Kingsway Villagers

I do hope Kingsway residents will turn out next Saturday 2nd April to give a special cheer to The Rifles when they are granted the Freedom of Gloucester.

The ceremony starts in the docks at 0930 followed by a march-past the saluting dias outside the Guildhall at 1015.

As your councillor and equally important as a former career soldier I will be there to witness this historic event. The granting of Freedom to march with ‘bayonets fixed, drums beating and flags flying’ is the greatest civic honour Gloucester can bestow on a regiment.

Let us share in the pride and wish them well!

See you there.

I was given a leaflet outside Sainsury’s last week produced by The Council advising that from next month (April) we will have to pay for our garden waste to be collected from our green bins. As Victor Meldrew would say "I couldn’t believe it"!
Just another way to get more money out of us all then - as if we are not squeezed enough!

I have written to The Council today asking if they have considered what other councils do, who still offer this as a free service, which is:
1) Recycling the garden waste they collect by composting it and then selling it. (Many other districts I note are doing this most successfully and seem to be covering their collection costs and at the same time recycling the waste into excellent garden compost), or:
2) Just running the free service during only the summer months, as some other council’s in the UK successfully do, thus reducing their running costs by half.

What I do find surprising is that we don’t seem to have been properly advised here in Kingsway about these changes! I certainly havent had anything posted to me here at home. Has anyone else?

So if you are going to cut your lawn now the nice weather has arrived, think again!

Four weeks ago tomorrow (the day after our last public Residents Association meeting -as I prepared to add my meeting summary), my 9 year old (Tiny) PC finally bit the dust as the hard-drive failed and to make matters worse, I was actually in the throes of reorganising my back-up system at the precise moment that the damn thing croaked, so a number of my back-up files were corrupted

Faced with the possibility of losing all of my saved emails and a lot of my business data, I enlisted the help of local PC hardware expert Neil Souter at Soutersoft in Quedgeley, who was very helpful indeed. Neil was able to retrieve all of my important data, including my all-important email archive.

Retrieving my data and purchasing/installing my new PC took around 3 weeks, then there were issues with my replacement PC, (PC World made a simple mistake, supplying me with the wrong model, which I didn’t notice until after I’d set the damned thing up) which lost me an additional week!
To top things off (sic), when my mother-in-law was babysitting for us on the night before my birthday (as I went out for dinner with an old friend), she sat on my office chair and snapped it in half and sadly my wife has been ill for most of the last month, so I’ve also been coping with much of the housework and looking after the kids!

So, with the furniture damaged and some time on my hands whilst I was waiting for things to be sorted out, I took the opportunity to renovate my old desk, replace my broken chair and rearrange my “office”.

The whole thing has cost me 4 weeks, a good deal of stress, considerable expense and some loss of income

I was able to log in to this website (using my laptop) to "catch-up" with posts / comments / new user requests / spam etc on a couple of occasions, but I didn’t have the time/opportunity to do much else, and having finally managed to get back to some sense of normality, I am now some 4 weeks behind with my work and have an inbox full of emails to catch up with

On the upside, I now have a shiny new supersonic Packard Bell triple-core PC with a 1TB hard-drive (that will take some backing up) and am now in the midst of trying to catch up with my work whilst sorting out the new PC, and coping with all the strange things that Windows 7 keeps doing… lol (get Bill Gates in here, I want to slap him)!
Heads Up: The last two PC’s I bought both came from manufacturers who went bust within months of my purchases, so don’t buy any shares in Packard Bell for a while

Here’s to another 9 years of trouble-free processing!

So, if you recently posted on the website and were frustrated by the (slight) delays in processing your post, please forgive me… normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Regards,
Clive

There have been recent postings about the bus bollard and the imminent changes, (ie: the installation of a traffic camera).

This morning when I went out for a walk, I saw a car turn down the road towards the underpass. Finding the bus bollard in place, the driver stopped at the white “give way” line (meant for bus drivers) and he and his passenger got out. They left the car in the road at the white line, ignoring the double yellow lines, and walked under the underpass. As I was walking the same way, I watched them in disbelief as they headed towards the cash point at the HSBC bank, (any bus coming down the road would have had a problem getting round the car)!

Given the other postings on this site about inconsiderate parking – not to mention the seeming increase in litter around the place at the moment (viz the broken glass and empty bottles around the underpass – yet not a single litter bin in sight), and the lack of social responsibility by those inconsiderate people who don’t clear up after their dogs (another phenomenon on the increase around here, it appears – check the pavements), I’m left wondering whether we’re just unlucky to have a seemingly disproportionate number of people in Kingway who think they can do what they want, (if they leave litter or park where they want, it’s not their problem, someone else can clear it up or be inconvenienced, not them); or whether it’s just a selfish and inconsiderate few who are causing most of the problems for the rest of us… Or whether it’s just a sign of the times.

Badham Pharmacy are delighted to report that – on Saturday 2nd April at 11am, Barry Kirby, Chairman of Kingway Residents Assocation has kindly offered to officially open the new pharmacy in Kingsway (next to the Kingsway Primary School).

We are also running a free raffle, so please call in and collect your (free) ticket. The prize is a £25 voucher to spend at the chemist, and the draw will take place on 23rd April 2011.

The new pharmacy marks a new era for Kingsway where services will be provided locally for the community.

Please come and support Barry, he has done so much for the residents of Kingsway, he works very hard for the benefit of the community.

Free drinks will be provided for all.

Editors Note: As reported in this post, Badham Pharmacy opened it’s temporary premises in Kingsway on March 1st.

At the beginning of last week, I took our new dog for her first walk.
Where better, I thought, than the large park. We hadn’t been over there for three years!

Unfortunately, we were greeted to a substantial amount of dog s*** (apologies for the swearing but it really gets on my nerves). Large piles of the stuff that you’d think came from a dinosaur, not a dog; and one pile not 2 yards from a dog bin!

Later on in the week we were over at the park again and I saw the monster/culprit/dog in question. I’m no excrement expert, but you only had to look at the colour and size, it was the same. The owner, quite a young lad, looked around aimlessly whilst it was doing it’s business, then walked off. No thought whatsoever to picking it up.

In passing, I questioned whether he was going to pick it up or has he trained his dog to do it? He mumbled something about not having any bags etc… to which I offered him one. He walked off in silence!

Now whilst I commend this person for being a responsible owner, having seen him in all weather walking a dog of that size twice a day, he undoes all his good work by refusing to pick up what his dog leaves behind!

Any Dog Wardens around?
How about a PCSO? (Not seen one of those for ages)!
No, I thought not.

As with the rest of this place, life goes on…

Twist your ankle on the raised manholes, walk around the dog c**p not through it, park wherever you like…

Rant Over.