Sandy 4 St Albans

I have been meaning to post this photograph for some time.  It was taken in Driftwood Way in Chiswell Green.  The gentleman behind the hands was a member of the Three Valleys Water leak detection team - and he was using divining rods to do his business.

I was absolutely fascinated and made him repeat the process over and over again, just to observe how he walked along and the rods then suddenly moved in his hands as though of their own volition, always over the same bit of roadway.  My architect wife says water divining is not uncommon in the construction business to find springs as well as leaks but I had never seen it done before.

Anything that saves unnecessarily digging up the roads seems OK to me.  And there is something pleasingly old-fashioned about the whole idea.

There must be a political metaphor there somewhere but I will leave it at that.

I have sent in my personal letter of objection to the Helioslough proposals for the Radlett freight terminal.  I hope I am among many, many local residents and organisations to have voiced our dismay.

There are so many different grounds why this proposal is wholly unsuitable for the site -

• “coalescence” of currently separate communities destroying any remaining sense of a rural setting for the south of our city and district
• massively increased lorry traffic on a highway infrastructure which is already close to breaking point
• much of the workforce operating the site having to be imported daily from miles away adding to unnecessary traffic congestion
• a whole mass of unanswered questions about the impact on commuter rail services which are vital to the economy of St Albans and the surrounding villages, and
• the terrible impact on the quality of life of those living near the site.

But I wanted to highlight in particular the loss of the long-distance view from the south of St Albans Abbey.  There are good grounds for saying this was the very cradle of Christianity in Britain.  It is the only British cathedral built on the site of a martyrdom - Britain’s first Christian martyr.  I have always believed that St Alban would be an ideal patron saint for Britain.

St Albans Abbey may not be the greatest piece of ecclesiastical architecture in Britain - but miraculously given its proximity to London it still sails above a recognisably medieval town with a skyline punctuated by Abbey Tower, clock tower and St Peters Church.  Tens of thousands of rail travellers see this view every day - and religious or not, their spirits must be uplifted by the sight.

Suddenly that view is to be expunged and and the view from the railway line will be of great slab-sided warehousing.  St Albans Civic Society has commissioned a brilliant poster designed by Roger Harlow which makes the point more powerfully than any words can.

What happened in Roman Verulamium nearly two thousand years ago was an act of huge significance for the history of our nation.  The great church standing on a hill has been a beacon for pilgrims and travellers for a thousand years.  To expunge this view is no less than cultural vandalism showing total contempt for the history of our island.

It must be prevented. [Read more →]

I gave my Shaking Hands with History talk to St Albans U3A (University of the Third Age) today.  I followed Animal Architecture and the next talk in their series of talks is Open Wide: A Short History of Dentistry.  They have eclectic interests, these U3Aers.

It was perfectly sweltering outside and the inside of the shimmering green main hall of the Highfield Centre was like a furnace, so I am grateful to them for at least not giving the impression of going to sleep.

Because I always do the talk ex-tempore, it can sometimes be a voyage of discovery for me as well when I realise I have left out one of the key stories and need to rebuild the talk as I go along.  I don’t have any props and simply wave my hands a lot.  I keep asking myself if I should generate some illustrations and do a powerpoint presentation with illustrations from the Battle of Waterloo to the July 7th London Bombings.

But on balance I will continue to attempt to paint word pictures in the best traditions of From Our Own Correspondent.

I think it more or less works.  I am happy to speak to any local groups so please do not hesitate to get in touch.

“Redaction” is a slippery word.  I associate it with Bush and Blair and other dodgy neologisms such as “special rendition” for state sponsored kidnapping.

Redaction is just a fancy word for censorship and we should say so.  Looking at MP receipts on-line and seeing all those blacked-out details is genuinely shocking.  This is public money being spent and apart from a very few exceptions I just don’t buy it that MPs’ security is being compromised by making their home  addresses public.

I live at 6 Hobbs Hill in Welwyn.  Previously I lived at various addresses in St Albans: 4 Dorcas Court, 42 Pageant Road, 4 Watling Street.

The newspapers tell me that Mrs Main’s taxpayer-funded second home in St Albans is at Samuel Square - coincidentally at the top end of Pageant Road only a few yards from where I was living when I last stood for election in St Albans.

I don’t think telling the unredacted truth about where we live is going to cause the sky to fall in.

Excellent session at Marlborough School.  First time I have been there in decades and I had forgotten what a pleasant environment it is in terms of the way the buildings are presented and laid out.

I was speaking to Year 12s though a few final year pupils also sneaked in.  Given that the greedy antics of a few MPs have made voters really sick and thus have diminished the stock of politics, I told them how to make MPs sick.  Take one lavish lunch in Brussels, then put them in an ancient propeller driven aircraft to fly back across the Channel in a storm.  I can tell you it works a treat…

It was mainly a question and answer session and there were some really good ones - on MP expenses of course, also the law round drugs, immigration, sustainable transport, getting young people interested in politics to name but a few.

And then some really thoughtful follow-up e-mails and facebook exchanges.

“Sandy Will Walk It” was the crassly hubristic slogan of my first parliamentary election campaign in St Albans in 1983 - complete with a little walking stick man figure as the logo.  I didn’t then but I did today - the St Albans Half Marathon at least.

I did the Walking Race which has the great advantage of starting in the relative cool of 8 am - see atmospheric early morning picture (right).

The bizarrest moment was walking up Bedmond Lane and hearing a shrieking whistle ahead as a steam roller clanked, rattled and hissed past on its way to Redbourn.  It seemed a metaphor for my own ancient machinery huffing and puffing round the 13.5 km course, which beats the bounds of the west of the constituency.

Going back down Bedmond Lane, we met a different kind of steamroller in the shape of the awesome phalanx of runners bearing down on us between the high verges like some wild infantry charge.  All they lacked were the assegais.

I finished my stroll in just under three hours which meant I was there to see Dominic Easter triumph in the proper race in just over an hour.  I first met Dominic when I spoke at St Albans School a year ago.  He is on course to be a great running star, he made the race look so easy, and I will be able to tell people that I finished the Half Marathon ten minutes in front of him - shame I had to have a two-hour start…

[Read more →]

I do not believe that Conservatives and their forbears have ever failed to win a single council seat in the St Albans parliamentary constituency.  Well the impossible happened last Thursday when the Liberal Democrats won every single county council division lying wholly or partly within the St Albans constituency boundaries.  As Herts County Council’s own website shows, there is a splash of yellow across the middle of the county.

The picture above shows seven of the eight LibDem councillors from the St Albans constituency with the road and pavement dossier which has become a metaphor for Conservative failures in Hertfordshire.

For the remarkable result can’t just be explained by the current St Albans MP’s tangle over expenses.  The simple fact of the matter is that our critique of the current Conservative administration in Hertford really hit home.  An absolutely abject performance on roads and pavements.  Failure to plan ahead for school places.  An Adult Care Service which had a starring role on Panorama (not for good reasons).  Inadequate youth services.  £28 million thrown away in dodgy Icelandic investments.  Council tax doubled in just ten years.  And a chief executive paid more than the Prime Minister (though perhaps performance related pay would mean that virtually everyone should earn earn more than Gordon).

No wonder St Albans was not the only place in Hertfordshire where LibDems made gains off the complacent Conservatives.  For the first time we are the main opposition party.  Now we need to really hold their feet to the fire.

We have finally completed the mammoth task of collating all the responses to our roads and pavements surveys which was delivered earlier this year to over 36,000 households in St Albans and the surrounding villages.  Nearly 2,500 households completed and returned the two-page questionnaire.  Responses came from all areas and from across the political spectrum.  It was a collective cry of rage at the dangerous condition of so many roads and footways and at the visual pollution caused by shoddy patching where any repairs are carried out. 

86 percent of respondents are dissatisfied with the condition of the local roads, and 66 percent named specific roads that are so bad that they pose a real danger to users.  Some of these feature so often that we can list them in a ‘Herts Highways Roll of Dishonour.’ 

64 percent of respondents were dissatisfied with the condition of local pavements and footways, and a startling 29 percent of those completing the surveys reported falling over, sometimes with quite serious injury.  They all expressed their rage and frustration with what had happened to them. 

I have never known any single issue strike such a chord with local residents. 

When we know the name of the new person in charge of roads and highways at County Hall after Thursday’s elections, we will be presenting the dossier to him or her and demanding immediate action to get a grip on Herts Highways’ woeful performance.

Click here to download the dossier as a PDF file (about 3 Mb).

It is always fun peeking at other people’s gardens.  It is even more fun when you are licensed to peer.  So I really enjoyed the opportunity given to me by last Sunday’s National Gardens Scheme to see just what creative people with genuinely green fingers can do.

Here are two gardens in St Stephen’s Avenue - two oases of suburban bliss, where the gardeners started with standard slices of lawn and trees and created paradise:

I had not previously heard of the Corrigan Brothers.  They performed at President Obama’s inauguration with their song “There’s no-one as Irish as Barack O’Bama.”  Now they have turned their gentle satire onto the MP expense issue.  Listen to their song here and smile ruefully - it’s our money they are singing of.