As a veteran of Norfolk County Council’s attempt to foist an unwanted incinerator on King’s Lynn (failed – we kicked up sufficiently much of a fuss about it that the dishonourable Mr Pickles, then the minister responsible for such things, felt obliged to intervene on our behalf) I offer both solidarity and encouragement – these scum can be beaten. We fought against the plan to build an incinerator on the edge of King’s Lynn not as NIMBYs (Not in My Back Yard), but as NOMPs (Not On My Planet)…
Information has reached the SKWAWKBOX that had slipped beneath the radar until now. It’s of particular interest because everyone knows that Tories will screw over Labour areas without a second thought, but the usual assumption is that they will protect their ‘heartlands’, if only out of self-interest – for example, the ‘Surrey sweetheart deal‘.
But this case shows that they will screw over their own areas just as eagerly as soon as it suits them – as long as they think they can get away with it.
Even if it means lying to do so.
Illustration of GCC’s planned Javelin Park incinerator
The case involves Tory-controlled Gloucestershire County Council (GCC), which has been involved for some years in negotiations for a planned waste incinerator – or rather, a cabal or subset of its Tory councillors have, as until a few weeks ago even most GCC councillors were unaware of…
Anna asks searching questions of her local authorty, and the post starts and finishes with an infographic that being biased due to its content I just love!
For English version, scroll down and find it after the Swedish version.
Kan ni hjälpa mig att räkna? Jag får inte ihop det. Se nedanstående frågerunda jag har haft med kommunen. Jag ville ta reda på hur många bostäder kommunen planerat för totalt för att kunna göra en bedömning om Trosa förbifart/infart västra Trosa och exploateringen av vår storslagna natur på Tureholmshalvön som hotar havsörnens närvaro verkligen behövs. De svar jag fått ger mig inga klara besked om hur väl planeringen stämmer överens med tillväxtmålet om 150 nya invånare per år. De sista frågorna jag ställde i tråden har jag fortfarande inte fått svar på. Så ni får hålla tillgodo med de uppgifter jag fått från kommunen. Kan ni få ihop ett tydligt svar utifrån alla delsvar? Jag har inte lyckats hittills, men så är jag inte så bra på matte heller 😉
More spring photographs following on my last post, likewise some appropriately themed music, some stuff about public transport, some autism related links and some other links.
INTRODUCTION
This is a follow up to my previous post, but after the photographs I will be sharing a number of links as well. Here is some appropriately themed music once again – Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”.
THE PHOTOGRAPHS
Immediatelty I had put up the previous post I set off on another walk. Although I did not manage to capture any more butterflies I did get plenty of splendid pictures.
The Corn Exchange
St Nicholas ChapelCats on a pipe that crosses Bawsey Drain
sunlight on water and exposed mud flatsThe upper Purfleet following much needed clean up work.
AN EXAMPLE OF THE DAFTNESS OF BRITISH PUBLIC TRANSPORT
This too has some photographic content. I made passing mention of a daft situation involving public transport in Norfolk in my post“Network Autism”, and now I am following up on it.
A return journey from King’s Lynn to Norwich on this style of bus, going by way of Fakenham, Lenwade, Hellesdon, Taverham and Drayton costs £5.50…A return journey from King’s Lynn to Norwich on this type of bus, going by way of The Hardwick Industrial Estate, Middleton, Narborough, Swaffham, Dereham and Easton costs £11 – twice as much as in the other style of bus.
Although the routes taken differ, the distance covered and the time taken to cover that distance are similar, and therefore so too is the fuel consumption of the bus. The First Eastern Counties X1 route is available almost the whole day, whereas the Stagecoach X29 route is more restricted timewise, with the first bus leaving King’s Lynn at 6:28AM and the last return bus leaving Norwich at 5:20PM (and the other way around the restriction is greater because the depot is in King’s Lynn.
This is the sort of nonsensical situation that can arise when public transport is in the hands of greedy profiteers rather than being publicly run and publicly accountable. There is no rational justification for the same journey costing twice as much by one route as by another like this.
LINKS
For today this section divides into two subsections, starting with…
AUTISM RELATED STUFF
I start with a link to a post on Mamautistic, titled “Not an Excuse”. This post is liberally laced with links of its own that I recommend you to follow up. Click on the picture below to read it in full.
My remaining links in this section are to posts on thesilentwaveblog.First up is a post titled “Asperger’s / autism may not be a disability only (but we *do* need to treat it like one)”. Please click on the image below to read this post, which is detailed and well reasoned, in full.
Next comes a post with the title “When an “official” Asperger’s / autism diagnosis is just a formality”. This one is is super-detailed but very well worth the read. Once again, there is an image that I can use as the link.
Finally, to end this subsection, although I reblogged the magnificent ‘put the boot on the other foot’ type post “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Neurotypicality: a handbook on the rest of the world for Asperger’s / autistic people” earlier today it is so good that I feel another plug is in order, so if you have not already read it please click on the image below to rectify the omission.
OTHER LINKS
I start this section with a horrifying story from The Canaryabout how some girls in Britain in 2017 are missing school because they cannot afford sanitary products. Click the image below to read this piece.
My last two links go together – not only are both to pieces on Skwawkbox, both are to pieces about Tory election fraud:
The first one is titled “#TORYELECTIONFRAUD JUSTICE REQUIRES FULL RECKONING, NOT #MCKINLAY AS SACRIFICIAL LAMB” – as usual I am using an image as the actual link.
The second piece deals with a ‘tactic’ that the Tories are using as a supposed form of defence, and is titled “TORY ‘NO INTENT’ #ELECTIONFRAUD CONFIDENCE IS A NON-STARTER. HERE’S WHY”. Click the image below to read the piece.
By way of an introduction to this post, which is celebrating some welcome good weather here is a video recording of Spring from Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons”.
If you enjoy classical music you might like to visit young singer and Royal College of Music student Charlotte Hoather’s website by clicking here.
SPRING ARRIVES
Since the epic storms I wrote about a while back, the weather has been gradually improving. Within the last few weeks I have been able to leave the flat without a coat, and then yesterday I switched the heating off. Today, for the first time in 2017, I am making use of my outside space:
Also today, although they have been in evidence for a few days now, I managed to photograph some butterflies, again for the first time of the year.
This was the first one I captured.
The fourth and best of the four butterfly pictures I was able to get today.
Where did I locate these little beauties? All within walking distance of my little town centre flat – two near Hardings Pits and two near Bawsey Drain, gained during…
A WALK
It being bright, sunny and reasonably warm I set off on a walk just after 10, and was out for over two hours in total. Here are some of the non-butterfly related pictures I took while out and about.
The first seven pictures in this set are not actually from the very beginning of the walk – it has been a long while since I saw this many cormorants on what I call “Cormorant Platform”
This buoy is not in its regular position – there is only one seal living in the Great Ouse, and no sand to be found. Norfolk does have one big seal colony, at Blakeney Point, which although part of the mainland is accessible only by boat – there is no road link as it is quite rightly a fiercely protected area.
The best ‘role-reversal’ type piece of autistic blogging that I have yet come across – I will probably be linking to the original again, especially as in not very long I have a birthday coming up that relates to the title of this post…
(Beginning note: this is meant to be equal parts satire, seriousness, and helpful. It’s not meant to sound superior, condescending, or anything else. As usual, what follows is strictly my own opinion. Also, the words allistic and neurotypical (often abbreviated “NT”) are, for these purposes, used interchangeably to refer to non-autistic people. And last but not least, please understand that this is not directed at all allistic people…only the people who fit the description.)
~~DON’T PANIC~~
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of western civilization lies a small unregarded segment of the population. This population has a problem, which was this: we’re largely invisible. Many solutions were suggested for this problem (Autism Awareness, Light-It-Up-Blue campaigns, etc), but most of these were largely concerned with “fixing” the people on the spectrum, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the spectrum people that needed fixing. And…
An important autism related meeting in Dereham plus a few shares and some photographs.
INTRODUCTION
As well as my title piece, which as promised yesterday, is about the meeting in Dereham organised by Autism Anglia and ASD Helping Hands that I attended this morning. Karan and I were a little late arriving as she could not leave before the person who would be looking after her son had arrived and I had arranged a meet up point at The Gatehouse since while I was definitely up for the meeting I was not up for forking out the £11 it would have cost to me travel there and back under my own steam (at some point I will be putting up a post on public transport that will highlight why this particular shortish journey is so extortionate – for the moment suffice to say it has nothing to do with logic, reason, meeting passenger needs or anything else that has any place in the proper running of a public transport system). This meant that although we were able to introduce ourselves we missed most of the other people’s introductions.
THE MEETING
The meeting had been arranged to discuss amendments to an autism strategy document which as it stood was laughably incomplete. Autism Anglia and ASD Helping Hands were effectively doing the kind of outreach stuff that Norfolk County Council should have been doing but weren’t. The County Council’s own meetings about such matters are invariably in Norwich, generally with a requirement that one arrive by 9:30. Before moving on to NAS West Norfolk’s role in the events of this meeting I will mention two things from the preliminary talk that caused hackles to raise. First, Norfolk County Council’s person responsible for co-ordinating matters relating to autism appears to have his fingers in a suspiciously large number of pies, and extending from this seems to be overly averse to scrutiny (as a West Norfolk resident who has the incinerator debacle seared on his memory I am naturally inclined to be mistrustful where Norfolk County Council are concerned – although we eventually won that one and the thing did not get built). Secondly there is the role of Norfolk Steps, who seem to have a monopoly on training provision for parents and carers and to be very reluctant to see that change – one person at the meeting had tried to use their materials to provide training and was told to desist. Another strike against Norfolk Steps from our point of view is that their training is not autism specific.
The key pages of the inadequate document that we were trying to improve were pages 16-19, and there was little we could do about what was on page 16, so as we seated around three tables each table was assigned a page to look at and make additions to. Ours was page 18:
I have already covered a lot of the problems with Norfolk Steps, but there is one extra point – they have recently had their funding reduced, and no longer offer “steps plus” to parents.
There were a few additions to point 5, which started our page. Point 6 was the single most inadequately expressed point in the whole sorry document. For this point to be worth the ink and paper it has to contain chapter and verse – the specific Act of Parliament and the specific clauses contained therein that are of most relevance.
Anne Ebbage of Autism Anglia will be passing all the points raised at this meeting on to the council, and if the final version of this document is not massively changed and enlarged there will be trouble.
This was a very useful and productive meeting, and I hope it will play a role in dragging Norfolk’s approach to autism and autistic people out of the dark ages wherein it seems to have been stuck for some time.
A SEGUE LINK
The first part of this post has been about autism, and so I introduce the remainder of it by way of a link to an interesting piece by The Inked Autist. My views are rather different to those expressed in this post, but I recommend that you read it here.
A BUSY WEEK FOR DPAC
That title is no overstatement – this section contains a link to a post on the DPACwebsite and two embedded videos.
The post, which gives this section of this post its title, can be accessed by clicking the DPAC logo below. Then you can find the two videos, which are both about a protest outside Parliament. The first video was created by Let Me Look TV, the second by Steve Topple of The Canary.
PHOTOGRAPHS
I had planned to include more stuff in this post, but a malfunction has prevented that – I have just lost a large amount of stuff that was in here and have no way of getting back, so here are the photographs.
A magpie near the pick up point in Lynn this morning
Three shots featuring a stretch of the Mid-Norfolk Railway in DerehamOne of the “Ecocity” towers near Swaffham – even in this picture, and still more so in the further edited version the observation room near the centre of the propeller is clearly visible. The original shot from which this picture and the next were both obtained was taken through the window of a moving car.
Preparations for tomorrow, photographs from in and around King’s Lynn and pointing up a couple of things brought to my attention by DPAC
INTRODUCTION
The links I am sharing in this post are to do with disability rights. I am also going to be setting the stage in this post for the main thrust of tomorrow’s blogging, which is where the autism part of the title comes in.
NETWORK AUTISM
I will be attending an event in Dereham tomorrow morning which has been organised jointly by Autism Anglia and ASD Helping Hands. Dereham has been chosen as a location because we are dealing with a large area, and King’s Lynn to Norwich is too long a journey for most to consider acceptable (and even more so in reverse). Along with everything else, I have been making preparations for that.
GETTING THERE AND BACK
I have mad arrangements with someone who lives in Watlington and will be travelling by car to be given a lift. In order to avoid the necessity of the driver coming into the middle of King’s Lynn at what would be a busy time we have arranged to meet in the car park of the Gatehouse pub. It being fine outside I was up for a walk anyway, so I started by walking the best route between my house and the car park in question. Those familiar with this blog will not need to be told that in aspiblog terms when talking about walking routes “best” and “shortest” are not necessarily synonymous, and my chosen route is not by any means the shortest. However I class at as the “best” walking route because it minimises the amount of time I spend close to busy roads.
I set off at 13:31 (I needed to time this first section) and headed over the bridge across the upper Purfleet, across King Street, and down to mouth of the lower Purfleet, where I crossed the other pedestrian bridge to walk along the bank of the Great Ouse as far as Millfleet, from where I took the path around old Boal Quay to the Nar Outfall, and briefly rejoined the riverbank until I reached the path through Hardings Pits to Hardings Way, which I followed to its end near the South Lynn Baptist Church, where I crossed the road it joins, crossed the Nar and walked along to the South Gates roundabout, where one more road crossing took me to the edge of the car park which tomorrow morning will be my destination. Having recorded that I had got to the car park at 14:02, and hence been underway for 31 minutes I continued my walk by way of the cemetery, The Walks, Lynnsport and finally back into town by way of Bawsey Drain.
When I got back I found a facebook message awaiting me telling me that the ETA for my lift at the car park tomorrow was 9:20 – 9:30, so factoring in the timings for today and reckoning that if anyone has to wait it should be me I am planning on leaving my flat at approximately 8:40AM tomorrow.
Here are some of the pictures I took while out walking (including some in the first section which I was timing – where I go my camera goes).
The sun shining on the Great Ouse.Marriott’s – note the people using the outside seats.
More light tricks courtesy of Helios and the Great Ouse.The former Wagg-Jex building been done up and turned into flatsThe South GateThe Gatehouse pub
A DPAC DUO
Disabled People Against Cuts have put out two very important pieces today. First, they draw our attention to a day of action against the vicious barbarism known as “Benefit Sanctions” organised by UNITE Community for March 30th. Please read this piece in full by by clicking on the image of an anti-sanction badge (from that post) below:
The second piece from DPAC relates the upcoming mayoral elections in Manchester. The Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People has developed a Disability Manifesto. This manifesto has been sent to all the mayoral candidates, and for those of you who use social media, a thunderclap has been launched to oput further pressure on the candidates to sign up to this manifesto.
The Thunderclap, which I have already supported, and urge those of you who are on social media (facebook, twitter, tumblr or any combination thereof) to do likewise by clicking on the picture below:
TOMORROW
My aim tomorrow is to put a post before I set off finishing the sharing of links I have started today, and then once I am back from Network Autism to put up a post about that.
Some public transport related links, accessible by means of appropriately themed photographs.
INTRODUCTION
Several of the interesting pieces I wish to share with you are related to public transport (no great surprise there). In the case of each piece that I share the link will be in the form of a picture that appears I have introduced the subject matter. In this particular post all the pictures I am using are appropriately themed ones that I have taken myself (if the post I am linking to is illustrated I will use a picture from there). More detail about where these particular pictures come from will appear in my next post.
BUSES IN CRISIS
This section links to a post from the Campaign for Better Transportdetailing the way in which British bus services have been slashed since 2010. If you are ready to read the full, grim detail, please click on the picture below, which features a 505 bus on it’s way into Lynn from Spalding.
My second link, accessed by clicking the picture of the bus depot that ends this section, is to the Campaign for Better Transport’s response to the House of Commons Bus Services Bill Public Bill Committee.
TRAINS
Given the scandalous state of Britain’s railways, it is not terribly surprising to read the horrors contained in David Hencke’s latest piece, titled “Why millions of passengers will face years of overcrowded trains because of a staggering electrification blunder”, which you can read in full by clicking the picture of a train framed by willow trees.
WWW.LONDONTU.BE
In addition to this blog I am the creator of the website www.londontu.beon which I today posted a piece about Greenwich. To see this piece please click on the map section below:
A (very brief) case study on inspiration, some autism related stuff and stuff about sharing, and some of my own photographs – read, enjoy and feel free to share so long as you do so in the right kind of way!
INTRODUCTION
I have a number of things to share today (although today’s blogging won’t quite be on the epic scale of Saturday’s), and with one significant exception for this post I am concentrating on autism related stuff.
A CASE STUDY ON INSPIRATION
One of the treats awaiting me in my inbox this morning was a post on estersblogabout Greenwich. Seeing her pictures of Greenwich inspired to me to created a post on my London transport themed website about Greenwich. The picture below is one of Ester’s, and links to her post about Greenwich:
As well as the picture that I am using as to link to the post I was inspired to create, I have a screenshot from that post below it:
This is part of the image gallery I created for lot 1,001 in James and Sons’ April auction.The screenshot
SHARING AND COMMENTING
I came across an excellent post about sharing and commenting onthesilentwaveblog. Please read this post in full by clicking on thesilentwave graphic below:
A NEW FIND – THE AUTISTIC ACADEMIC
I came across this blog yesterday. The post that caught my attention was titled “Ten Things Autistic Kids Pick Up Faster, Better, and With Less Trauma If They Aren’t Bullied Into Learning Them” and can be read in full by clicking the screenshot below. The PDF of the article to which this piece was responding can still be viewed, although the original article has been taken down (nb – once you have posted something anywhere on the net it is exceedingly hard to remove it, so best to think before you post so you have no need to worry aboiut trying to remove it!).
ANOTHER NEW FIND –
THE UNABASHED AUTIST
As a sample of this blogger I offer you a piece title “This Is Your Solution – To Ruin The Bike?”, which can be accessed by clicking the Unabashed Autist graphic below:
PHOTOGRAPHS
Here are some photographs from yesterday to end this post:
We start with some public transport themed pictures (five in total)This display is not as prominent within the station building as it should be.Close ups of each poster.
From the train station to the bus station (while this is not quite a true transport interchange, the distance is only about 200 metres)Some of these pictures were taken yesterday morning, the others yesterday afternoon after my mother had dropped me back in King’s Lynn (near the cemetery, which made the best walking route home obvious – note for those new to this site best in this context does not necessarily mean shortest).
Yesterday, I celebrated six months of awareness of my true nature: I am autistic (Asperger’s).
This does not make me an expert (at least, not in the academic sense). It doesn’t grant me a magical power to speak for anyone else.
In the last six months, I’ve investigated this topic–and indeed this “alternate world” (at least, for me) with abnormal intensity.
But really, all I was doing was searching for terms and ideas that more-eloquently described what I had already been experiencing throughout my entire life. I had already felt those feelings, thought those thoughts, and struggled with those invisible differences; what I learned during my searching merely helped me identify and articulate them.
During this search, however, I noticed some patterns (ha) that struck me. The official diagnostic criteria and other conventional authoritative sources of information focused on what they observed through their own perspective lens; specifically, what they…
Illustration of GCC’s planned Javelin Park incinerator
aspiblog 