9 May (Part 1) - Vandals rule - both trains and Council
I
expect you felt the same as I did when you saw the vandalised Crossrail train
sitting just outside of Abbey Wood station and I did wonder if I should give the
b**tards the publicity, but it is news and another insight into what the dregs of society get up to in their spare time.
However not everyone felt the same shame on behalf of the community as you and I did,
just look at what people were saying on Abbey Wood based Facebook pages.
Some of them were critical of me on Twitter for highlighting the fact that there
are too many low-lifes there. They thought the
desecration would have been done by people outside of the area. Possible I suppose, but not all that likely.
New Council appointments
There is not much going on at Bexley Council and there won’t be until their first meeting on 23rd May.
Many people will be disappointed to see Teresa O’Neill remain as Leader and may
well be surprised to see Councillor Louis French appointed Deputy. Whether he
will be tough enough for that position remains to be seen. The obnoxious O’Neill
made former Councillor Rob Leitch’s position untenable because he did not share
all of her views. Rob wisely left to devote all his time to being a successful
Assistant Headmaster - and a less successful football team.
Councillor David Leaf is taking over Massey’s old role, Resources, which should provide a lot of fun.
Councillor Craske’s role will be expanded to include traffic. Last time he took
that on he trebled the cost of residents’ parking permits.
Councillor Alex Sawyer will take a new role called Communities, but it will not
include Community Safety, that remains part of Craske’s portfolio.
Where has Councillor Linda Bailey gone? She was not the greatest performer in
the Council Chamber but her team successfully brought in a lot of investment.
And it’s Councillor Brian Bishop for Mayor apparently. I can’t quite see him
as Chairman material but let’s hope he proves me wrong.
New website
There have been several complaints that the ‘Bexley Council is Bonkers’ text that overlays
the banner is far too large and overlays the menu too. That is because the new Bonkers logo is
wider than the old one and instructed to go full width. The old logo was
only about a third the width but has been cached by your browser. It presents the old logo
to the new instructions which are to go full width and in doing so, being smaller originally, it grows
deeper too. On some browsers a Refresh will fix the problem but Chrome and Safari will need
a bigger kick in the pants. Clear History probably.
Perhaps I should have changed the file name, the Twitter etc. icons were moved
to a new folder which is much the same thing and they did not give the same problem.
Other comments are that the pages are too wide on desktop full HD screens. I always adjust the
browser width but maybe I forgot some people have windows at full width all the time.
Personally I like the wider look but a compromise is possible. Text pages
(blogs etc.) can be width restricted but Photo features (like Crossrail) won’t be.
There is plenty of scope for adjusting text sizes before the next
Council meeting. I think some is too big on mobiles, everything uses desktop size at the moment.