Fast train

Looking up this evening

Poles

Contrails

Sudbury Hill Harrow

Up

And over

Winter Solstice, Cardington Park

Overhead is opal turning sapphire,
Down to turquoise, and then blue.
The sun is cold upon the trees
On the far side of the reservoir.
A weeping willow, a reedy bank,
A few leaves, downcast, waiting.
And now three swans approach,
Looking for bread, expecting none.
They glance, reflect and dazzle
Like tomb light on the darkest day.

--
Stephen Moran
(1992)

Merry Christmas

The Pogues, starting with 30th anniversary concert in Paris, a beautiful version of Fairytale of New York and next up, Shane and the band on top form with a great version of Dirty Old Town.

Litter and fly-tipping in Harrow

This pile of rubbish has been growing for weeks.

Groups of men stand here at night drinking and others spit paan.

Steps lead up to flats above the parade of shops.

From across the street

The corner of Cavendish Avenue and Hartington Close is always filthy.

On turning into Cavendish Avenue from Greenford Road in the Harrow-on-the-Hill ward of the Outer London Borough of Harrow you are greeted by filth and rubbish that lies and piles up for weeks. Groups of men hang around the corner of Greenford Road and Cavendish Avenue and also sometimes the corner of Hartington Close, drinking and tossing their bottles, cans and litter around or stuffing cans into hedges.

There is an official looking building, which houses a centre for disabled people, around which complete squalor reigns. I myself had to pull large sheets of plastic out of the overgrown hedgerow and stuffed them into a bin, after I got fed up with walking by the scene for several weeks, during which time nobody responsible for that building lifted a finger to tidy the rubbish outside, despite people hanging around and coming and going from there continuously*.

The base of the walls near the corner are covered in what looks like splashes of red paint, but is actually spitted paan residue. What the hell are we paying Council Tax for here in Harrow? The police come once every couple of months and hold a meeting on the corner with anyone who wants to talk to them. Other than that, in over a year living here in this street, I have only once seen a pair of police walking down the street and that was in the daytime when nothing goes on.

A little further down Greenford Road, across the railway bridge at Sudbury Hill station, you enter the London Borough of Ealing. Here in Grove Farm special nature reserve, where a local woman was murdered a few years ago (by a known criminal from one of the Baltic states, a man with a string of convictions in his own country for rape, by the way), I have seen groups of men standing around in the trees, more than one group, drinking and once in a field with a campfire. (Is this a right or wrong use of the place? I really don't know.) And of course, bottles are strewn around there as well. Grove Farm is a particularly forbidding zone for anyone alone or vulnerable, in this writer's opinion**.

Does anyone in power ever go for a walk in the street or do they all go from limo to bureaucratic building to limo and home? Can they see anything as they swish by in their cars to get to the David Lloyd £90 per month (approx.) sports centre? I doubt it.

Ossian

* Update: The day after I posted this, the rubbish was cleared. The overgrown bushes in front of the council building have also been cut right back.

Slipped a bit

** Update: A sign has appeared near the entrance to Grove Farm, which is also the road leading to the David Lloyd sports centre, designating the area a no-drinking area. That should help.

Mall Christmas decorations

London Designer Outlet - Wembley

Christmas shop window display

The Flower Nest, Greenford Road. Website - Interflora

A willow in winter

Whitton Avenue West

Stop harassment and surveillance outside clinics

The campaigners who stand outside clinics with cameras and posters should be arrested and charged with something. It's intolerable.

Another shop window smashed

Chicken Cottage window smashed

Two shop fronts with cash machines on this block have been smashed up and the cash machines broken into in the last month or so, as we reported recently. It looks like somebody just vandalised this one, or it might have been an accident perhaps. One of the windows of the hairdressers' across the street from this has been boarded up too. Business and life continues as normal while it feels like we are under attack.