Streetlights - but why?

A few minutes walk from Cadiz Court are these. Streetlights. Yeah. So what. But look at where the post is. Why is it here? It looks like the kind of streetlights you would find in the middle of a busy dual carriageway. And yet they would shine, if they were to light up at all, which they don't by the way, on precisely nothing. Unless you think of a marshy bit of parkland as a dangerous road. Yet another surreal site in a borough which is closely becoming amalgamated into the nether region that is...The Twilight Zone.



Seen from the road itself, you can see the park beyond the fence.




...and here, once again are the "lights" - this time taken from the park and looking towards the houses. I'm not convinced the devices on the end of the arms are lights at all - they look more like CCTV cameras or maybe some kind of siren?

If anyone has any further information about them, do tell.

Daylight pictures of Cadiz Court

Not half as creepy as the last all-red effort, but nevertheless, Cadiz Court (the flats, obviously) still look sad, neglected, and potentially malevolent. I know my imagination is a bit much sometimes, but if this block were a gentleman, he would be a forgetful, sometimes mentally ill hobo with a bad scabies problem and a liking for small boys.

Scary picture

I was coming home from work via Rainham. As I was bimbling along on the 103 bus, it passed these flats - Cadiz Court as I later found out. I'd seen this block for years and didn't take much heed - except - I noticed there were no lights on. At all. Anywhere. The place wa abandoned. It even spouted a couple of mobile phone masts for that additional air of otherworldliness. I had to have a further look, and did. Trying the take a picture of the rear of the building, which is in a residential street, was impossible because of a lack of lighting. Most of the pictures on this site are 'vox pop' and taken with my trusty and nearly perfectly featured Samsung D900 phone (8 out of 10, highly recommended).

But it hasn't a flash. And the flats have a massive wall round them saying things like 'if you trespass here, you'll be chased kicking and screaming by a devil who has mental problems, new trainers and a set of Sabatier knives'. You get the idea. So this was taken on Rainham Road South itself and the because I'd been messing around with my phone at the back of the flats trying to make it take a picture of something which wasn't a square of black, the colour settings were screwed.

I ran it through the Mac and added sepia, but to be honest, although the colour wasn't as wild, and probably more representive of what I actually saw, drenched in a washed out brown-pink, I much preferred the red that my cameraphone captured, and so present it here.

May Cadiz court rest in peace. For 44 years it has housed families, both happy and sad, angry, disturbed and pleasant. Now looks like the kind of tower block in which only nightmares reside.

Jaywick on Sea - the bleakest place in England?

Here's a picture of Austin Avenue (taken from http://www.essexphotos.co.uk/

I knew once a rather posh, confident girl called Kate who grew up in Maldon and who used to go on about how scummy Jaywick, near Clacton is. Recently, one of our neighbours has been forced to move there because they can't afford the mortgage due to the husband leaving work due to disability. But Kate really was a few class grades above to put it gently. With a day off from the wife, I took a bus there from Clacton and your ''greeting', ie if you prefer, entry into the Twiglet Zone, for that is how it felt, believe you me, started when the bus left relatively oridinary 1930s suburbia and entered what I described to Lynn as 'township on sea'.

Now, if anyone from Jaywick is reading this, puh-leeeeze, don't think I'm having a pop at your town. He who comes from Dagenham, after all, has very little right to be snobby about anyone else's yard. Its just, for once, I'm shocked. Oh bugger it, if you are offended, I don't much care, you've heard it all before anyway.

The bus starts out by taking a road onto a brownfield site. The sort of place which you can imagine once contained animal feed factories and will, after the heavy duty decontamination work has been done, truckloads of heavy metals have been transported somewhere else, and in a year's time, the site will be host to sprawling avenues of Prescott Mansions of the tickytackiest order. But no. The houses, should you deign to call them that, are built already. Quite futuristic looking Swedish style wooden shacks are on both side of the road. You do a double take. Wood works in Sweden, but it doesn't work here. This style of building works in Sweden because they know how to care for wood structures and how to prettify them. These places don't look cared for, or prettified. But they contain a huge slab of (liff word) zeerust. They are almost ghostly - they should not be in England in 2007. This isn't a class or snob thing, far from it. They don't belong because cerise pink sky just doesn't belong. Looking at their not-belongingness gave me the creeps in a trans-siberian motorway sense. Nick, a guy who took a lot of the pictures of the town on essexphotos.co.uk, seems to have placed an inordinate number of shots of signs declaring the dangers of tsharp rocks, riptides and sharp shellfish you can injure yourself on and posted liberally along the sea (correction, mud) front. These amused me. It amused me that there is a whole road of bungalows (shacks) whose front windows look at not the sea but at a brown wall which presumably was put up after the floods of the 50s.

Essex, until the 50s, was famous for its 'plotlanders' who, being mainly reasonably well-off working class East Enders, bought a small parcel of land in and could pretty well do whatever they wanted with it, including building houses. Historically, I believe this was due to the fact that Essex, being a marshy county, wasn't parcelled up for agribusiness in the way most land in England had been. I'm not sure whether Jaywick was plotlander territory, but if it was, it explains the way the place looks since it reminded of old pictures of Basildon I saw before it became the new town of today. Jaywick looks like a throwback from the 50s, or before.

The pub is called the "Never Say Die'. We need to visit that too. Either the place is going to be full of boiled and carrots eating cockneys from the 30s or the kind of redneck with three eyes and where the women look like men and the men look like asylum escapees. With guns, probably. They smuggle them in from Holland when the tide is high enough not to get the bottom of your boat ripped to pieces by the sharp shellfish or grounded in soft mud.

My comments, actually aren't directed out of any sense of dislike to the place. In fact, I am very much drawn to it. Plotlanders in Basildon were paid a pittance for their sites when they were forcibly bought in the 50s. Once again the working class try and better themselves only to be sharfted by those who own or who can buy the law. It was a noble cause, a chance for those who had grated to buy into a system that had hitherto been beyond their reach. No doubt the Basildon Plotlanders were offereed very fair rents on the council houses they were not in a position to refuse. The very unplanned nature of the place is appealing. Its just that when I saw a black child for the first time (as I did at the late age of five), the first though I had - translated from the infant is "this can't be..." as all my preconceptions about what humans look like had to be reset and adjusted for the new circumstances. This is the case with Jaywick. Its not that I dislike the place, its just I'd never imagined somewhere like it could exist. And it does.

I'll be back there.

Review of Yaki Noodle House, Barking, Essex

arking is famous for its fishing industry - that was until it closed down in late Victorian times. It is famous for its pound shops and it has a wide selection of kebab shops though it isn't especially famous for them being great. For that you'd need to visit Stoke Newington or Green Lanes.

Its these kebab shops though that I want to write about. Or rather, it is is the fact these venerable establishments now have a rival in the form of the Yaki Noodle House. Conveniently situated opposite the station, the Yaki is a newly opened cafe/restaurant selling a mixture of classic noodle dishes, ramen soups, Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai dishes. In fact, the whole of Oriental Asia is at your beck and call.

First, I've got to start of with two observations before we even get on to the food. It is clean. I mean, really, really clean to the point where you could probably perform operations safely there. You would pick up MRSA anyhow. I dropped some money and floor was completely dirt free. It looks it, and I know now, it feels it. Good. Noodle places are really just Taiwanese factory canteens. Food should be quickly served, pleasant but basic, with no frills service and presentation and I think any South Korean factory would be proud to have a place as clean as the Yaki serving its workers. Secondly, it is empty. This is cause for concern as two friends of mine have recommended it to me. My friends aren't unusually weird in their choice or opinion of food. But on a Friday night, I'd expect there to be a reasonable selection of Barking's finest there. Sadly, there was me, Adam-no-mates, and two others. Two more came in for a take-away, and that was it. I can't see how a place this empty can operate for long, so let's just hope the word spreads.

And the word, from me, is a good one. Excellent is what the word is. I can find very little to fault with anything. I know this sounds more than a little partisan, perhaps bland beyond belief, but my baptism by noodles was at the Tai Wan Mein in Greenwich. Yep, Wagamamas may be older but the TWM was where it all started for me and it will always set the benchmark. Yaki puts it to shame. Not only is it clean, but the lady who served me was friendly and courteous, the food was served on nice white, square plates and the food contained just the right balance of everything to be...well pretty much unfaultable. I had lamb in sao sa sauce (not sure what this is, but wanted to try it). It was mildly curry-ish, with hints of coconut and chilli and served with peppers and just-so fried lamb peices. No sign of MSG. Noodles were basic, plain and completely grease-free. Spot on.

I hope the Yaki does well. Barking deserves it as is almost nothing outside the kebab zone (plus a smattering of so-so curry houses, plus a selection of actually rather good curry houses). Yaki fulfils the Barking main food need - cheap and lots of it. The fact that my plate was also of fine quality helps things along nicely.

Its just a shame no-one else knows about it yet.

Service: 10/10
Quality: 9/10
Value: £5.50. 10/10
Overall: ***** Excellent

Is it the right kind of snow?

Blimey. It snowed today apart from a bit of a problem on the Hammersmith and City Line, which lets face it, doesn't need anything as contraversial as snow to cause it to grind to a halt, the railways ran fine (none of the usual 'wrong type of snow' excuses to be heard). Took the usual amount of time to get to and from work. At last, maybe we as a nation are doing what the Scots and Swedes do every year.

PHOTO - Snow covers our wee street

Supercasino. Great location choice, chaps

So Manchester go the supercasino!

CLEV-UH. About as clever as anything else this bunch of incompetents have planned. What were NuLab thinking of?

I think any supercasino is a pretty crap idea, but the decision to put in Manchester takes some beating for incompetence in my opinion. The choice of the Dome would have been a supreme farce as well, since the attraction (if you can call it that) of Las Vegas is that it is the middle of nowhere and there wasn't much to see or do other than playing the slots and poker tables, hence the hotels charge almost nothing knowing that you'd be pulled to the cards or fruities. The idea in Greenwich's case, was a stick a giant hotel near the dome, which couldn't have charged next-to-nothing prices as its only 15 minutes away on the Jubillee Line to central London, so would have been a conveniently cheap site for tourists not the slightest bit interested in throwing money away on blackjack. And since this is going to be white elephant anyhow, it would have been laughable to have created not one, but two on the same site. Manchester though? Beswick is a poor quarter, isn't best served by transport (no tram, yet) and is in a location not associated with fun, as would have been the case with Blackpool, the tackiest kind of fun, but nevertheless, fitting some kind of criteria in the same way that Atlantic City is also tacky, gaudy full of the American equivalent of kiss me quick hats (check out any early Bruce Springsteen album which seems to focus on this part of New Jersey prominently).

I think the government, knowing the whole idea of a supercasino has turned out to be a dead loss, plan to deliberately fail it by placing it in a no-hope location, so at least they can shrug and say to those Mafia types in America and the nu-rich Russians with far too much money who are both certainly up to their necks in this face: "I'm sorry guys, we tried our hardest to convince 'em, but the Brits just ain't falling for this £10,000 jackpot lark".

I give it a year. Then bye bye. Or a government subsidy to keep it open in the name of 'job retention'. They did it with the Saudis and BAE, so why not?

Review of the Quality Chop House

The Quality Chop House is one of those old London institutions in that it has traded at the same spot on Farringdon Street, more-or-less opposite the Grauniad, since 1880. On the outside it looks like a Victorian gin palace, and inside - well all I can say is that working class bottoms in Victorian times were considerably leaner than 21st century posterii. Bench seating and very narrow tables make eating quite uncomfortable, but overall I'd rather do it this way than have the place gutted and turned into a parody of itself. This is the real deal, so like living in a slightly breezy cottage, its worth putting up with its faults in order to experience its genuine charms.

The ambience is nice and homely, with warm lighting, a steamy atmosphere and helpful staff. The menu was fairly comprehensive and there is more on it than just meat. You can buy fish, snails and there's a reasonably wide veggie selection too. I had a steak tartare as a starter - fresh and tasty with just enough dill involved to kick arse. My main course of venison and mushroom pie appeared a little wimpy in its size, but game is so rich that I left with quite a bloat on my - and I can eat. But I think charging for extra veggies other than mashed spud is stingy. Dessert was one of the highlights, a crisp-on-the-outside-gooey-on-the-inside chocolate hot muffin type thingy, which was moist and perfect. My daughter, being an awkward cuss, wanted a very basic variation of a fish and chip meal (extra cheese, no veg). No problem. The sign of a customer-friendly restaurant.

However, much as I liked the food in this place, I think it was a tad expensive. Working-class it certainly isn't (not if you compare prices to real working class food such as pie 'n' mash anyhow). £28 a head (with two beers each). Not cheap, and the quality is on par with a good gastro-pub so I think you should be paying 25 percent less. This seemed to be opinion of the five others I ate with.

Service: 8/10 (the waiter was obviously new and nervous, but willing to go the extra mile)
Quality: 8/10
Value for price: 6/10
Recommended: Yes, but you can eat just as well for less.