Spot the Difference
Images
How I wonder how you park?
On the 21st April 2015 a hustings was held in All Saints Church Hall, Park Road Peterborough. This is a rare thing in Peterborough: a ward hustings. As far as I am aware Park Ward is the only ward in the unitary authority of Peterborough which holds a regular hustings events. Here, voters are invited, either by the residents’ associations or by whoever leaflets the ward. Park Ward has begun to view them as an important part of the run up to election day. I am a big fan of hustings, as a glimpse at my blog will confirm. I’d like to see several in every ward, since they give people chances to thrash out where candidates stand on different issues, and how they perform, and what they are like.
Anyway every candidate appearing on the ballot paper in May had been invited to the Church Hall by a local residents’ association and the turnout was small, but respectable and well informed. John Peach, CON, was the last candidate to arrive. I would probably have been taking my seat and organising bits of paper when there was the very slightest flutter of excitement in the audience. The hustings proceeded without incident.
One of the most true and telling observations of the 2015 election campaign was made by a man at the back of the audience. He pointed out that climate change had disappeared from all the parties’ election campaigns.
After the event someone else came up to me and asked me to accompany him into the car park to see how John Peach had parked his car. He claimed to have felt an impact, but I am pretty sure his tongue was in his cheek and I have to say the wall did not move for me. But naturally I had a look. And of course I took a photo.
I couldn’t see the wall behind the rear bumper at all. Can you?
I realised that had there been the sort of penetrative event you see in a crazy American road movie, instead of talking to a man in a car park, I might have seen a man flying across my field of vision and just for a second I imagined him fly, hanging on to his church hall chair as a massive black car skidded across the parquet floor in a hail of bricks and plaster dust. But that was just me imagining something which certainly did not happen that evening. Thank goodness.
What I did observe is that Cllr John Peach, (who was reelected and has since been crowned Mayor of our fair city) had proved himself capable of parking his car next to a wall in such a way that there is not a single millimetre between the car and the bricks. Not a single one.
I blog this now only because the antique Jaguar, the mayoral vehicle EG1 is reportedly:
and I for one would like to know how #PossibleRightOff happened.
And what it costs to keep this particular mayor in maintenance and insurance.
Perhaps Conservative councillors could tell the voters exactly what they each spend on driving around the city in very fancy cars, and how much of that expense is funded by residents?
Peterborough Green Festival 2015
Happy St George’s Day!
twinkle twinkle polished car
You see, our Park Ward councillor team (two Labour, one Conservative) went for what they describe as “aggressive pavement cyclists” recently and tasked the police with talking to shocked children and middle aged women cycling along gently as well as people who couldn’t speak English. (My sample was tiny: but I did one.) They fined about a third of the people they stopped: most of them probably incapable of being polite and apologising nicely to a policeman. (Some offenders just got warned, although whether or not cycling on a pavement is an offence in all circumstances is a moot point.) So I think it only fair to point out that cycling on the pavement can be a perfectly logical and reasonable response to dangerous junctions, roads and cycle lanes and is a better place to cycle if your lights have just packed up.
Cars which park in the Park Road cycle lane, or across it or on the pavement are a regular feature of life at this end of Park Road and I for one don’t think it is safe. I think badly behaved drivers are one of a number of contributory factors encouraging “pavement cycling”.
I didn’t paint in the double yellow lines (which most people don’t even believe are there any more: they are virtually worn out). The Conservative council did. So I think elected Conservative members of all people should be able to show us how we can all live happily with their decisions.
