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| Little Nan's in Deptford |
Did someone say #Brockley? From the 23rd May Little Nan will be popping up in Brockley with her 2nd bar - 'Little Nan's Tea Cup' #Cocktails
— Little Nan's Bar (@Littlenansbar) April 4, 2014
More soon.Sarah writes:
My friend's lost a dark green, khaki army style rucksack in New Cross around midnight Monday night, and have exhausted all efforts to try and physically find it so we now turn to the web.
Inside was a Macbook Pro, and Toshiba 1TB external hard drive.
We're all convinced it's probably been stolen by now but there's 2 years worth of Design coursework for uni on that hard drive.
Simply hoping if you could pop a post/tweet up asking for people to keep an eye out for it or if they hear that anyone's trying to sell it!
All we want back is the hard drive and the work on it. The rest can be sold on to whoever the hell wants it.
Email her here if you know anything about it.
The Rivoli Ballroom is up for sale for £7.5 million.
Its current owners put it on the market for £10 million back in 2007. That move triggered a campaign to protect it from being turned into flats or a supermarket and it was given Grade II listed status as a result. This planning restriction gave the sellers cause to reconsider and in the years that followed, the Rivoli's fame has grown, as a location for film, television and music, as well as dance, cabaret and parties.
The new, lower price-tag presumably reflects the fact that it will be harder to bulldoze and turn into something more lucrative.
Despite the fact that it can be maddeningly hard to book and its calendar of events is erratic, the Rivoli is nonetheless Brockley's greatest man-made treasure and its owners have been loving custodians. The relatively few public events it holds have helped to preserve its features, while the eccentric booking process means that some gloriously unusual events take place there.
If and when the Rivoli is sold, we have to hope that the new owners take as much care with it. If they have to recoup £7.5m from it, that will be a tricky balancing act to get right.
LVIG are holding their public meeting and AGM at the St Mary’s Centre, Ladywell from 7.30pm on 9th April. They say:
We have lots of ideas for events, activities and campaigns for the year(s) ahead and we’d love you be part of bringing them into life with a view to improving our quality of life in Ladywell. We’d really like to hear your great ideas and throw them into the mix too!
For the group to make these happen we need to elect a committee for 2014/15 and that’s where LVIG needs some help from you! For LVIG to continue to exist it needs members of the local community to represent it and become the public face for it. As a committee member your contribution does not need to be time consuming or onerous – your level of input is your choice, but it will involve attending a few meetings a year and doing a bit of admin as a minimum – anything more you can do will, of course, be very much appreciated.
If you are interested in joining the committee then go to the LVIG blog http://ladywell.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/lvig-public-meeting-agm-now-on-9th.html where you will find out more information about the roles and how to apply. Applications need to be returned by Saturday 5th April. We hope to see you there!
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| Decoded: Cicada 3301 has nothing on this |
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| The Horniman Walrus in happier times |
Sarah: How are you supposed to know? Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you're so creative. You don't know what it's like to really create something; to create a life; to feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death...
John: Mom.
Sarah: ...and destruction...
John: Mom! We need to be a little more constructive here, okay?
- Terminator 2
With the Council elections less than two months away, the Greens have chosen to draw first blood by launching a campaign against self-service checkouts.
They were angry about ATMs, bitter about barcodes and sour about sushi conveyor belts. But by god, the Lewisham Green Party won't stand for self-service checkouts in supermarkets. A line has been drawn. The fightback begins here and Brockley's prospective councillor is leading the charge. The News Shopper reports:
The Lewisham Green Party is calling on Sainsbury's customers to contact [Sainsbury's] and request an end to their push for more people to use self-service machines.
It comes after they spotted a sign at the Lewisham branch showing a target for 59 per cent of customers to use the self-service tills.
The Greens' Brockley election candidate Violeta Vadja said: "The savings from replacing staff with self-service tills aren't being passed on to customers and clearly aren't being passed on to staff.
Given that supermarkets are currently engaged in a cut-throat battle against the growing threat of deep-discounting stores, which is forecast to contribute to falling inflation, this is an airy reading of the economics but never mind - Ladywell's Green candidate, Andrea Carey-Fuller was happy to kick the rhetoric it up a notch, likening the infernal contraptions to the Spinning Jenny, saying: "We are returning to the days of the industrial revolution where mechanisation increased profits at the expense of jobs and wages [sic]."
Lest you think this was just a journalist latching on to trivial quotes to fill a page on a slow day, they actually organised a protest about this issue in Lewisham Shopping Centre at the weekend.
Brockley Central bows to no blog in its dislike of self-service checkouts, but with Council budgets being squeezed to an unprecedented degree, a housing situation approaching crisis and even (whisper it) environmental issues like air pollution to deal with, you might hope that they had something better to worry about than which type of aisle supermarket customers are being encouraged to use. If they want to worry about the rise of the machines, they'd be better off contemplating the likely impact of pattern recognition software or what happens when you put a taser on a drone.
The Green Party was once a credible force in Lewisham politics, with a practical, sensible team in Sue Luxton and Dean Walton and a political heavyweight in Darren Johnson. This stuff is hopeless. Once were eco-warriors.
Full disclosure: The particular checkouts in question are at Sainsbury's, which is a client of my employer. But the checkouts might have been anywhere since every supermarket and many other types of shop are using them. This protest is embarrassing, whichever way you look at it.
