Davblog

In which someone you've never heard of writes about things you have no interest in

Posts Tagged ‘balham’

Parking in Balham

You’ll often hear people saying that Mail writers live in a different world to the rest of us. Actually, I think that they live in the same world as us, they just like to think that they live in a different one. The fun and games start when they discover they are wrong and that the real world doesn’t appreciate their over-developed sense of entitlement.

Here’s a good case in point. Melissa Kite lives somewhere near me in Balham. Melissa is a serial parking offender. Of course, Melissa doesn’t see it quite like that. Melissa describes herself as being a victim of “bear traps” laid by councils to trick motorists who dare to park on their patch. When she parked up at Balham tube station “at 8pm for ten seconds in order to pick up a friend who was coming to stay with me and who was weighed down with luggage” she was appalled to be given an £80 fine.

And there’s that sense of entitlement. This is what really annoys me about people like Melissa. There are parking restrictions around Balham station. They have been there for as long as I can remember and they are clearly marked. But because they are inconvenient for her, she feels she is perfectly justified in ignoring them. Balham station is at junction where two busy roads cross. The parking restrictions are there for a good reason (and, no, not to make money for the council – to prevent congestion). They aren’t there to trick people like Melissa.

But we can find out more about Melissa’s parking problems with Wandsworth council. She wrote about a very similar incident in the Evening Standard a year ago. This gives more details of the offence. She was parking in a taxi rank. The taxi rank is a relatively new innovation. It’s been there three or four years. But, once again, it’s clearly marked. And, once again, Melissa chose to ignore that because it was inconvenient for her. She also mentions four other offences where she was picking someone up or dropping them off at the station and chose to park in a restricted area.

Amusingly, she even describes a telephone conversation she had with someone from Wandsworth council.

I rang Wandsworth council to tell them this but their spokesman sounded distinctly unimpressed. “Well, I don’t know what you were doing there,” he said.

“But I’ve just told you,” I said. “I was picking up a friend.”

He sighed: “People come up with all sorts of stories.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re asking me to assume that everything you’re saying is the truth.”

At which point I confess I raised my voice a little: “Yes I am!”

“Right,” he harrumphed, “you’re shouting, I’m ending the call.” And he slammed the phone down.

So I rang the parking department, where someone called Angelo explained that when running errands I should always stop on single yellow lines

There’s that sense of entitlement again. She honestly seems to believe that “I was picking up a friend” is a reasonable excuse for ignoring the parking restrictions. Balham Station Road would be in chaos for most of the day if everyone chose to ignore the rules because they were “just picking up a friend”.

Then there’s this lovely paragraph from the end of her article.

Very soon, Westminster council will abolish free parking on a single yellow line in the evenings. And when they do so, I will stop going up West on a Tuesday night as I have done for the past six years to meet a group of friends with whom I have dinner in a Lebanese restaurant.That restaurant will lose us as regular customers forever, and goodness knows how many others.

If only she lived in a city where there was a quick and efficient public transport system. Perhaps something that whisked passengers to their destination through underground tubes. I know travelling on the tube can be a bit of a nightmare in rush hour. But on a Tuesday night, it should be fine. Or perhaps people like Melissa are too self-important to mix with the rest of us in a confined space like that.

There may, of course, be a serious point to her objections. Perhaps the parking restrictions are too draconian. Never let it be said that I object to a nice bit of civil disobedience to protest against bad laws. But you need to be prepared to take the punishment. You can’t expect to have the fine waived just because it’s inconvenient to you.

Actually, this is all academic to me. Like the vast majority of sane Londoners we don’t have a car. Most weekends I walk to the supermarket and carry the shopping home. If it’s going to be a huge shop then we’ll order on the internet and get it delivered. And if friends arrive at Balham station overburdened with luggage then we’ll offer to meet them there and help them carry it home. If we’re feeling particularly lazy we might offer to pay for them to get a taxi. From the rank right outside the station. Assuming it’s not full of idiots with 4x4s and an over-developed sense of entitlement.

SW12 Social Network

One of the themes I picked up on at this year’s Opentech conference was that of local social media. More and more people are using open source tools to build local online communities and this movement seems likely to grow. I was particularly impressed with the work that Will Perrin and friends are doing over at TalkAboutLocal. I confess that Lloyd had mentioned the project to me some months ago, but I had forgotten about it until I saw Will speak at Opentech.

I’ve written about my interest in local sites before. You might remember me introducing Planet Balham and Balham Twits. I still think that both of those sites are useful, but they aren’t very interactive. What I wanted was something that the local community would find more useful. I spent a few hours playing with Drupal. I think that Drupal would be a great tool, for building local sites, but I didn’t have the time to spare learning how to get the best out of it, so in the end I went back to an earlier experiment.

A couple of years ago, I used Ning to build a simple social networking site for Balham. At the time I didn’t have many local contacts so the site atrophied through lack of use. But this lunchtime I went back to have another look at the project.

And after only twenty minutes or so of fiddling, SW12.org was ready to go. The great thing about Ning is that it has all of the standard social networking features already available as modules that you can just drop into the site. As a start, I’ve picked a pretty standard-looking set of features (user profiles, blogs, disscussion forums, photos and videos) and have seeded the site with a few entries of my own. I’m sure things will grow and change if the site becomes popular.

Through my other web experiments (particulalry through Balham Twits) I’ve made contact with some Balham-based internet users, so hopefully this time the site will get a little more use. I’m planning to put in some work to promote it locally as well. Even if it means dropping leaflets through every door in Balham (ok, perhaps I won’t go quite that far!)

It looks to me as though Ning is a great way to get a social network site up and running really quickly. I expect I’ll be using it again for other similar sites in the future. If you’re thinking of doing something similar then I recommend talking a look at it.

And if you’re in or around Balham, please join up to the site.

Local Media – Twitterers in Balham

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I’m becoming very interested in using the internet to bring local communities together. So here’s something else that I’ve built over the last few days.

About a week ago I saw Paul Carvill’s new site Twitian. It brings together all of the people from The Guardian who use Twitter and reposts their tweets. It’s an interesting way for people to find other people who might share their interests. I thought that it would be interesting to aggregate tweets on the basis of geography.

I contacted Paul and asked if he planned to release his code as open source. He said that he would, but that it wasn’t quite ready. But then I discovered the Perl Net::Twitter module and realised that it would be pretty simple to recreate a lot of what Twitian does. A couple of evenings of hacking and Balham Twits is ready to go.

It’s a pretty simple set-up. And I don’t do things quite the same way as Twitian. I’ve set up a new user on Twitter called balhamtwits and the site is generated using information about the people that user is following. One feature that I think is rather clever is that the program automatically follows anyone that follows it. So anyone can add themselves to the site by simply following balhamtwits. Of course that could lead to spam accounts being included automatically, so there’s a mechanism to manually remove and block undesirable accounts.

Anyway, I’ve put the code up on Github so that anyone else who wants to have a go can do so. It’s a surprisingly small amount of code. Of course, like all quickly hacked together projects, the documentation is a bit lacking. But I’ll work on that over the weekend. Honest.

Please let me know if you find it useful. And if you’re twittering in SW12, please follow balhamtwits.

Boxing Day Walk

I know I’m about five years later than everyone else in discovering the joys of a GPS receiver, but I’m really enjoying having one in my G1.

Here’s our Boxing Day afternoon stroll around Tooting Common. More details on the InstaMapper web site.

We saw parakeets. I’ve known there are wild parakeets on the common for years, but this is the first time I’ve seen them for myself.

Update: PJ points out that  the maximum speed is quite possibly inaccurate.

KT Tunstall

Bugger. I’ve just seen some photos of KT Tunstall playing in my local pub last night.

It’s all very well living so close to such a cool music venue, but I really need to find a good way to keep in touch with what’s going on there. Their web site really doesn’t seem to be kept particularly up to date. But I think a lot of their best gigs are deliberately low-key and unadvertised. Maybe I need to buy a few beers for their events organiser.

Update: It seems I would have known more if I had been listening to Capital Radio. Not even the chance to see KT Tunstall live is worth that torture.

BKB Closes Down

The Balham Kitchen and Bar has closed down. It has been sold to Sam Harrison (who owns a place called Sam’s Brasserie & Bar in Chiswick). It will reopen in September under the new name Harrison’s.

The BKB won’t be missed. I’ve only been there a couple of times in the four years that it’s been open, but that’s because every time I’ve gone the food has been average and the staff have been very unhelpful. Not what you expect from what is probably the most expensive restaurant in Balham.

I’ve said it before and I’ll no doubt say it again, but if you want a top-notch restaurant in Balham then you should really try Lamberts.

We’ll be trying Harrison’s when it opens though. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Flash Flood

I monitor an RSS feed of all photos uploaded to Flickr with the tag “balham”. Which is how I came across this set of photos of a flash flood in Balham today.

I’m trying to work out how close to my house this was. And vaguely dreading what I’ll find when I get home this evening.

Local News

The internet is a fabulous source of news. And it’s now becoming so ubiquitous that you can find out local things that you might never find out otherwise. Here’s a slightly sad example.

Harry is a local celebrity. He’s never far from the bar of our local pub. He lives on our road and you only ever see him either in the pub or walking between the pub and his house. He’s very old though. And very ill. Whenever you don’t see him around for a few days you always wonder if he’s died. But he always pops up again.

Except, now he won’t. Harry died yesterday. I saw an ambulance going down the road, but I didn’t think of Harry (who I vaguely assumed to be indestructible) until I read this LiveJournal entry. And I found that through Planet Balham, which aggregates various new sources about Balham, including a Technorati search.

Without these, it would have been weeks before we realised what had happened. I can’t imagine Harry’s death being mentioned in any mainstream news medium.

The internet means you get your news quicker. Even if it’s bad news.

UFOs Over Balham

There were some strange and spooky goings on in the skies last week, prompting one observer to eerily predict “I think there is something out there.”

Stunned witnesses described how gobsmacked crowds were drawn out onto the streets to watch two sets of unidentified shining bright orange lights fly perfectly in formation through the skies above Balham and Tooting.

The UFO’s, which lit up the skies for a short while before shooting up and disappearing into the distance just before midnight last Friday, also had people standing in their gardens trying to capture the action on film and mobile phones.

From the Wandsworth Guardian

I, of course, saw nothing.

Yum!

Dinner last night was a trip to one of my favourite London restaurants – the Sugar Club. It’s been a couple of years since I could afford to go there so it was a nice treat. The food was as good as it ever was (particularly the tandoori rabbit that I had for a starter and the passion fruit sorbet and white chocolate ice cream that I had for dessert). Only slight downer was that the clientele seem to be a bit more noisy that they used to be.

If you fancy a really good meal in central London and you don’t mind paying in the region of £60/head (including drinks) then I can’t recommend it highly enough.