Monday, April 23, 2007
More tales
The under age drinkers of Epsom are in mourning. The late night burger bar in town centre - Roosters - who have refuelled generations of said under age drinkers has shut. Not clear where they now go and the street cleaners who bagged a fair bit of overtime cleaning up the mess in the morning are not too happy either.
To compound the misery another late night venue - the Boogie Lounge - is having trouble with the licensing people over late night revellry. Maybe the problem arises when, not having Roosters, the youth try and get into Boogie's - which is supposed to be a place for the more mature and discerning drinker - and get refused.
Becoming something of an expert on provincial tips, having recently visited those at Gosport and Guildford. Layout of both very cramped with a row of parking slots in front of a row of green containers with very little in the way of manoeuvring space in front of the slots. At Gosport they are very into you sorting your rubbish which means that if you have a car load of miscellaneous household rubbish you spend quite a long time marching up and down trying to find the right container. You need to know, for example, that tree roots do not count as wood (unpainted) and that the definition of metal (iron and steel) is as elastic as the trusty minding the container. Less bother sorting at Guildford but they make up for that with a very long queue. Makes one realise what a palace the waste transfer station at Epsom is. Not much in the way of containers, just a row of rectangulars holes half way up the concrete wall of the huge waste warehouse, through which one chucks one's rubbish. Large loaders trundle around below pushing it into heaps. Large mezzanine area in front of the holes in which to drive around. All in all a much higher throughput operation, a proper metropolitan operation (despite Epsom presently being in Surrey rather than London. On which subject we hear change may be afoot), although not fast enough to prevent a tip-madness death the other month when an elderly gent had his arm broken and died a few hours later of heart failure. And for a treat yesterday, because we were driving a van, we were allowed to drive into the waste warehouse itself rather than use the holes. We were allowed to park right among the heaps and loaders and get the authentic sights and smells of waste on a warm Sunday afternoon. A very distinctive smell it is too: nothing quite like dustcart smell. This incursion into the warehouse being topped and tailed by visits to the weighbridge to make sure that we were not shifting contraband commercial waste.
Pleased to see that the animal rights people are alive and well at Leatherhead. It seems that a fox got into a multi-storey carpark there and managed to get stuck on a ledge some way up. The rightys organised a full scale rescue and were able to announce that they would be able to release the fox back into the wild very shortly. I think I would have borrowed one of those Harris hawks they use to harrass pidgeons to take the thing out - always assuming that such a hawk would take on a fox.
To compound the misery another late night venue - the Boogie Lounge - is having trouble with the licensing people over late night revellry. Maybe the problem arises when, not having Roosters, the youth try and get into Boogie's - which is supposed to be a place for the more mature and discerning drinker - and get refused.
Becoming something of an expert on provincial tips, having recently visited those at Gosport and Guildford. Layout of both very cramped with a row of parking slots in front of a row of green containers with very little in the way of manoeuvring space in front of the slots. At Gosport they are very into you sorting your rubbish which means that if you have a car load of miscellaneous household rubbish you spend quite a long time marching up and down trying to find the right container. You need to know, for example, that tree roots do not count as wood (unpainted) and that the definition of metal (iron and steel) is as elastic as the trusty minding the container. Less bother sorting at Guildford but they make up for that with a very long queue. Makes one realise what a palace the waste transfer station at Epsom is. Not much in the way of containers, just a row of rectangulars holes half way up the concrete wall of the huge waste warehouse, through which one chucks one's rubbish. Large loaders trundle around below pushing it into heaps. Large mezzanine area in front of the holes in which to drive around. All in all a much higher throughput operation, a proper metropolitan operation (despite Epsom presently being in Surrey rather than London. On which subject we hear change may be afoot), although not fast enough to prevent a tip-madness death the other month when an elderly gent had his arm broken and died a few hours later of heart failure. And for a treat yesterday, because we were driving a van, we were allowed to drive into the waste warehouse itself rather than use the holes. We were allowed to park right among the heaps and loaders and get the authentic sights and smells of waste on a warm Sunday afternoon. A very distinctive smell it is too: nothing quite like dustcart smell. This incursion into the warehouse being topped and tailed by visits to the weighbridge to make sure that we were not shifting contraband commercial waste.
Pleased to see that the animal rights people are alive and well at Leatherhead. It seems that a fox got into a multi-storey carpark there and managed to get stuck on a ledge some way up. The rightys organised a full scale rescue and were able to announce that they would be able to release the fox back into the wild very shortly. I think I would have borrowed one of those Harris hawks they use to harrass pidgeons to take the thing out - always assuming that such a hawk would take on a fox.
# posted by Jim @ 12:18 AM 
