads out for food and water. The eggs dropped through and were routed into collection trays, the shit would fall onto a flat metal floor surface which would be scraped off. The chickens lost all their neck feathers through rubbing against the bars when feeding and they would die in their hundeds as a result of suffocation, exhaustion, disease or fighting. Twice every chicken day we would enter these stifling hell holes (by controlling the shed lights the farmer fooled the hens into thinking there were two days to our one day, driving them to lay twice). The squawking was deafening, the smell utterly repellant, so the objective was to get in and out as fast as possible - feed them, water them, collect the eggs, pull out the carcasses that were being trodden into the bars of the cages, turn on the scrapers, hose down the shit tray and scarper. But my weekend job didn't last long, I couldn't stand that smell - far worse than pigs, cows or even humans. It was the smell of fear. I had to leave and went to work for the farmer next door. This was a highly industrialised pig farm, with a mixture of swill pigs and meal fed pigs. The farmer had a contract to pick up waste food from local institutions - schools, hospitals, offices, as well as restaurants, cafes and a Butlins holiday camp. Every day his fleet of swill lorries would arrive and tip brimming bins of waste food onto a conveyer belt ? vile brews of blancmange, milk bottle tops, rotting pork chops, broken glass, rancid milk, plastic bags and anything else that might be casually chucked into an open swill bin by a kitchen hand - was emptied off into two vast steam heated cookers. We had to rifle through this food with our bare hands as, the farmer insisted, it was the only effective way of finding the cutlery and large bones that might be concealed in it and which might damage the cookers. The swill was boiled and pumped down into a pit over which we had to walk to get to our rest room. Here we'd sit on grease covered armchairs and eat our sandwiches just feet from thousands of gallons of steaming swill, great clouds of it wafting in through the door like noxious burps. Swill smells revolting, it gets in your hair, clothes, ears and eyes but somehow you get used to it - although my mother never did and used to make me get undressed at the bottom of the garden and hose me down before letting me in. One day a lorry arrived and tipped at the top of the driveway. Us boys were sent to cover the load with a tarpaulin 'in case the health people drop by'. The pink mess had come from a well known chicken processing factory and consisted of rotting chicken giblets and other chicken body parts. The smell made me gag and we had to use handkerchief masks before we could get near it. Then we heard the cheeping sounds. One of the farm lads waded into the filthy matter and frantically started pulling out live chicks, scores of them. Some he couldn't find and the pathetic cheeping didn't stop for a couple of days. Each day a certain amount of the pink filth was forked into the cookers and mixed with the waste food. They didn't want to use too much of it in case it harmed the pigs. Often a pig would die - at least one or two a week. The carcasses would be butchered and tossed into the cookers. Whatever had killed the pigs was fed back to them. One of the other farm lads and myself were told to clean out the cookers one day. They were cylindrical tanks with circular hatches on the top like a submarine, where the waste food was put in and where the hot grease was scooped out (not for health reasons but because when the fat cooled it would congeal inside the swill pipes and block them). The farmhands drained the tanks, opened the hatches and, wearing only our underpants we were lowered inside. The only light was from the hatches and there was a foot of hot swill washing around our feet. There were long shafts running the length of the tanks with paddles attached for stirring the swill. We sat on the shafts, our legs dangling in the brown liquid in the steam filled tanks and bent double to feel for cutlery, broken crockery, bones and all the other stuff that gets thrown into waste food bins. Another important task was to cut and pull out any string or entrails that had wound around the paddles. Within seconds we were wringing with sweat and gasping for air. I can often win 'what's the worst job you've ever done?' competitions with this story. Generally the swill pigs got sicker than the meal pigs. They used to urinate and defecate in their own beds, they would lose all their teeth through lack of use and seemed to have constant diarrhoea. Their pee seemed highly acidic as well and a pair of wellingtons would rot away in a couple of months. In contrast the meal pigs were cleaner and happier. The problem for the farmer was that the meal pigs grew at half the rate of the swill pigs - that would go from piglet to fifteen stone porker in about six weeks. The economics were obvious. The farmer got away with it. The pigs didn't contract any significant disease, neither did they cause a dangerous epidemic. They were taken on a double decked articulated lorry to the Walls factory as normal (usually five or six would die in transit - of suffocation usually. Some would arrive with broken legs). We'd watch the pigs being fed in the door of the processing plant and as we walked alongside it to get to the staff shop, our pigs were killed, rendered and their waste body parts were slopping down chutes into skips positioned along the length of the factory wall. We unsentimentally bought sausages and pies for our families at discount rates and headed off home. We were blithely complacent about the health risks involved and one hopes that things must have improved in the thirty odd years since but even then we all knew that we shouldn't be feeding this muck to the pigs, that it was deeply wrong. The farmer knew as well and had been concerned about being caught doing it but it was cheap food and he had a red E type Jaguar, house improvements, a swimming pool and a predilection for fine cigars to support. The farmer has now, fortunately for us all, abandoned farming and gone on to build a huge waste disposal business ? something, obviously, for which he was highly qualified, although I worry about what he dumps where.
  13. But how will we ever get the MEP's expenses under the microscope?
  14. There were plenty of knifings and beatings in Dulwich 30 years ago when I moved here. Lordship Lane at night was a dangerous place. Some golden age is an illusion. Here's a quote from Dulwich History and Romance (1922) 'From Dulwich Green the only road going south was known as Back Lane, now the Gallery Road. It led to Dulwich Common and the Northwood, a wild and lawless place of great extent, intersected by many paths and tracks, infested by highwaymen, and unsafe for travellers even down to the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the middle of the eighteenth century complaint was made that "Watchmen notwithstanding, robberies and murders occurred almost every night."' Let's be careful out there.
  15. A few weeks ago some chaps planted a couple of trees outside my house which was nice. However, the trees both now look quite sick. According to the three council gardeners who were leaning on their spades in the rose beds, the council isn't responsible for trees, the job has been contracted out to a firm. They suggested that the firm has a budget to plant trees but no money to maintain them. So if you have some thirsty-looking trees near you, it might be in order to empty a bucket of water over them.
  16. That's funny, I thought I was Dulwich Design Dulwich Design
  17. Apparently the Stockwell market (not the covered one) is closing in two weekend's time, one of my favourite haunts for 20 (very) odd years. Anyway, apart from a bit of ranting from BBC journo Andrew Gilligan, outcry has been slight. No one seems to know what will happen on the site or seems to care, least of all the council. The Greenwich forum has tumbleweeds blowing through it. I'm thinking What a tragedy and where will I buy my tat now? Keep your forum strong and vigilant
  18. Wow, I can write in the past
  19. Did I just (18.49 hours) see a shooting star out west in the village direction or have I been drinking too much herbal tea? It was green (the star not the tea)
  20. I was thrown out of the Dream Machine once but it was four in the morning
  21. "The Latest in Up to Date Living". Anyone know where this used to be?
  22. Ironically Nisha's brother-in-law works in Somerfield
  23. Still trying to find somewhere for the summer. Do any discriminating Dulwich folk know of an idyllic hideaway?
  24. Have a look at the South London Guide (as maintained by me). It's all there.
  25. Have a look at the South London Guide (as maintained by me). It's all there.
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