3 January (Part 1) - Friends and foes
On 1st January Bonkers started the year with
a blog which could be interpreted as being pro-Conservative and on the second was
somewhat critical of Labour politicians. I like to do that when I can because it
may demonstrate that BiB is not a branch of the Labour party. Such blogs do of course run the risk of upsetting local Labourites but that is just
tough, reporting what I believe to be the truth has to come first.
In practice nothing changes. Yesterday I exchanged messages with two of Bexley’s
eleven Labour Councillors. They were related to the two January blogs but
neither took issue with the position I had adopted, experience has shown that
they are bigger than that. Not so their Tory counterparts Tweedle Dum and
Tweedle Dee who run the Bexley Conservatives’ Twitter account. They returned to
their regular theme of referring to me as a Labour supporter who has said
something particularly silly.
A month ago they claimed I said that
Crossrail has sounded the death knell for Abbey Wood when the truth was
that I said it had sounded the death knell for Abbey Wood as we used to know it
and went on to say what a good thing it was.
Yesterday @bexleynews was at it again.
I can search the website a little more easily than readers so I looked for
occurrences of the word dim and found it 16 times, exactly half of them since
the decision was taken to replace the sodium lights with LED.
Only three such uses of the word referred to the new lighting.
The first related how when first driving home after LED installation I found
my own road looked dimmer than before and how I struggled to find the keyhole in
my own front door. My camera told me that the LEDs were only half as bright as
those that went before.
The next use of the word dim was four months later when I made a reference
to my initial reaction being that the lamps looked dim but twice said I was in
favour of the changeover and that
I have grown to like them.
The third and last time that
the
LED lights were labelled dim was when it was reported that Bexley Council
itself admitted they were dim.
An email from Bexley Council signed off by Josephine Hollier
- yes there is a connection with the temporary Monitoring Officer - made it very
clear that the LEDs are dim when compared with sodium lighting. Only 8,800
Lumens instead of 18,000. There can be no arguing with that. The LED lighting is
comparatively dim despite
Bexley Councillors claiming they are brighter.
But that is not what Tweedle Dum and his brother are saying. Their claim is
that their favourite Labour supporter said “reducing Council running costs was a
dim idea”. As usual they are lying because they know no other form of existence.
Nowhere has Bonkers said that LED lighting is a dim idea, I even paid extra to
have them fitted on the new motor; the only objection has been to Councillors
making false claims about them.
Incidentally, until 1964 there was a street lamp exactly like the one shown here
right outside my house and throughout all the neighbouring streets. A man came
around on a bike carrying a ladder to switch them on each evening and presumably
off in the morning although I do not remember that.
I must be getting very old. A few years beforehand some of my school mates still
had acetylene lamps on their bikes. (Google it.)