All the fun of the fair.

Growing up in Warwick in the sixties, a highlight of the year was Warwick Mop, a funfair that closed the centre of town for a few days. Probably still does. We have a local fair on Victoria Park just about to open and it is reassuring that even in this doomed climate some things remain pretty well unchanged. Sneaking around this morning there are still ERF lorries and Foden's. Old English manufacturers that used to be powered by Gardener 180 diesel engines with a second in the back to power the massive generator needed to run the ‘Bumper Cars’ as we called them. I intend to visit one night very soon and see if the heady smell of candy floss and diesel can take me back to my childhood when i watched in awe, the operators skipping nimbly from one car to the next collecting a shilling off each of us. Of course, it was all in black and white then....

A Boom for Shoppers.

There used to be a grocers here, run by a smiling chap with greased back, black, hair. Those that have lived around here for over 25 years will remember him. It was old style. Shelves with packets of Birds Custard and a slicing machine with some dubious looking cooked ham. Now we are having a new Sainsbury’s Local to a mixed reception. As there was always a queue in Jackson’s a need can be clearly proved. My own thoughts are that far from suffering, the local, owner driver, shops may well benefit. There will no longer be a need to drive to a supermarket for loo paper etc. and I, for one, will be doing all that on Queens Rd, on foot. This may prompt locals to return to buying meat from a proper butcher and fruit and veg from a proper Greengrocer. Completing all of the weeks shop (whatever that is) on foot and on Queens Road. I hope so.

1984 and all that.

In a dastardly move today the Council has announced that we shall now be held responsible for issuing our own parking tickets. This move, hugely unpopular with residents, will save thousands on traffic wardens. Surveillance cameras will be positioned on every street corner and of such high definition they will even be able to read tax disk dates. Car users, the scum of our society, will be charged with sticking parking tickets on their own cars if illegally parked and reporting their own out of date tax disks! Fines will have to be doubled to cover the installation costs, but Graham Ramsbottom, the brains behind the scheme assured people they would soon get used to it like all other stealth taxes. The pioneering scheme is being applauded by snoopers everywhere hunched over monitors in their high vis jackets and hard hats. Possible future developments include catching thieves who bend down and pick up coins off the street, those who don’t own up when they’ve been given too much change in shops and people who wear odd socks. As English subjects will shall, naturally, take it all on the chin. If we were French we would block all the roads with turnips and retreat to a bar until the plan was shelved, but we’re not. Vive le France.