Spooked

A couple of days ago we were reduced to buying a rare print copy of the Telegraph, a newspaper which still has reasonable coverage, but which has lurched a bit more to the right since I last looked at it. I was interested to come across an article in the Features section - the sort of pull-out I would usually pass across to BH - about how we are spooked in Epsom by housing goings on in the Residents' Association led council, aided and abetted by the new Labour government. Whoever wrote the piece perhaps not knowing that most RA people are actually Tories who like to pretend to be apolitical in local matters.

It seems that the council, keen to build more houses, is eyeing up the bit of green called Hook Road Arena (orange spot in the snap above) and some other bit of green which used to be part of the farm once attached to one of the Epsom cluster of mental hospitals, the hospitals themselves already long gone for housing estates, mostly not very affordable. What the article calls Horton Farm, but I am not sure exactly which bit of green that means.

The article, to be fair, is reasonably even handed. But I am less sure about the residents of Epsom who are all for houses provided that they are built somewhere else. They don't seem to understand that there is no free lunch, that if you take land for housing there is going to be a downside, there are going to be losers. As things stand, I used to go to excellent car boot sales at Hook Road Arena and I will still pick blackberries there later on in the month and into August. I shall be sorry to lose a chunk of it, if that is what they have in mind. But needs must.

There is also the consideration that the Arena leaks in the spring, with surface water often running off onto the roundabout at the northern end of Hook Lane. See, for example, reference 1.

I associate to helping the Ukrainians. If we bung them £10b, that is roughly £200 for every one of us which is not going to be spent on something more pleasant and useful, like new schools and hospitals. But again, needs must.

PS 1: our Wetherspoon's with its fine new terrace visible middle right. Once the Assembly Rooms, built to service the needs of people coming to Epsom to take the waters. This being just before racing horses for money was invented. From where I associate to my last venture into Epsom Salts, the medicine cupboard having got a bit low. Not nice at all.

PS 2: I can zoom in on the original of the image above and read the small print. This probably does not work as published here, but I find that if I download an image from the blog, I get something of quite reasonable quality, in fact something slightly bigger in bytes than the original, at around 4Mb. Whereas I had thought that the process of publication in this way involved a serious cutting down. Perhaps it once did, when storage was dearer than it is now.

PS 3: not going up in the world after all. The clue being the 'enbounce' of the third line from the bottom. Not quite as many emails as when they were chasing the money, but they are still doing pretty well. It took a bit of geekery to capture this pop-up, regular use of the Snipping Tool knocking it down again.

PS 4: after breakfast: a hopeful snip from the New York Times. Adverts above, tasters below.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/02/horton-lane.html.