Nothing succeeds like excess

BBC London last night (still available but not for long) featured a small segment by Sarah Harris about a boat, placed on the roof of the Royal Festival Hall on the south bank, available for people to stay in overnight and enjoy unrivalled views of London.

“People on the South Bank were doing a double take as they looked up, but no, it  really is what looks like a boat perched on the very edge of Queen Elizabeth Hall’s roof.  Not only that but in a triumph over health & safety restrictions people can actually stay in it.”

She doesn’t qualify this comment, so I can only assume it’s another one if those lazy throwaway lines that the media love, to have a pop at the perceived excessive Health & Safety culture, which David Cameron is so keen to stamp out.  Let’s have a think how this might be a “triumph over Health & Safety”.

This must mean that they’ve ignored any advice, law or building regulations that might be relevant to this situation, and that at *no point* during the planning has anyone done a risk assessment, putting guidelines in place to assure the safety of the occupants or passers-by.

Therefore this implies:

• The boat is unsecured or someone has judged it heavy enough that it probably won’t sway or topple over onto the pavement below.
• The roof weight limit has not been checked.
• Occupants access the roof and boat on their own, either by climbing the outside of the building, parachuting in, or unguided via maintenance areas.
• No additional lighting has been provided to guide them back to the inside of the building in the event of an emergency.  In such an emergency, they’ll just have to take their chances as none of the nearby fire marshalls will check that area.  The only emergency exit is to jump off the roof.

If the boat was constructed there, I can only wonder how it was put together e.g. who did the wiring and heating?  If the boat was already built, how did it get up there?  Jedi mind levitation?  Using a crane would be cheating, as that would require a whole other set of considerations, including weight, stabilising the crane, rope strength, how it was lashed together.

Would you want to stay there?

The above points are what I would expect the Health & Safety officers involved to consider: looking at each situation as the plans were developed and implemented, based on their experience, established best practice, advice from the fire brigade and building engineers, using appropriate and certified equipment.

And that’s what we refer to as a culture of Health & Safety – is that so excessive?  If this seems like common sense, can the media, press and politicians stop perpetuating those ridiculous myths and stop bashing at people trying to do their job?  This is actually a triumph for all the Health & Safety people who’ve been involved in getting this to float.

Installing Child 2/2

There’s been a meme floating around on Twitter and Facebook about “uninstalling dictator” and I can’t be sure now whether I was using it before this to track the progress of my second child.  Being of a geeky nature, I have a spreadsheet to calculate the percentage for a given date, should all go to plan  (if I was a real techie I would have a Perl script for this).   As of today she is 90% complete, and due in a month’s time.

I’ve thought of some other computing/baby analogies:

• You may have planned to install this product, or you may have just found the product installing itself one day.
• In the future you may be able to do a custom build of your product.
• When it gets to 100% it will stall for a while saying “Extracting Files” (thanks to Lewis for this one).  So you may have no idea when it’s actually going to be ready.
• Once completed, the system will spend some time cleaning up your product.
• You need to register your product within 30 days in order to receive benefits
• You will spend all your time talking about and showing off your product, even though millions of other people also have one, or more of the same.  You will ignore all criticism of your product.
• It’s recommended that you install an antivirus package, but you will still likely need regular fixes and patches.
• Training courses and manuals abound, offering conflicting advice for problems.
• You may also find some problems just go away after a while, or can be alleviated by the many leisure and productivity accessories that are available to buy.
• You can apply various themes, but eventually you will have no control over these.  For example version 1.0 has suddenly come home with the Hello Kitty theme.
• There are constant updates, each of which consumes more and more resources.
• If you have the same type of OS on each product, you can reapply the updates to the second one.
• There may be conflicts with other products, so it’s best to partition them off.
• Eventually, the product will uninstall, but leave lots of little files around and you may later find further child processes in your system consuming resources.

Any more, please add them!

 

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside

The Lady wife and I spent a lovely weekend in Bournemouth, last chance for a bit of peace and quiet before child #2, courtesy of my kind in-laws. Not having been there before, and not really knowing much about the town, it was just somewhere different for a quick weekend break.

It’s a strange town, with a confused layout, though the lie of the land is probably like many other seaside towns. As you come in to the town on the A35, there are a couple of tall office buildings, which announce Bournemouth as an Important Place, but just past that there’s a lovely Victorian church which looks uncomfortable next to these giants and the busy A-road.

There seem to be dozens of large hotels, which were probably Grand in the 70′s and 80′s when they were first built, but now look shabby and distract from the smaller B&Bs and splendid Art Deco styling in smaller buildings. Many parts of the town centre are neglected, with features like the canopy in Westover Road that would be cherised in towns like Leamington Spa.

Bournemouth Imax, soon to be demolished

On the seafront is the Imax cinema pictured above, which I remember seeing Kevin McCloud’s Demolition programme about buildings that should be demolished.  I can completely understand why it’s such a white elephant as it’s  just in the wrong place, and a look in the local paper shows that it’s only able to screen short documentary films, in comparison to the South Bank BFI Imax that shows feature films.  Even the Imax in Bradford in the 1980′s showed mainstream movies in 70mm.  It now looks set for demolition, but what will it be replaced by?

The town seems to lack a focus, with traffic in the middle of the town breaking up the flow, and pedestrianised areas not really working either.  It feels like new buildings have been allowed to be placed anywhere, and business use for landmark buildings that doesn’t unify the micro-local area.  Take this view for example, just off the main shopping area, wonderfully styled buildings that in any other town would be the centrepieces of a regeneration area, with sought-after apartments and offices above restaurants, not shabby flats above nightclubs.

It was during our weekend that David Cameron made his comments about Multiculturalism and his government also announced plans to move May Day to October in celebration of Britishness.  To my mind, cultural identity and urban planning are connected.

Incoming cultures are perceived as a threat because British people (more the English really) have a crisis of their own identity.  We aren’t defined by a single religion, or costume, or ethnicity, we’re a mix of different histories, that have are preserved by local traditions.  The experience of Britishness for someone from Bradford is different to someone from Hastings.  They have different histories, trades and customs which make them distinct from other towns, but there will be some shared traits with other towns in their region, or across the country.

Culture takes place in a physical space, and when that is not used appropriately, with unrestrained developments and neglect of important sites, culture is weakened.  Town planners surely have an overview of the flow of people and businesses in a town, and should control that appropriately to make sure the story of the town is retained but kept vital.

Castlepoint Shopping a "unique retail experience". Photo by Lewis Clarke

Slightly disappointed by the town centre, we headed out to Castle Point, which the radio announced as a “unique shopping experience”.  This is just a large car park, with two supermarkets at opposite corners and a string of high street shops between them.  A few paper lanterns were strung up to mark Chinese New Year, as they were in the Pavilion Gardens, but this is a sanitised place, with no sense of history or culture or coming together of communities.   Whereas you could have a small parade and Lion dancers in the gardens, which would serve to bring closer the Chinese and British communities, this would be ridiculous at Castle Point.

So my conclusion is this: British culture is something that isn’t easily defined, but exists in our own experiences and places.   If we continue to allow town centres to lose their relevance, and be damaged by bad planning, we will still have this crisis of national identity and integration of other cultures will remain a struggle.

UPDATE:

I stated above that the Imax cinema only showed crappy documentaries, however because I had been browsing the listings on my mobile whilst in Bournemouth I failed to notice that those showings were in 2005, at which time the cinema closed.  Point still stands that they were showing the wrong kinds of film.

Failure: a response to MyFootballClub doom merchants

This was going to be part of a FAQ section on the new MyFootballClub website (coming soon), but I realised I could probably use it to get back to blogging again.

In response to: http://www.footballfancast.com/football-blogs/ebbsfleet-united-project-doomed-fail

MyFootballClub was started in 2007 with absolutely no precedent to follow. Along the way the members and Board have had to create their own structures, policies and methods for communicating with each other and the club. Not always perfect, as I’ve reported here before, but more and more critical votes on Club business have been put to the members throughout this time.  But time and again, the members have shown they will make a sensible decision, and recent votes show that there’s diversity of opinion, which is a good thing for making the right decision, so the theory says.

Fundamentally, MyFootballClub cleared a massive debt that had been built up at the Ebbsfleet, brought the club to a worldwide audience.  Whilst momentum was clearly lost and in terms of numbers we’re a long way from those short heady days of 32,000 members, we’ve continued to support the club financially for two years.  In the midst of a recession, whilst more established clubs with bigger local fanbases have gone deep into debt, administration or even closure, the thousands of MyFootballClub members have continued to support Ebbsfleet out of their own pockets, working with other directors to ensure the players are paid, and constantly finding new ways to raise funds.

On the 27th March we were scheduled to play Chester City at Home, a big game anyway as both clubs were struggling in the table.  But Chester went bust, closed down, and for us this means £10,000 income lost, or a weeks wages for the playing squad, more or less.  So how do we get round it?  In typical MyFootballClub spirit, let’s get down to the ground and have a kickabout, with a difference.

So instead, Coach Liam Daish is holding a challenge match against team captain Paul McCarthy, with teams formed of members and fans paying £100 each for the privelege.  With a good turnout (bearing in mind our stats show catering is one of the bigger sources of matchday income) we might go some way to recouping the loss.  More on the Gaffer’s Challenge can be found on the Facebook fan page here (or on the site if you’re a member)

So here’s to failure.  And to Chester, Portsmouth and all the other clubs who are far worse off than we are.

Home Truths

One of the big challenges in recent months has the issue of the home ground at Stonebridge Road.  Currently leased for the next 16 years, it’s not really the most attractive sporting venue in the world, though the pitch is immaculate, maintained by the rapping groundsman, Peter Norton.  The Club were looking at a new stadium before MyFootballClub took over, and discussions have continued since then.

These seemed to fall through in August when the local councils (Kent County and Gravesham Borough) and  said they would not support a community stadium on the old A2 site.  Following this blow, the freehold was put up for sale by the owners, Land Security, who also gave the club the opportunity to make an offer before the 21st Sept auction.  A group of MyFC members, directors and other supporters of the club got together to raise the funds – not an insubstantial amount, somewhere between £400-600,000.

New Player

And that was going reasonably well until Gravesham Borough Council stepped in on the 17th September and bought the ground.  This has changed the game again, as there are now two options:

1) Continue to raise the funds in order to buy the ground from the Council
2) Take up the offer of long-term, peppercorn rent

Learning to Juggle

Both have their good and bad points, but I feel that the Society Board members should not be pushing one argument over another, which has happened before and cause a lot of division.  Instead they should be monitoring the debate, providing information where needed and pushing things through at the club on behalf of members.  Despite the usual circular and emotive debate, thankfully both sides have been allowed to discuss the options.

As an organisation, we’re still struggling to deal with more than one item at a time, a shame as important issues are neglected whilst everyone’s energy is focused on the Big News.  Again, this is something that I was hoping for from the new Board – to each take ownership of different areas and foster groups of members to deal with the issues and come back to the Society.

Good news in this regard is that the Operator is planning a revamp to the website which should make this more of a reality.  This should also improve communications, allowing casual members to easily see what’s going on and feel involved.  This is essential for maintaining and growing membership beyond the hardcore MyFootballClub fans and local Ebbsfleet fans.

MyFootballGround

Incidentally, funds for the ground purchase are still being raised by the new company, MyFootballGround.  Going on what we’ve done before and the way the forum discussion’s been going, if the full amount isn’t reached MyFG will probably continue and become the company that develops the stadium.  All quite exciting, whatever the outcome!

If you’re interested you can email 0800 334 5605 or e-mail Trustboard@myfootballclub.co.uk