Sandwich Weaving

A hand-coloured postcard showing a decidedly ancient lorry is my offering for today. The caption reads "Strand Street and The Weavers, Sandwich".

Which probably means the shops and cottages were originally weavers' cottages from the times when cottage industry was the main source of income for many of England's population.

A sign painted over the window at the near end of the row says "Sandwich Weavers" and that sent my (admittedly weird) sense of humour off on a tangent!

I've only been to Sandwich once. It was during a holiday in 1999 when we stayed for a week in Hastings and toured around the Cinque Ports and the south eastern corner of Britain.

There's a lot of England's history to be found in that part of the country and some lovely countryside too. One of my websites is devoted to that holiday if you want to see what we got up to.

This is one of the few photos of Sandwich that I took and it gives a totally different view and impression of the place. I took it from an old toll bridge that was a controlled way into the town. The gatehouse still exists with a list of tolls for various forms of conveyance.

Letchworth

It's been a busy old week - I've now got back from Letchworth, just about.

Horrible journey, it's a Friday night, it's half-term and the M6 was crawling. I shelled out my hard-earned to nip up the M6 Toll but as soon as it ended I was back down into first and second gears and that's how I stayed until Stoke on Trent.

There had been some sort of incident on the slip road of Junction 15 and it had caused a rare old tail back. It took me over 6 hours to get home.

Anyway this is where I've been - the Goldsmith Centre of North Herts College. Photo from Flickr, courtesy of John Sanderson. I didn't take any photos down there. Some nice scenery down that way though.

Tom Tom was navigating which meant going over lots of those stupid bumps in the road that are supposed to calm traffic and instead only do your suspension in and make a row, annoying anyone unlucky enough to have one outside their house...

So I'm not quite sure where I was, but at one point there was a gorgeous stone-built red-tiled country church with a rather strange looking tower, seen against a green field and wonderful blue sky. I almost stopped but the thought of traffic building on the M6 kept me going. In the event it wouldn't have made much difference!

I delivered a session on Risk Management at a IT Technical Forum organised by the local JISC Regional Support Centre. They call themselves RSCs, but to anyone outside the Further Education Sector that normally prompts some conversation about Shakespeare...

Busy weekend looming as well so no rest for the wicked! Will try to keep up with the entries!

An Email from Tony Blair

I was one of the million plus who got an email from our Tone the other day because I'd signed the online petition against road tolls.

Tone didn't actually say he'd take any notice of the petition - he said more about things like "We must do something to ease congestion"... Agreed. Public transport was one of the options. Agreed again - get it sorted out! At the moment it is far more expensive to take a train than it is for a single person to take a fleet of Rolls Royces. We have crazy situations where trains that are consistantly overcrowded cause railway managers to comment that the fares must be too cheap. I'd have thought in my naive way that it was because they either didn't use enough carriages or put on enough trains myself, but it just goes to show how wrong I can be!

Of course it's a dangerous thing to point out to politicians that it's cheaper to travel by car than by train because they rub their hands in glee and take it as an excuse to put the cost of motoring up. Whereas what's needed is the cost of rail travel - particularly at rush hour and other busy times - to come down so more will use it. Ah, but of course, we make those times more expensive and therefore less attractive to commuters...

A friend was on a train from London the other week and a young foreign girl got on. She had a ticket to travel so imagine her surprise when the train conductor demanded another £100 from her because she was on a train that left London during peak times. Actually she wasn't so much surprised as downright shocked, upset, in floods of tears. As anyone might be who thought they had paid for something legitimately only for an official to suddenly demand a huge amount of money out of the blue.

Very few people live within walking distance of work these days. We rely on being able to travel every day and many of us travel quite long distances. Putting up the cost of road travel causes the cost of almost everything to go up because goods have to be gotten from A to B.

I've found most people, even strong Conservatives, think the railways and Power services should be re-Nationalised. The current rail system where there are so many companies involved in charging fees for a train traveling through their region, on their rails, etc. etc., it's probably as much an administrative nightmare as it would be as a public body and there's umpteen lots of profit being charged as well.

</rant>