Don't Blame Me, I'm Supposed to Be in Greece

Brentford West councillor Guy Lambert reports back

Cllr Guy Lambert

August 11, 2023

I anticipate this will be a short one because it's August and there's not much happening in this world and particularly not to me because if you recall I'm supposed to be in Greece doing absolutely nothing.

My calendar was completely empty over the weekend and in truth this unnatural situation remained until today Thursday.

Didn't mean I was 100% lazy because there are always things the enterprising councillor can't think up to fill the unforgiving moment.

A fair number of emails, a few phone calls under bucket load of complaints about Lime bikes and the state of the A4 under the M4 and the Ealing Road junction.

One of these rogue Lime bikes was sitting there minding its own business on one of the traffic free private roads in the Ferry Quays estate where I live. Before we introduced the pens it would've been parked there, possibly by me and causing no upset to anybody but being quite handy to the next person who wanted to use it to go somewhere. However it is now against the rules so I reported it to li.me and I got a nice letter back thanking me for the report but sadly they didn't take any action whatsoever so it was still there the next day. As I say unlike some of the Limes left on public roads it didn't worry anybody just as most of them didn't before we introduced pens and created an incentive for idiots to mess with them push them over generally be a big nuisance.

But something much much worse was going on on the A4 which led to a 22 year old losing his life. This happened in the small hours of Saturday morning. I don't know much about it but this young man was found on the road having been hit by car which stopped but nobody could save him.

When I heard about it I just wanted to go and have a look and see if I could learn anything. There's a pedestrian crossing near Brook Lane north and one I got there the South carriageway was free but there was a pointless police tape on the middle reserve telling people not to cross.

Naturally, people ducked under it and carried on but then they found that following the rain there was a serious flood at the North End of the crossing. Those with no wellies or webbed feet then crossed the central reservation and followed it a bit until they could see a dry way across a few yards away but of course without the protection of a crossing. Whether this had any relevance to the accident I can't say but I doubt it helped.

Still I was on holiday, and with Greece not being available I remembered that someone had mentioned the canal area near Kings Cross had been much improved and would be worth seeing because it might make a nice example of what could be done in Brentford so I decided to take a days stayvation in Saint Pancras. Naturally it was raining so after a bit of wandering I found a museum to cower in. It turned out to be small but perfectly formed and to be the London Canal Museum.

A few interesting. The Bantam pusher tub was a form of transport built in Brentford. They apparently made 91 of these handsome beasts and I presume they were still at it until the 1960s.

I didn't know there was a lock in Hanwell handy for the Pauper and Lunatic asylum and if my memory isn’t failing me there was a little siding, if that’s an acceptable word, for provisions and so forth to be dropped off for the inmates by the 19th century equivalent of Deliveroo.

During the week I made a few visits to Boston Manor to see how the bridge was getting on. The first time I was a bit surprised to see the bridge only linking a bit of the meadow to another bit. There were 4 blokes standing where the steps used to be, but they were just standing there stroking their beards.

Later in the week their beards were untroubled and they were using the bridge maker’s Meccano set to put it together again (I hope)

Well, the night is late and you deserve a bit of a holiday too, so I’ll sign off with something about our younger neighbours. Apparently schools in London are short of children. Will Cygnets, educated thus far in Ferry Quays help?

Councillor Guy Lambert