The website...ilivehere.com has named the Uk's most depressed towns. Although Falmouth is known as a cultural centre and having Blue Flag beaches and beautiful country side...it has been voted the UK's...."most depressing" town. 2nd came Peterborough followed by Aberdeen......5th was Tiverton.....6th came Yeovil.....9th came Paignton ...,.,.15th came Torquay.....16th Teignmouth.....18th came Wells. ilivehere.com came to these results by users submitting views.....one of the main comments was that families cannot afford to live there....and of course so many absent home owners out of season. Sunday Telegraph...18/02/2024. Personally I would have nominated Orpington....nothing but Coffee shops, Charity shops, Estate agents and unloved rundown multi-national outlets. It has nearby two huge post-war housing developments...Foots Cray and St Mary Cray where EastEnders had been re-housed after WW2......BUT it also has two high end gated luxury Estates where many well know celebrities also live..........and of course its fair share of boarded-up shops.
I can comment indirectly on Falmouth. Personally, as a casual visitor, I love it. Yes, it’s over-run by tourists in summer and therefore blighted by second homes and holiday lets, but then, so is the rest of my home county. It’s beautiful and still has traditional elements, including the dockyard, the lifeboat and, although not predominantly Cornish, the sailing community. It’s a haven for eco-friendly long line fishing from traditional Cornish sailing boats and for shellfish. The surrounding areas such as the Helford River, Mylor Creek and St Mawes are beautiful but as a result have some of the most expensive properties in South West England. Traditional industry has gone. When I was growing up. Penryn was famous for one thing: the foundry. Its massive granite buildings are now flats. Similarly Hayle, further west, once famous locally for its huge Holmans compressor factory which originally made equipment for the mining industry. However, my brother lived in Falmouth. having at one time worked for the local Customs & Excise water guard. He moved out a few years ago and moved inland. I thought he was bonkers but the thing that drove him out was not the emmets but the ever growing University. The town is rammed with students. This, with the ever growing plague of emmets, has destroyed the traditional pubs and shops and has exacerbated the tidal nature of the population: packed to the rafters one minute and tumble weed the next. I think he now regrets it, given what property prices have done. It’s odd that something we assume to be naturally benign can in fact be a cancer on a community. Falmouth University is such a thing.
It seems the FSB (the KGB as was) visited Navalny's cell two days before he died and removed the CCTV cameras and microphones. I expect they just wanted to get him some nice new ones.
If your locked up behind bars..,.why do you need CCTV cameras....just a waste of equipment....and it would give him more privacy without them.....its not as if he was digging an escape tunnel is it.
I suppose the thing they fear most is uncontrolled communication with the outside world. Notes being passed... even a phone being smuggled in. I watched this when it came out. It's worth watching. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0016txs It shows what a brave pain in the *** Navalny was and why Putin would want him gone. Don't miss it.
Can't comment on Falmouth but can relate to it from my Dartmouth experience. Thats where my inlaws all come from. In the Old Days things like Regatta and New Years Eve as an example used to be more internal. Regatta was an excuse for a good weeks sessions whilst doing a tug of war or watching the rowing stuff on the river. New Years Eve the locals took to dressing up in period costume and having a great time. Then the dreaded happened. Grockles discovered what was going on and invaded the Town in their thousands. It got so bad that as a example, although there were or are around 25 pubs in the small town, you took about half an hour to get from the entrance door to the bar in all of them and then around another hour to get served. They bused people in from all over the place. This activity was so much so that eventually the locals had enough and the vast majority stayed at home and gave up their tradition. The Grockles of course carried on and the period costumes for example became just fancy dress of any sort. In other words it was ruined. The most heard accent now in and around the Town is Brummie. There are hundreds of them living in the area or at least owning a home there whether they live there 100% or not. The local Council is overun by what we call outsiders who then decide what happens to the place. There was a time I would have said if the opportunity arrived to go back there and live into my dottage I would bite the hand off and move instantly. Now most of my inlaws have moved out and wouldn't go back no matter what and the ones who remain regret it and moan about the spiral incessantly. Cornwall isn't the only place to have been destroyed in this way as a whole swathe of Devon has as well. No wonder the locals are depresed.
On summer Fridays or Saturdays my mates and I would go down to the Rashleigh at Charlestown. It was then a working port: chaina clay out on one side and coal and other bulk materials in on the other. The attraction was that there would be a band on the lawn outside (now a car park) and thee was a big holiday camp up at Duporth on what I think was once a WW2 military camp. A new bunch of girls every week. The Rashleigh has now been converted to an eatery and the Duporth holiday camp is now up market houses. There are still emmets though because all the cottages and houses around the port are now holiday lets. Another high point of the summer was Mevagissey Feast Week, much like the Dartmouth Regatta I expect. Trawler racing, a village fair on the playing field. a brass band and parade through the village and packed pubs. That village is a wasteland of holiday lets. knick-knack shops and sterile eatery pubs now.
COUPLE RESCUE TRAPPED DRIVER AS FIREFIGHTERS STAND BY. A driving instructor was trapped in his car after getting stuck in rising flood water was rescued by a passing couple after firefighters called to the scene were unable to reach him. Filmmaker Jamie Price and his partner Danielle said the motorist "looked like he was drowning" when they arrived at the scene in Ingatestone Essex...on Sunday morning. Two Essex fire and rescue crews from Billericay and Hutton...along with an ambulance and a police car ...were parked up nearby the trapped driver whose vehicle was submerged in more than 4ft of water....Mr Price said he was surprised at the apparent lack of action given the number of emergency personnel present. "i asked them, 'why aren't you going in the water?". and they said that specific crews have different levels of training for different situations. They were waiting for some specialist crews, because the water level was 4.5ft....and they were only allowed to go in waist-high. Essex Fire and Rescue Service said in a statement ..."Crews who arrived at the incident at Butterbury Wash found a car stuck in over 1.2m of floodwater...because of the depth...these crews requested additional support from our specialist water team while they remained at the scene to ensure the driver was safe". Daily Telegraph...19/02/2024. No mention of the couple who waded in and rescued the driver being told not to do it because of the depth of water ? I have a vision of being trapped in my car with rising flood water.... and a shrugging fire crew pointing at their tape measure saying sorry it's to deep for us....we're only trained up to waist depth. Please someone remind me ....we did win the second World War didn't we ?. PS.....VC's and other gallantry medals will never be won again because of health a safety regulations.
Daily Telegraph are still battling takeover bid from the middle-east. And now.....we have a bid being put together by Chinese E-Commerce group JD.com to take over Curry's.
I think the days of handsome hero firemen rushing into burning buildings to rescue beautiful maidens are long gone.
Well the calendar was on sale in Smiths....next to the Kylie and Cliff ones so it wasn't that raunchy
Don't tell me: it was reduced in the Black Friday sales like the nearly-out-of-date meat in the supermarkets........
Nearly out of date meat??????? When I was growing up there was no such thing as a sell by or even use by date. Your mother would sniff it and if it didn't chuck up then it was still fresh. Everyone has gone too soft these days. Bit like the Firemen but in fairness to them the one leading the team on the spot has to be aware of the safety of the people in his charge or else he/she might end up with a corporate manslaughter charge if it goes wrong. Now, before the sue society took hold the Firemen would have just plunged in. See, in the old days.......................
Sir Jim Radcliffe, founder of industrial giant Ineos, has interests in several spirits including sailing, cycling and Formula 1. He s recently become a significant minority shareholder in Manchester United. As I understand it, he’s going to be responsible for the football club. All football fans know that ManU have misspent billions on player recruitment but his first foray into the news is to declare Old Trafford “tired” by comparison with the new stadia built by Arsenal, Tottenham and Manchester City. I know Manchester United own large tracts of ground around the site and indeed they were our landlords at a business which moved into a factory building close to the ground. I was hopeful we’d get some free tickets but the first contact with the football was a visit to the MD by a man with a gun advising that his employers required access to the site on match days to operate an unlicensed car park. This was dealt with locally and I didn’t enquire how. Sir Jim’s first foray into club management has been to suggest that a new United ground could be a home for the England team. This sounds like a plea for a back door subsidy from the tax payer. Sir Jim also claims it could contribute to levelling up at the expense to the south east. That’s all very well but it doesn’t help fans in other parts of the country who can currently get to Wembley by the extensive transport links to London and would mean battling across country to Manchester. Any one else sick of this special pleading by the North at the expanse of other less well off areas, including here in the south west, in Wales and coastal towns across the whole country? I’d mention Scotland too but they have their own very sophisticated begging bowl.
I'm surprised that the politically correct brigade haven't jumped on the band wagon regarding the title....."Black Friday".
Torquay United have gone into administration and been deducted 10pts....which moves them from 11th to 18th place in the National League South.
How the (relatively) mighty have fallen. I went to watch Torquay a few times when we were on holiday when I was a little tacker (as we say in Cornwall) and worked with a guy who was a big fan when we came back here. Very sad.
The year we spent a week at Newquay was the same week that my local team Bromley came down to Torbay and played at Plainmoor.....2015 and won 7-3....and the Torquay manager was gone.
