Siduhe

Wax or silicon earplugs - only thing that worked for me.

Sadly - the attachment to my post from 2021 didn't survive the forum move, but the original post is here - Others have posted the response from councillors above, to the effect that the report had been issued in error and CPZs would not be introduced without local agreement. Part of the reason I'm particularly irked is that I put in an FOI request at the time, which was eventually turned down on the grounds that the document was a draft and not Council policy. I did get a copy of the attached document which refers to a "recommendation" to introduce a borough-wide CPZ, so this has been policy formulated since at least then. Public reports pack 09032021 1830 Environment Scrutiny Commission.pdf

I remember that. It wasn’t consulted on but was referred to in an internal Southwark report attached to some Council minutes. I posted the timetable for introducing the borough wide CPZ from the report on here but then the Southwark report which mentioned it was withdrawn, with councillors saying it was not formal policy and had been issued in error. Let me see if I can find the post.

I read that as saying that the cost of the entire Southwark events team, which organises and puts on all the Southwark events that are publicly available for us to attend was £244k which was entirely met by income from commercial events with £22k left over. So the commercial events are paying for Southwark to put on all the other events which we would otherwise either pay for from council tax or simply not have available to residents.

Lime in particular do seem to have upped their game recently. They now have a review of the photos that you have to take when parking - and they send follow up warning emails and are starting to fine users who persistently park badly. I got a warning email last week - not for a ride I had taken mind (and when I got in touch they acknowledged it wasn’t my photo or my ride they were following up on) but it seems to be a “one warning email and then we start fining you” process. Not sure what happens if you don’t take a proper photo of your parking…

Well, I've stumbled on a solution...extreme but it works. Mr Hurtlepuss and I have moved up North for a bit for work reasons, so I've had to put a post redirection in place from ED. To be fair, it's a much more automatic system than it used to be (so your post is diverted before it gets to your local sorting office, rather than the sorting office collecting it and batching it up to forward on) but the difference is astonishing. We get post diverted from ED regularly and it arrives just a day or two after it was sent. It's like having a proper postal service. I don't know if we are just very lucky to have moved to an area where there is a good postal service, but it's like night and day in terms of regular and timely deliveries. Which does tend to suggest this is still an ED/Peckham Sorting office issue at heart.

Southwark has been pressing for the site to be redeveloped as a community centre and affordable housing for over five years. It’s the Dulwich Estate who is holding out for a high-end residential development. I criticise Southwark a lot but on this, they are being proactive and community minded. But with no actual power to make it happen.

I’ve looked at getting one several times and I think it really depends on a) how much you will use it and b) how much space you have in your kitchen. They take up a fair amount of room and need regular cleaning if you want to use them for different types of dishes and not have leftover taste in the next dish. If you have space to store easily and think you would use it for more than chips (!) then lots of people I know absolutely love theirs. I have limited counter top and cupboard space, and I use my slow cooker/pressure cooker/all in one type machine a lot, so I’m sticking with that as my one bit of kitchen real estate for the moment.

Marks and Spencer on the Walworth road? They definitely have some suits. Not sure how big the selection is post-pandemic but right price point.

I think there's a difference between expecting some flexibility during the period when the room was offered (Monday to Friday) and/or agreed to be rented (Monday to Wednesday) vs. expecting the room to be kept for his exclusive use when he wants it, including outside those periods, which is what it sounds like he is saying. I think you're on strong grounds to say that you can be flexible Monday to Friday as advertised but not at weekends and any agreement for him to stay on a Sunday needs to be specifically agreed in advance at the start of the week. Just because he isn't there one night doesn't mean he's entitled to a different night of his choosing unless it works for you.

The road part of Wood Vale is definitely managed by Southwark. I have been on a one woman mission to get the crossing points on Wood Vale reopened after Conway did all the pavement work in March/April and put up barriers across them, but didn't remove the barriers when the pavement works finished. Various residents moved the barriers aside assuming this was an oversight, but they mysteriously kept being replaced. After god knows how many enquiries and Fix My Street complaints, finally got to the bottom of the issue. The new crossing points were installed in anticipation of the road being immediately resurfaced. Southwark put the timetable back for resurfacing to end 2022, and H&S at Southwark determined that the crossing points weren't safe to use until the road was resurfaced - due to the height difference between the pavement and (un-resurfaced road). I suggested maybe, just maybe, they could put some temporary tarmac ramps to bridge the gap between road and pavement and let everyone use the crossings until the road was resurfaced - which didn't appear to have occurred to anyone as a solution. Of course, as soon as they did that and opened the crossings, Southwark managed to bring the resurfacing and other works forward to August. As part of all that, Lewisham confirmed they didn't have responsibility for decisions relating to the road and crossings which was the main point of this email. Thank you for listening to my rant though... ;-)

Does your phone support a virtual SIM? If so, I use YeSim pay as you go esim for overseas travel. It’s an app/virtual sim that you can use travelling anywhere in the world - tonnes cheaper than paying roaming and data charges in a lot of countries (outside Europe). It can be a bit fiddly to set up and you need to remember to switch the YeSim line on for data and your usual data provider off when you land but once it’s set up you can use it anywhere. There are lots of other providers who can do similar, esp for Australia.

It's a variation on a theme but we have a neighbour who walks with his dog past most days and drops his poo bags into our neighbours' green bins - it's a small block of flats so there are 3 green bins. But add two bags a day for 14 days and the bin absolutely stinks, esp in hot weather. It's incredibly frustrating as he's been asked not to several times, but carries on doing it. If you go out and eyeball him as he walks past, he crosses the road and drops it someone else's green bin but it's the same sort of theme - leave it for anyone else to deal with...

As far as I can see, all the earlier readings were estimated and it's only recently that your meter has been read. So there's a chance that your earlier bills were based on wildly inaccurate (low) estimated readings and you've been underpaying for your previous two quarters, which is why this bill is so high - it's not that you are using more gas, it's just that you haven't paid for the gas you were using in the prior two quarters. That said, even if you average out the cost over the three quarters (you are using the equivalent of £69 per month averaged out over the year), it still looks a bit high usage to me for a 1 bed flat.

Same for ours - regularly picked up a day later than scheduled at the moment. It does mean we need to keep our bin out and accessible for an extra day, as we don't know when it will get picked up.

It's a good question and I've never heard an answer that makes sense. The pub closed in 2014, due to a fire in the kitchen (and that's a whole other story with many, many local views about what happened there). As I understand it (again, no direct knowledge, just local gossip) there was a disputed insurance claim, and I can see why the pub might have laid empty while that was sorted out. What makes no sense is why nothing has happened since then. The Dulwich Estate said a few years ago that it could do nothing while Stonegate was continuing to pay rent every year and that the lease on the pub will come to an end in 2025. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me as every commercial lease I've ever seen has a dilapidations clause in it whereby the landlord can force the tenant to bring a building in disrepair up to standards during the period of a lease as well as at the end of it. My best guess is that there is an arrangement or understanding between the Dulwich Estate and Stonegate - limited rent, no enforcement of the dilapidations clause while the Estate work out what they want to do with the property and how to best achieve their stated aim (at least their stated aim four years ago) which was to redevelop for high-end housing. The benefit of having a tenant in there on a long lease is that they can't be forced to do anything or come under meaningful pressure from the Council or local residents.

I have a Lime account and when I signed up to use their e-scooters (which I've only done once - terrifying - give me an e-bike any day) I had to scan my drivers licence before it would let me unlock the scooter. It would be fairly easy to scan someone else's or scan a fake I would guess, not sure there was any back checking of my details, but it definitely requires you to do something to prove you have a licence.

The situation with the actual Grove Tavern building isn't going to change for as long as Stonegate has a valid lease for the site (which it does) and the Dulwich Estate doesn't want to try and terminate it early, which they don't because the Council has made it clear they will not support redevelopment of the site for high end housing (which is what the Dulwich Estate wants to do). The Council has put forward plans for an elder care facility or social housing, but the Dulwich Estate isn't up for that (or at least wasn't last time I spoke to our councillors). And everyone seems to be pretty happy with the current use of the site by Grove DIY including the council and some neighbours who were a little sceptical when the group started up, but have very much come round to what they are doing.

Will be a shame if the horses stop exercising in the park entirely....

May be related - I got a general email from Lime (I regularly use their bikes in the centre of town to get around, not used them in SE22 but they obviously know I live here!) earlier this week with a warning/reminder about parking bikes so they don't obstruct pavements, the issues it causes for the elderly and less able and it showed a map of SE22 and surrounds on the email. Sure it's auto-generated but thought that was interesting

Peckham is a much better bet for clubs (and bars)...

Ditto. Rye Lane is part of my regular cycle route and I'm much happier now its two way, buses only and not a general free for all - appreciate that sounds a bit counter-intuitive but the scooters ride much more carefully when there are buses going both ways, and there are fewer pedestrians stepping out randomly without looking.

I have mixed views on this. I'm a regular cyclist and occasional driver - strongly in favour of road infrastructure that encourages sensible cycling and car use, but I'm not a fan particularly of entirely segregated infrastructure like this. Segregated cycle lanes are really important where there is heavy cycle use and/or danger to cyclists from the existing road layout - the changes at Blackfriars Bridge for example - where several cyclists have been killed in the last ten years. But I firmly believe the best thing to do to encourage long term change to cycling for short journeys is to put infrastructure in place that can be shared fairly between road users and particularly to teach cyclists how to ride safely in traffic and car users how to share space with cyclists. I've said this on here before - the single best thing I did when I started cycling was one of the Southwark return to cycling lessons. That and starting to cycle more regularly in traffic has made me a confident cyclist who can ride in traffic, share space with cars and not ride like an idiot. Touch wood, I've never had a near miss with a car, and most car drivers are actually really considerate of cyclists in our area. I can't say the same for near misses and hits by other cyclists, in particular the charming man who rear ended me because I stopped (pretty slowly) at a red light a few months ago who I thought was physically going to punch me for interrupting his high speed peloton to work. My commute has several segregated parts to it and a couple of those I have to ride defensively on as they either have high speed FKWs racing each other in, or people riding three abreast and rolling on and off pavements like it's a country lane. This strikes me as an ideal road to put some semi-segregated infrastructure in- - do the bits that support those parts of the road which are rightly called out in the report for being potentially unsafe for cyclists, while not getting rid of all the parking and/or causing issues for residents which are highlighted by some of the replies by putting in an entirely segregated lane when the benefit isn't clear in terms of need or use. It's instructive if you look at the postcode analysis in the report too. Most people who live in the area either do not support the current scheme or only support with changes. The vast majority of people who are being relied to show majority support for this scheme do not live in the area. That's when these schemes end up being unpopular and not useful - when they override the legitimate concerns of people who live locally while pushing through something that ultimately isn't going to work, for that reason.

You'll have more luck in the Business section - someone posted on there earlier today with a space at doggy day care which may be of interest.

I don't think anything formal has been announced but our bin was collected a couple of days late last week and the reason given for that was shortened rounds for the refuse teams due to the hot weather, so wouldn't be surprised if they have stopped all rounds today.