redjam

Blimey, from the way everyone's reacting it's as if North Cross Road Market is a heaving mass of bodies. It's not. It's no more than a dozen stalls that were well spaced last time I was there, with marshalls at either end asking people to wear masks. In recent weeks it hasn't been that busy and it's EXTREMELY easy to avoid if you don't want to go through it - either by taking a slightly different route to bypass that short stretch of road or, y'know, avoiding going through it between 11am and 3pm on a Saturday. Do you really think it's safer to go to M&S or Co-op to get your lunch ingredients rather than buying something in the open air? And I'd far rather support a local business through these hard times.

The whole of Peckham Rye seems really waterlogged at the moment, as are parts of Dulwich Park. Don't really understand why - I know it's been a bit rainy recently but not THAT rainy! Maybe I don't normally go to the parks so much in the depths of winter so I just haven't noticed it before. Makes it hard to keep your distance when everyone is crammed onto the path trying to navigate huge puddles. Quite nice to see the Peck free-flowing though - it's normally such a dispiriting little trickle. Wonder what the rationale is for clearing out all the vegetation. Hopefully it will discourage the rat problem round there!

Eh? What decade have you travelled in from, PP?! Stamps are 66 or 85p these days. It?s ?1.29 to send a large letter! For those of us who don?t have our post kindly put to one side by our mates, we?d quite like it to arrive in a timeframe of days rather than weeks after it was sent. Patrick DiPosta Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > let?s remember a stamp only costs 27p, what do you > have to complain about. You couldnt even by a > tomato from Franklin?s for that

Received 7 Christmas cards today! Just in time for twelfth night, nice.

Thanks legalalien. I knew you couldn't go east/west through the village with the blocking of Calton Avenue - didn't realise you couldn't go north/south either! Wow.

I got a warning in the post this morning - not a fine this time but saying I'd be charged ?130/?65 if I do it again. Trouble is, I don't understand what I did wrong. I was driving through the centre of Dulwich Village (from Gallery Road heading towards East Dulwich Grove). I didn't go up Pickwick Road. Are we not even allowed to drive through the village at all now? Where is the sign? I totally missed it.

Do report back and let us know what you did! I'd be tempted to print out a photo of the milk snatcher and leave it in the usual spot, along with a nice friendly handwritten note saying that you'll introduce yourself next time you meet in the street, now you know what he looks like.

Yes it does seem a bit OTT that Dulwich Library is STILL running such a limited service, given you can walk into any shop and pick things up and put them back on the shelves without the world ending. I don't know why they think books are higher risk than, say, a tin of beans? That said, I've found the online ordering system has worked fine - the trick is to order several books at once as some of them take ages to come in, so that way you get a steady trickle of new titles. Though when I went in to drop off a returned book the other day, I did think it was a bit nuts that I had to sign in for Track & Trace - I had to spend longer filling in the form (using a shared pen, hmmm) than I did just returning the book itself, which took all of ten seconds. There were heaps of staff; God knows what they were all doing given there were no customers.

Some great ideas here - thank you so much everyone (and for the private messages). I will follow up.

I have a load of brand-new kids' books (age 9+) I'd like to donate to a hospital, refuge or charity. I've just done some googling and it looks like the Maudsley is doing a Christmas gift appeal but just wanted to check there wasn't anywhere even more local?

Jesus. That image is going to haunt my dreams forever more.

I was recently able to make an appointment with both a dentist and an oral hygienist as normal at the practice on North Cross Road.

As Ginster says, the Reception year in school is nothing like formal school. It's generally completely separate (separate outdoor space etc) and very child-focused and play-based. I don't know anyone who deferred and my own August-born child came on leaps and bounds that year. Good luck with the move! Can't believe you're voluntarily coming from an Australian spring into a miserable British autumn/winter - can I swap with you please?!

My daughter can confirm it's very noisy! But I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a quiet secondary school, tbh... It's fine; your child will find their set of friends and they will hang out in their own group (Covid permitting, of course). It's hard to imagine how your child will cope when they're still a teeny Year 6 but they all do. And remember that the years are kept separate at lunchtime so they will only be with kids their age. Good luck with your choice!

Does anyone understand how the Kingsdale Sixth Form admission works? On their website it says places are allocated in this order: 1) kids in care 2) special needs 3) 'ranked by average point score for their best 5 qualifying subjects for the course they wish to study' 4) random lottery 1) and 2) make sense but I don't really understand what 3) means. How do you know what the 5 qualifying subjects are for each A-level? And by 'point scores' do they mean GCSE grades? Or predictions? And surely 3) and 4) are incompatible, anyway - it's either done on attainment or it's done by lottery; they're two different things! If anyone has been through this before and can enlighten me, I'd be grateful. My daughter is actually at Kingsdale now so you'd think I'd be better informed, but I can't make head or tail of these criteria...

DulwichFox Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > > TFL are not there to assist people. > Their policy along with the policy of Mayor of > London Sadiq Khan is to make public Transport > as difficult as possible for people to use. > Especially the Elderly. > > The government's decision to restrict Early > morning use of the Elderly's Freedom Pass > has been welcomed by TFL along with The Mayor. > > Sadiq Khan is driven to work in ?300,000 > five-litre armoured Range Rover while commuters > endure packed Tube trains and drivers face new ?15 > congestion charge > > https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/05/15/15/2843024 > 6-8323259-He_was_whisked_to_City_Hall_in_a_luxury_ > Range_Rover_Discovery_as-m-37_1589554461359.jpg > > #Hypocrite > > DulwichFox What a ridiculous statement. Those changes to the Freedom Pass seem entirely sensible to me. Older people can still travel free after 9am for the rest of the day and all day at weekends and bank holidays. How many retired people really need to travel before 9am on weekdays? And let's face it, the reason we have all these social distancing measures is to ... protect older people. As for Sadiq Khan having a chauffeur and security, what did you expect? Do you really think the Mayor should queue for the bus? Do you think Boris Johnson did that when he was mayor? Anyway, back to the cinema bus stop - moving it to outside Mrs Robinson does seem sensible. I hope they will eventually put up one of those temporary bus stops there.

Ha, I?m an angry ED mum! But I was happy to sign their petition when they first posted and my daughter went down and skated there the other day. She loved it. I think it?s great - well done guys.

Very interesting post above from sheff and completely agree with Beefcheek that measures need to be relaxed - quickly. Landlords really need to do their bit and work with the shop-owners to enable them to continue trading - greedy landlords were a problem long before Covid so this worries me. Above all, we all need to do our bit and BUY LOCAL, supporting the shops and businesses as much as possible when they reopen. I'm an optimistic person and I think - and fervently hope - a lot of ED businesses may end up benefiting from more people working from home and shopping locally. But this only works if we all make the effort to shop on LL as opposed to ordering from Amazon and congratulating ourselves on saving two quid (I'm as guilty of this as the next person but really going to make an effort to change my ways). It's essentially up to us if we want to keep the character of LL.

We had endless issues with Virgin for years before we eventually bit the bullet and switched to BT. Not a single problem since (4+ years). I'm amused by how regularly this kind of thread appears on the forum - and it's always Virgin. Seriously, vote with your feet, guys.

Thanks for posting this - always love a bit of street art and I smiled when I saw that one had gone up a few weeks ago. I see there are two new pieces going up on Shawbury Road and Fellbrigg Road at the moment. I spoke to the guy doing the one on Fellbrigg and he said it was something to do with Extinction Rebellion (didn't quite understand what the connection was but perhaps they are funding it?). Anyway, always good to see a blank wall brightened up! (Unless it's that terrible one that the council did on North Cross Road...)

Can I second the suggestions on here for a) bigger bins in entrances to parks (and more frequent rubbish collection in/near green spaces when we're all using the parks so heavily) and b) opening loos in parks. Bit grim seeing guys peeing in bushes.

Thanks, Lauram! Will pop down later.

As Lauram's post above - anyone know if they're taking donations today?

Yes I realise the dentists themselves want to go back but their hands are tied by the government incompetence around PPE. Maddening. Re the aerosols, sorry if this is a stupid question, but wouldn?t an open window and a fan help with that? Or an extractor fan??? Let?s hope so, because otherwise there?s no way we can have normal dentistry for the foreseeable..,

It's an absolute scandal that dentists haven't remained open. Other countries have managed to keep their dentists open throughout the crisis, with staff being provided with extra PPE to keep everyone safe - why can't we? It's storing up heaps of problems for the future, from extra teeth removal to serious illnesses being missed (there was an article about it in the Times today - it said that in a normal six-week period, nearly 1000 cases of cancer are initially diagnosed by dentists). Plus there's a fear that a large number of dentists will go bust - dentists aren't being offered full relief from business rates, apparently, unlike many other high-street businesses. Bringing it back to local - I've got a friend who works in the dental institute at Kings and she's been working throughout the crisis, so it is taking emergency appointments. But that might just be children only, not sure. Hope you manage to find someone to sort your problem, OP. I feel your pain - my daughter's been told she's going to have an extra 4-6 months of her braces because of this delay (there'll be a huge backlog when the orthodontists reopen, plus her teeth will have 'overcorrected' in this time). She was about three weeks off having them completely removed before we went into lockdown!