St. Rumwolds Raft Race at Bonnington
A small hint to anyone taking part next year, don’t pick a fight splashing the opposition if:
The crews of Mamma Mia and the Silver Duck found this out to their cost. The school children enthusiastically water ballooning the rafters. It was great fun to watch.
Attack on the Silver Duck
Google Street View has been in the news a lot recently and after a previous sighting in Tenterden, today I spotted a Street View car on the A20 by the Pilgrims Hospice.
So, whether you believe Street View is an invasion of privacy or not, now is the time to cut the lawn, clean the car and the windows, because your house will be appearing on the internet soon.
PS I would avoid putting out the dustbins in your dressing gown too.
A bad start to the Easter weekend was being turned away at the entrance to The Hop Farm at Paddock Wood to see Peppa Pig. Staff told us that it was too crowded inside and we should “come back tomorrow”. That isn’t really an option when you have already driven a long way. When others that were coming out were asking for a refund because they had not even seen the Peppa Pig character when they were at the show, it was clear that a different attraction had to be found to avoid disappointing my 5 year old.
Leeds Castle was the next nearest big attraction for Easter weekend. There was a treasure trail that lead to a chocolate Easter Bunny for the children and a kite display. The children could make their own kites in a big marquee and a kite shop was on site with reasonably priced kites if you wanted to join in. Everyone was having a brilliant time. It is easy to forget how much fun children can have with a kite. Safe to say that being turned away from the Hop Farm gave us a much more involved family trip out at Leeds Castle.
Today I was a passenger on the first Eurostar train to carry passengers on the High-Speed rail link through Kent.
I had volunteered to take part in the evacuation exercise within the tunnels and had assumed this was beneath the channel. Unfortunately the evacuation exercise was for the new tunnels under London and the Thames. Not nearly so good a talking point. More disappointing to for my mate Andrew Jones who was probably thinking that he had been invited under false pretences. The passengers were nearly all men, most of whom were carrying expensive cameras and camcorders. We also got to see the newly redeveloped St. Pancras station which is still under construction.
The evacuations went smoothly without any noticeable problems and then it was on to the first high-speed passenger train journey in the UK. We made the journey from Folkestone through Ebbsfleet to London in about 21 minutes. The ride was smooth and the speed hardly noticeable until you watched as the cars on the motorway were being left far behind. The train manager announced that we were doing 300 km/h and a small, self conscious cheer went up from the passengers. At this point Andy said he could not let the opportunity pass for another first and he headed off to the toilet for his first 300 km/h pee. The experience was obviously a good one as Andrew returned grinning from ear to ear.
Andrew over exagerates the effects of travelling at 300km/h
Just heard on the news that two thirds of all foreign lorries stopped in a police check in Kent yesterday had faults that made them unroad worthy. BBC Kent has an article on it here. Why am I not surprised that UK hauliers are finding it hard to compete with their foreign competitors.
For several years the local papers have been publicising the fact that there is not enough water supplies to support the new houses Mr. Prescott has been forcing upon the South. No matter what the council has been said or the local studies have reported, no one was really interested.
Then, the media made it open season on John Prescott and any news involving him has become big news. This last week the national newspapers commented on how “irresponsible” it was to promote the building of new homes in the south when there is not the infrastructure to support it.
So, thanks to the hot water Prescott has got himself into through his extra-marital affairs, someone has finally noticed what was going on.
The Times has reported on the crime figures for England and Wales and found that Ashford in Kent has the dubious honour of being the eigth in the table for murders per capita!
The news of an MOD report into the existance of extra terrestrials has been all over the “Oddly Enough” pages of the news sites today. Reuters and the BBC had both been reporting on an investigation into the causes of the UFO phenomena by the MOD.
The full report is not out until the 15th of May but the conclusions have been reported on, perhaps a little disappointingly, as
Evidence suggests that meteors and their well-known effects and, possibly some other less-known effects are responsible for some unidentified aerial phenomena…
and
Considerable evidence exists to support the thesis that the events are almost certainly attributable to physical, electrical and magnetic phenomena in the atmosphere, mesosphere and ionosphere.
After a little searching around I found a list of reported UFO sightings since 2002 on the MOD site. I have included those that happened in Kent during 2005 below.
27-May-05 15:15 Kent
Was a small white object, that was moving parallel with an airliner.
22-Nov-05 Sheerness Kent
A ‘V’ shape of dim lights, that went into a straight line and then back into a V again.
22-Nov-05 Gillingham Kent
Five lights in the sky, that looked very strange. The lights were flashing.
24-Dec-05 21:20 Whitstable Kent
Three bright, orange lights in the sky, and then a forth orange light appeared and followed the other three.
27-Dec-05 Whitstable Ken
Strange lights were seen in the sky.
The descriptions from the report are somewhat lacking in detail which is disappointing. Kent only receives 3% of the sightings in the report. Either the aliens don’t think that we are interesting enough, or we just don’t get the unusual atmospheric weather conditions.
Shame.
Very exciting news is that it looks like my crowd are going to descend on the May Beer Festival at the Halfway House in Brenchley. Mendip is proposing attendance on the Saturday or Sunday, as by Monday the best beer will be gone (and Sunday has the added bonus of a traditional pub roast).
So, I will blending in with the Real Ale stereotype by wearing my Linux guru beard and sandles.
In my enthusiasm to get this blog up and running I neglected to test the Google Maps code I used on www.hycc.org.uk. The result was that it didn’t work in Internet Explorer.
Anyway, I am not the first to fall foul of this and there were plenty of references to set me straight.
So, blog testing starts in earnest tomorrow. See you then.