Penguin68

Or is this just about making car ownership and use in ED increasingly difficult, as part of the unstated war on cars being waged in the borough (still no resolution or clarification of the double yellows on dropped kerbs, I note)?

James I wrote:- Even where there is a tree preservation order this can be over-ruled (with agreement from the council Tree Officer - or whatever title is held) where there is risk due to disease or damage, or where the tree is causing or believed to be causing structural damage to property - we still put (thank goodness) housing ahead of trees. You wrote:- Chatting with the new owners they had specific unequivocal surveoyr advice to remove it to stop the cracks in their front wall getting longer and wider. Without chopoing it down no house insurance and then no mortgage. You introduced this by saying, of my post Hi P68, I don't think this applies. Huh?? I had specifically noted that structural damage was a case where, even had there been a tree preservation order, this would have been (properly) over-ruled. As was/ would have been the case here - which had already been made clear earlier in this thread. I was responding to the comment about 'it should have been listed' pointing out that even had it been, that would not have saved it. The threads on Hindemans road had noted that gardens had been cleared of trees in advance of planning permission being granted/ sought - which was the point of my second para final sentance. The 'automatic' preserving of trees (meeting certain criteria) is still, to my mind, a good idea, given the caveats I started with, that where the tree was damaged or diseased, and hence a risk, or where it was already damaging property, such preservation orders could be over-ruled at the advice of council experts.

Even where there is a tree preservation order this can be over-ruled (with agreement from the council Tree Officer - or whatever title is held) where there is risk due to disease or damage, or where the tree is causing or believed to be causing structural damage to property - we still put (thank goodness) housing ahead of trees. Some councils 'automatically' put tree preservation orders on the basis of some criteria (commonly, girth) on all trees in their area (or in some specific sub-area) - requiring council permission to fell them. This stops developers clearing land in advance of submitting, or gaining, planning permission for new builds. Could have been helpful locally, reading some recent threads.

Well, a word of warning, Mustard. If previous years in ED are anything to go by, you should be anticipating desultory firework parties between now until (well) after the New Year. And most of these will be for adults, with adult bed-times in mind.

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Monkey puzzles are extremely slow growing, or at least very slow to get going - for a (very) long time this will probably not have seemed a problem. Although large trees can be moved, the size of hole needed to be dug to remove the tree with sufficient roots intact is probably larger than the front garden it is in.

I would always advise having accounts with at least 2 e-mail providers (g-mail is a good second account, where it's not your first) - if your account is compromised (stolen) you do at least have another to fall back-on, and a second account allows you to mitigate the sort of problem being discussed here. Anyone with an Android phone will have (as a default) an e-mail account with google in order to use the playstore for apps.

If you use an e-mail client (like Outlook) you will need to adjust the filters both in the client and in your e-mail service - two separate programmes will be filtering junk/ spam for you (actually, SPAM is unwanted by anyone, whereas junk is in the eye of the beholder).

Can anyone with a Hotmail account confirm if they have access to a SPAM folder, and if so whether e-mails from the forum are in there? Or can anyone with a Hotmail account do what admin suggests (...can you try adding @eastdulwichforum.co.uk to your safe senders list in Hotmail,...) and see whether anything then gets through?

As someone who has (professionally) been involved in (organisational) change management, my experience is that those who embrace anything save the most gradual change (unless initiated by them!) are in a small minority. The status quo is almost always preferred to the unknown, and this is particularly true when it comes to changing the environment around you. Ideally, although many people actually like living in town, most would also like to look out of every window and just see nature. Where you have had a little view of nature, to lose that to a building, however well designed, is most frequently something not desired. When it comes to building close to you, what is being replaced has normally to be a very significant eyesore before any new building is welcomed. Change which may actually benefit a community will still be loooked at askance when it comes to your personal amenity, and this is not unreasonable. You only have one life; it's quite an ask to sacrifice it on the alter of others' well being. And you are right to consider that planning precedent set may mean that a development which may even be acceptable as a one-off would be wholly unacceptable if it became the norm.

Even where the build proposed is against your boundary, you are not obliged (I believe) to give access for any building work - so building up to a boundary may prove technically difficult if building works have to take place from the build side only. The architects work to a brief from the client (obviously desiging within what they believe are planning regulations, although these are frequently a matter of interpretation) - their willingness at least to enter into discussion is to be praised. Not infrequently clients ask for designs which the architects may feel will not meet planning acceptance, but are still obliged at least to try this out where it may be an issue of interpretation. Sometimes architects know better than planners (the famous case of a building were 'planners' required supporting pillars, but the architect, Sir Christopher Wren, who knew they weren't required structurally, built them not actually to touch the ceiling). Whilst no one likes change, a better understanding of what is planned and what the impct will actually be can sometimes alleviate those fears. Equally, architects may understand better how their plans do impact communities, by talking to them, and can adjust plans accordingly. It (almost always) pays to talk.

I do not use Hotmail, but I assume that they divert dubious e-mails to a personal SPAM folder which can be accessed by individual e-mail accounts. If e-mails are being sent to personal SPAM by Hotmail then putting the address in a safe senders list will work, but if they are being blocked entirely (not getting through the system at all, even if marked up as SPAM) then individually 'allowing' them will probably not work. As the numbers of e-mails sent out from the forum are relatively low (I would guess) these are not being blocked on the basis of excess - so possibly a Hotmail algorithm has found something to annoy it in eastdulwichforum.co.uk or possibly the IP address you use has been blacklisted for some reason (possibly a keying error). If you have a tame Hotmail account for testing you could try sending from a different IP address (log in from somewhere else) to see if it's that. (Or log in to another account from the forum IP address and see if you can send mail to a hotmail account).

Hand-reared makes sense - perhaps even trained to take food from off a hat? Certainly no signs of natural timidity and clearly comfortable with people (well, a person). I didn't actually feel (despite my words) it was a real attack - but that I was being involved in something the crow wanted to do. There was certainly contact with my head/ hat on 3 occasions, but, with that beak, it could have been much more aggressive. More Disney than Hitchcock.

I had wondered about mistaken ID - but the hat is quite a light brown, and, well, hat-like. And we did stare at each other quite a lot, so I think he/ she wasn't mistaking my hat for a fellow corvid. Or lunch. Crows (unlike rooks) can be territorial, but I wouldn't have thought a road, as such, would be deemed territory. And it 'chased' me from one end to another -so I am not sure it was defending youngsters.

Yesterday (Sunday) morning I was walking along Langton Rise by the cemetery and was attacked 3 times by a large crow; the first time I initially assumed it was an accident, it rose up and flew into my face/ head - but by the third time, when I saw it fly low down the length of the road before lightly pecking at my hat, it was clearly intentional. I was not (in any way) injured - and the object of the attacks seemed to be a brown homburg style hat I was wearing - but it did seem curious. Clearly it wasn't defending a nest (or fledgelings) - far too late in the season - and there was nothing on the hat which might have appeared food-like (didn't have an alpine hat feather cockade in it). The crow was very bold, after the first incident it sat on the road, and then a fence, staring at me and no more than 2-3 feet away. After the third 'attack' it went back into the cemetery where it then roosted. Has anyone else been assaulted by a crow around there? Is this usual behaviour?

To clarify this thread - a bag full of rubbish was found away from the property it purported to have originated from - the owners of the property have said that they didn't put it there - and neither would their cleaner (makes sense as described) - it still seems possible a bag was taken away by a third party (possibly to look for scrap or items of identity) and then abandoned by the scavenger/ identity thief. This does not seem, as headlined 'fly tipping, bang to rights!' and neither, as it turns out, has the OP actually appeared to have covered themeselves in clouds of glory (despite no doubt good intentions). Righteous indignation is not always, it might seem, the absolutely best starting point for neighbour interactions. Particularly if it comes across as threatening rather than righteous. pinecone does seem to have a point.

Even 25 years ago the Grove was a good family pub - great from May through to late September in the garden with children, a barbeque in the summer. Because the garden was so large children weren't oppressive to the un-childed. Even the very early Harvester days weren't that bad, then it just seemed to lose direction, and, eventually, customers. With (originally) 2 good car parks it could have been quite an attractor for groups. That site, and that footprint, ought to give great opportunity to revive a pub there. It's a scandal it sits there boarded up and decaying. It's not as if there was too much commercial land about locally that that shoudn't need to be used. But maybe the fact that virtually the 3 biggest (by footprint) boozers locally are all shut says something about changing mores and customs.

I have just read the original post to this - are you sure the addressees were the fly-tippers? - we have had some incidence locally of bins being 'explored' by others - suggestions as to why have included scavenging and identity theft - bag taken away, examined closely and then discarded would fit with this scenario. As rubbish collection in ED is generally good (I know some have had complaints) I cannot see why anyone locally would bother to fly-tip when local disposal (particularly of things like Amazon boxes, all recyclable) is so easy - as Alan Medic noted above. Possibly the addressees will be pleased to know that interference with their rubbish has been picked up - equally, if they thought they had disposed of this 'properly' they might just be very confused.

union membership is declining in the private sector Part of the reason for this is that the benefits of union membership - outwith those moments of industrial action to improve direct benefts or pay - are not properly understood, either by potential members or indeed by management. Unions' actions in terms of Health and Safety, looking after individual members at times of dispute, workng with management to ease necessary change (ensuring fairness of treatment etc.) can not only improve members' conditions but can help improve overall morale within a firm, by identifying, for instance, bullying manangers and poor IR practice which leads to low morale and performance. Not all relations betweeen management and unions are necessarily confrontational, certainly at the level of the workplace. There are as many problems with anti-capital union officials as there are with anti-union managers but there are many firms where union: management relations can be conducted in an atmosphere of respect and fairness, where neither 'side' has a political axe to grind which interferes with effective relations. Union H&S reps can frequently identify dangerous practices or circumstances which can be addressed before injury occurs - to the overall benefit of the firm.

The issue about carers is actually much worse than described, as they are often not paid for the time travelling between jobs, so 'minimum wage' becomes 'much less than minimum wage' when taking into account total time required to work (time with clients plus time travelling between clients). 'Normal' jobs don't pay you for travel to/ from work, of course, but most do (effectively) pay you for the time you spend e.g. travelling between meetings during your working day. Paying a LLW (under the current process) still wouldn't mean that carers actually got that for the time they spend 'at work'. One of the key issues with LLW is how close that is to the next pay level in an organisation - if differentials erode then (in the end) you get wage drift, which puts up labour costs, which leads to price inflation, which then erodes the 'benefit' gained from the LLW - inflation always impacts the worst paid worst. And when you set a measure based on the measure itself (wages set as a percentage of average wages) as has been pointed out, you get 'stupid' answers. Setting wages in terms of some index which isn't (at least directly) wage impacted would make more sense. (The same is true of measuring 'poverty' as a factor of overall wealth).

This is all clearly madness - unless you accept that it is part of the war against cars by the anti-car brigade (which includes, as I recall, the Lib Dems and Greens - happy to stand corrected if I am wrong here). Taken in this light, such a stupid idea, which will cause upset and distress with 'cars' seen as the trigger, may all be part of a cunning plan (and a Tojan Horse, again, for CPZs - nice little earners as a punishment tax on car ownership). If it is, basically, anti-car, then don't expect any quick or sensible resolutions - oh, and we don't seem to be getting any of those, do we?.

Look folks, it's quite simple - the only way (short of closing London airports) of shifting flights away from where you live, is to shift them towards where other people live. This is the biggest NIMBY issue we have, as (unlike those who wish to avoid something new, and possibly actually stop-able, like housing) the planes are there, will be there, and have to fly somewhere. What this petition is actually saying is 'not over my back-yard, make someone else miserable'. If flights were (miraculously) steered down some tortuous path which didn't over-fly housing not only would this add considerably both to flight times and flight costs, but these paths would tend to be so narrow and tortuous that the risk of in-air accident would soar. This issue has been exhaustively discussed on this forum - some are clearly genuinely made miserable by the noise, most (I suspect it's most) can either live with it, or have found ways of not noticing it. We are not 'attached' to our planes (fond memories of Concorde notwithstanding) - but we (most, by no means all) have learnt to live with them, and indeed generally ignore them.

Thanks, Jeremy, for closing off the second set of 'open italics' commands - I hadn't seen this developing. Intexas - you 'opened' italics twice (once whilst trying to close them) - every command needs a counter command to stop it working - if you open twice you have to close twice. Efectively, although you see posts in a thread as being individual, each thread acts as a continuous run of HTML embedded codes - and you can influence anything 'below' you if you don't stop what you start. Sorry, admin, all off-topic, but to a good cause (I hope).

Are you sure you are putting in the closing (no spaces) ? You need that to close-off the HTML command. I know that in one e-mail programme I use any formatting 'sticks' until it is changed - but that's not using overt HTML coding.

The aspect I find most surprising about this is that the Ritzy employed 93 people This must be 93 individuals, not 93 FTE. I have seen 4 or so in the ticket area, 3 front of house in the downstairs cafe, presumably 2 at each of the screens (one for tickets, one projectionist, although most screens are automated/ digital nowadays and withour projectionists (5?) - say 3 in the k i t chen, 2-3 roving cleaners, 2-3 security, perhaps 1-2 in an office 'managing' - assume they operate 2 8 hour shifts (so FTE numbers double)- I find it hrs to get much above 50 FTE - and that seems quite generous staffing levels, assuming all staffing is at peak levels.