And so after fifteen summers spent at The Oval in South London watching Surrey County Cricket Club rise, fall and then rise (sort of) again, the plan was to become an Essex Boy and spend my summers down the road at Chelmsford.
But at a whopping £19 for a CB40 match, and a ridiculous £21 for a t20 match, like most things here in Wivenhoe, @AnnaJCowen and I decided to keep it local.
Which all means forking out an annual cost-cutting price of £10 for social membership of Wivenhoe Town Cricket Club, and then procrastinating (and boozing) the summer weekends away along Rectory Road.
Hurrah!
We were teased during the first week of the new season over the Easter weekend. Concerned that many within the town feel that I live my life online, I was warmed to see @Wtcccricket offering some superb live tweeting from the opening matches of the summer.
I’ll have some of that I thought, dragging myself away from MacBook on Saturday afternoon and cycling up to the cricket club for some online / offline interaction. Shame there was no WIFI in the outfield.
As ever, a fashionably, fashionably late arrival along Rectory Road meant that we missed the start. We actually missed the entire innings by Exning, the visitors to Wivenhoe for the day.
Whoops.
But tea interval is always a great time to announce your arrival. We were welcomed into the newly refurnished clubhouse, half-eyed up the splendid tea spread and then opted for the bar.
It wasn’t quite the Long Room Oval experience that we have dined out on for the past fifteen summers, but the booze was certainly kept better than the hit and miss bar back in South London.
There can be no finer early summer experience than taking up a position behind the boundary rope at a village cricket ground, pint of lager shandy in your hand and the umpires emerging from the pavilion.
Looking resplendent in their freshly pressed white overcoats, it was like a scene from a long lost Yellow Pages commercial, with added industrial strength lager.
There was slight concern that @AnnaJCowen and I had colonied the home team boundary bench. My own cricketing record still proudly reads: 0 runs, not out, having faced a solitary delivery during my own very brief batting days. But cometh the hour, cometh the crap cricketer, should the call up go out.
Chasing down 172 for the win, the home side were never in any real need for a half laced boundary boy. An outrageous six cleared the ground in the second over, soon followed by an equally outrageous lbw shout, which saw one of the Wivenhoe openers sheepishly wander back into the hutch shortly after.
“Well played, fella,” offered the encouragement of a cheeky young scamp loitering by the pavilion.
Whoops.
With a brisk estuary breeze blowing all the way up towards the top of the town, this was a day for your traditional chunky cricket jumper. Unfortunately I had made the extreme fashion faux pas of wearing a lycra cycling top.
We braved it out to see the Hoe slog away, ensured of a victory, before buggering off back to base for, um, gardening duties.
So yeah - you can stick £19 + train fare + booze bonanza of a day out at Chelmsford. A charming village cricket club, a well stocked bar and flirtations of walking out with the First XI are not as fanciful as they first seemed.
My blog is essentially my own personal online home, where I can create and dump any digital content that comes my way.
My day job involves managing online communities, as well as producing online content for localschools. Sitting somewhere in-between is my blog, hopefully as a platform for local co-operation and engagement.
When did you set up the blog and how did you go about it?
I started blogging in 2003 using Blogger. It was the online equivalent of the old punk rallying call of here’s a chord, here’s another one – now go and start a band. Starting a blog was as simple as setting up an account with Blogger.
I’ve since moved platforms to a WordPress self-hosted site, which offers more flexibility and control over the design. But ultimately it really is still all about the content.
I’ve changed direction, if not focus, in the eight years that I have been blogging. This shift more or less reflects my own offline lifestyle changes from sport, to local community issues, and then my current lifestyle change having moved out of South London to the North Essex estuary wilds. Essentially I blog about what I see around me.
In Lambeth I witnessed an incredibly poor level of local accountability when it came to local council matters. The press gallery for Full Council meetings was often empty, with local journos guilty of being caught asleep on the job.
Through blogging and tweeting about some of the political twaddle that was taking place, I was able to engage the local community in how petty local politics can often appear from the outside.
It is great to now see many similar local blogs carrying on this level of political accountability, as well as the traditional media taking to tweeting from within the Town Hall.
What other blogs, bloggers or websites influenced you?
The mighty Urban 75 has always been an inspiration in terms of community passion, and what is possible to achieve collectively online.
The South East 853 blog often overlaps with similar local authority themes that I addressed in Lambeth.
Lurking About SE11 was an online neighbourhood friend, although we only ever met once by accident, despite constant accusations that we were in league together.
memespring is doing some very interesting work with data journalism in South London.
Since my move out towards North Essex, Keep Colchester Cool and the online/offline creative hub at 15 Queen Street have both offered much support and many opportunities for collaboration.
There is a tangible sense that Colchester is going through a period of positive creative growth. It is no coincidence that this move coincides with the emergence of the Cultural Quarter in the town.
By continuing to blog about hyperlocal matters in my new home of Wivenhoe, I have been able to connect with others members in the community and share ideas as to what direction our estuary town is hopefully taking.
How do you see yourself in relation to a traditional news operation?
The distinction is often one that is made by the traditional news media, and not by bloggers who are simply going about their business. We are all observers and reporters of events that happen around us. Traditional media may make money out of this process, but that is the only difference.
I personally operate best in a news patch that I know inside out. Size is all-important here – I have little interest in what is happening in a one mile radius outside of where I live and work: that is for others to look into.
Traditional media spreads itself thin by the very nature of being tied down to a financial model of covering a greater footprint.
Having moved into a new town, I am slowly, slowly finding my feet, and finding out more about the social history. Being active online in the area is a great opportunity to go about learning more about the sense of history in the place I now call home.
What have been the key moments in the blog’s development editorially?
Covering local sport was a large part of my old blog. I then began to ask more questions about how local decisions were made, and why this supposedly democratic process was often leading towards a shambles of democracy in the local town hall.
Attending my first Full Council meeting was something of a key moment, and one that was almost on par with this despair of watching sub-standard non-league football.
Sadly the downside to this local level of journalism is that you don’t exactly make yourself popular with the local politicians that you are holding to account. I felt some sense of justice when a Lambeth Councillor who left a completely random comment with racist connotations on my blog, was then ordered by the Council to participate in social media training.
Moving forward and I have recently set up a hyperlocal forum for the community where I now live. The Wivenhoe Forum is growing organically, and it has been great to see how locals are joining the online community and starting conversations about how we can make out town an even greater place to live and work.
What sort of traffic do you get and how has that changed over time?
To my great surprise my traffic levels have doubled since my blog took a more rural direction along with my house move.
I prefer the more qualitative approach to measurement than quantitative. Many new opportunities come my way via my blog. I am able to make offline connections in the local community, something that a daily data report of unique users is unable to compare with.
Late February and it seems that spring has finally sprung out in the estuary wilds. I say finally, but I fear my impatience for all the fawn and flora is down to being a first timer when it comes to countryside living.
Spring back on the mean streets of South Londonsometimes meant that the roads were swept; if you were lucky then a solitary weed might poke through by your front door, watered by the urine of the street drinkers in the early hours.
Nice.
And so ever since our ambition of actually owning a garden became a reality, I have been waiting for the change of season in Wivenhoe, and the chance to observe on a daily basis the changing landscape around me.
Out down towards the front, and sadly any of this new sign of seasonal life seems to have been curtailed by the un-environmental Environment Agency. Closer to home however and our little patch is presenting us with hidden surprises popping up to say hello.
We have been incredibly fortunate to inherit a wonderful, mature and manageable garden. We’ve only lost one tree so far due to our green-fingered incompetence.
Whoops.
I personally planted some cheapo B & Q bulbs back in November, just before that bleak midwinter bedded in for the season. I wasn’t too optimistic of any action, but the shoots are now starting to poke through.
What is really wonderful however are the hidden surprises left behind by the very generous previous owners. Not knowing of the whereabouts of any under soil little surprises, we are waking each morning to find new spring plants emerging out of the winter gloom.
The plan is very much to see what this spring and summer months presents us with. We can then start planning properly next autumn, looking beyond a pleasant garden to hopefully a vegetable patch as well.
But until then, it is a time to explore and appreciate all that is green and good around us in Wivenhoe.
The Nu Labour twonk suggested that I was a racist for choosing to live in a:
“whites-only Olde English village. [sic]“
Such a sickening comment saddened me, and I felt that Councillor Davie should be made to answer this damaging allegation on my character. And so I filed an official complaint to @lambeth_council, stating that I believed that the Thornton representative was in breach of the Council’s Code of Conduct.
I wasn’t alone in my observation - I heard confirmation on Tuesday evening that the Standards (Assessment) Sub-Committee has met, and has decided to:
“Refer your allegation to the Council’s Monitoring Officer for further action.”
Furthermore, the Sub-Committee has ruled:
“It is necessary to identify one or more specific provisions of the Code of Conduct itself which are potentially engaged by this complaint. The following provisions of the Code have been identified for this purpose:
Part 1
General Provisions
2. Scope
(1) Subject to sub-paragraphs (2) to (5), you must comply with this Code whenever you:
(a) conduct the business of your authority (which in this Code, includes the business of the office to which you are elected or appointed); or
(b) act, claim to act or give the impression you are acting as a representative of your authority;
3. (1) You must treat others with respect.
(2) You must not
(b) bully any person;
5. You must not conduct yourself in a manner which could reasonably be regarded as bringing your office or authority into disrepute.”
The Initial Assessment Decision include:
“Referral of the complaint to the Monitoring Officer to take “other action” (e.g. a written apology, training or conciliation).”
The Final Decision from the Sub-Committee states:
“To refer the allegation to the Monitoring Officer to take “other action” as follows:
1. To write to all councillors with the Standards Board for England blogging guidance and a covering note urging councillors who use social media to do so with caution.
2. To hold a private meeting with Councillor Ed Davie (who may be accompanied by either Chief Whip or Leader of the Council) to explain the concerns and advice of the Sub-Committee.
3. To refer the issue to the Member Development Group for consideration as to whether any further training for councillors should be given in addition to the SBE guidance.”
And so it seems that Councillor Davie is being hauled in for a bit of an ear bender on how to behave when engaging with social media. I greatly appreciate the time put in by the Standards (Assessment) Sub-Committee in investigating this complaint.
But it needn’t have had to reach this stage.
The Chief Legal Officer @lambeth_council liaised with the Chief Whip of the Labour group, as well as with Councillor Davie himself, with my suggestion of intervention, before eventually having to refer the matter to the Standards Sub-Committee in the absence of any response from Councillor Davie.
Over a month later, and for whatever reason, it became clear that Councillor Davie wasn’t going to offer an explanation for his actions. I am deeply offended by being publicly labeled a racist by Councillor Davie. This is a damning slur on my character that I couldn’t allow to go unchallenged.
Having previously been told by Councillor Davie that I have “no mandate to criticise elected Councillors,” I feel that I ought to point out that he has no mandate to make libellous allegations.
I don’t think calling someone a Nu Labour twonk is libellous, although the Nu Labour tag certainly is a harmful character slur.
The Nu Labour apologist flag wavers were quick to step in to defend Cllr Davie. @KieranCasey wins the prize for putting forward the most naive political argument in the history of political discourse, stating:
Following this line of thought, then someone (who is not me) is of the opinion that Councillor Davie is not best suited to civic service.
The cutting edge social commentary from other Lambeth Nu Labour apologists didn’t exactly add further contributions to the debate either. @DaMcEvoy, the self-styled “unbiased” mouthpiece of the Nu Labour love in Weir Residents Association, makes Cllr Davie look like a blushing bride about to be jilted at the altar. His language is almost as colourful as his lively Weir Residents Association website:
For a borough that is rather well engaged with its residents online, there is of course the danger that the odd loudmouth will destroy any positive social engagement put in place, and revert to type as an internet troll. For every @wellbelove and his brilliant embrace of social media, there is sadly a Councillor Davie who still believes that he is back in the school playground.
And so fifteen summers of outdoor swimming in South London came to a close for me early on Sunday morning as I bid an emotional farewell to @BrockwellLido. A final creak of the iconic turnstiles, and I exited the cool waters of Lake Brockwell for probably the last time. I didn’t get this tearful after buggering off from Brixton Rec.
The @BrockwellLido close of season coincides this summer with the arrival of the Great Escape. With the lido shutters now pulled firmly shut, the bag packing can start in earnest as I seek to find a new outdoor swimming experience somewhere deep within the wilds of North Essex.
When @AnnaJCowen and I sat down some eighteen months ago to compile a list of Reasons to Stay in London, my plus column consisted of a solitary entry: Brockwell Lido. Cricket almost got a look in, as did track cycling at Herne Hill. Replacing cricket is relative; I’m too crocked now to compete seriously at le velo.
It was the absolute love of @BrockwellLido that *almost* kept me in South London. You can’t survive on the last of the summer wine forever, and a lido lifestyle can be a miserable ball and chain to be shackled with during those dark winter months.
But how to say goodbye to an activity that has been at the centre of my South London #hyperlocal universe for the past fifteen summers?
My love affair with the lido started almost as soon as we first moved into South London during the summer of ’95. I kept on hearing about this mythical outdoor pool during my first few weeks in Brixton. A weekend run around Brockwell Park led me to the formal introduction. We’ve had an intimate relationship ever since.
The start of May until the end of September have been put aside for the past fifteen years as Lido Days. It is an addiction that means my working day is not complete unless I have indulged. Breaking the Brockwell habit is going to come at a high cost.
The attraction is mainly physical, partly emotional. I embrace the freshness of the water washing over me each morning in an almost ritualistic manner, providing clarity and perspective for the working day ahead.
The lido has become my thinking place in South London. Most of my major life decisions have been made here in an environment where I am truly clear of any outside distraction or influence. Ironically, the decision to leave South London was made whilst under the cool waters of Lake Brockwell.
Starting your morning with a gentile introduction, albeit a rather physically brutal and mentally bruising experience, leaves you with positive thoughts that remain throughout the day. Colleagues have long since stopped asking me why I am grinning insanely at 9am.
Catching the dancing rays of the sun as they reflect down on to the pool basin is better than any sterile, soulless Brixton Rec indoor swimming experience. Seeing a flock of geese provide you with a personal flyover is an added bonus.
The lido is MY lido. This is a claim that every other lido swimmer would also no doubt make. It can also be yours if you choose it to be. The experience and routine of the daily dip becomes a highly personalised one. You are in complete control of your own immediate environment. No one can touch you [um, not quite true] and anything is achievable.
I feel that I know every physical feature of the pool, from where the uneven white edges around the perimeter start to crack, down to the gradual tethering of the shallow end and the exact spot where you need to raise your knees to prevent grazing on the pool basin.
I can judge with my eyes closed (and usually they are) the precise point where my feet need to make contact as I push off from the deep end as I turn around to do it all again. I swim blind - not in the literal sense, although the pool is home to a number of sight-impaired swimmers.
I have seen many weird and wonderful sights down by the waters of Lake Brockwell over the years. The bonkers underwater hoover, the official Hold Yer Breath Underwater National Championships, and even having to share my lido experience with some model submarines that tried to dive bomb me in the deep end. That’s not something you see every day down at Brixton Rec.
But perhaps the weirdest experience is that of my fellow lido swimmers. All lovely, all totally bonkers. It is the defining feature of someone who chooses to swim outdoors in a water temperature that your body wants to resist, but your mind wants you to indulge in.
My favourite lido moments are the extremes - falling asleep in the suntrap terrace on a South London scorcher of an afternoon, or swimming in the rain mid-September and being the single custodian of the waters of Lake Brockwell. The mid-winter Brockwell Icicles experience takes this crazed approach to aquatic hedonism a stage further.
The building itself may change, but the ambience remains. I was alarmed over the architectural vandalism that the winter 2006 re-build by Fusion proposed. The demolition of an art deco wall, and then replacing it with a full on body pump style gym, could have killed off Brockwell Lido for me.
Somehow the smoke and mirrors trick has managed to hide away the dirty business of the gym bunnies. What goes on behind that wall we don’t talk about, but at least it brings in the money for Fusion, and guarantees a future for the lido.
Remarkably the unique lido ambience is still more or less in place after the most significant building works in the pool’s seventy-year history. This is a place of community, a place to meet people and a place to escape the nearby madness of the city.
It is this companionship that I treasure the most. Seeing fellow swimmers for the first time in the season is always a diary date to look forward to. Saying farewell at the end of September only reminds you of the winter misery months to come. I confess to slipping out quietly on Sunday, not wanting to cause a scene, not wanting to blubber on my final Brockwell Lido day.
And so where to now? Nearby Colchester has the new Garrison pool (fitness swimming) and Leisure World (wave machine hell.) I’m hoping to continue the outdoor aquatic lifestyle, by finding my own personal space downstream in the Colne estuary.
Perhaps this will be the biggest personal legacy that @BrockwellLido leaves upon me. Outdoor swimming is the purest form in which to participate. But to participate effectively, you need companionship. The unique collision of an art deco building in South London with a collective of crazed outdoor aquatic types, is going to be simply irreplaceable.
I regret that I am not going to be around for the BLU AGM next month. It is a social highlight of the lido season, and provides me with my annual opportunity to ask why I should have to pay twice to swim in pools owned by @lambeth_council. Fifteen years of swimming, and I still haven’t heard a satisfactory answer.
