Reading between the lines

Catching up on local news stories, Found the Croydon Advertiser has a story that Purley swimming pool is to shut next year. It also continues to say they "may" be a new one built in Coulsdon. I do agree that the pool needs to close, As someone with kids, i would never take them to this pool.

Reading between the lines, Personally I would like to know three things before this goes any further. Firstly, with all the trouble and bad press regarding South Norwood, does the council not learn from it's own lessons and not close one facility before providing another one? (if they are going to build on different land)

Secondly - Why is there talk of moving the facility to Coulsdon. Why can't it stay in Purley on the original site? or is it due to the council hiding something like the fact that as norm, they will be selling this prime area of land off to raise some fast cash.

Thirdly, why use the word "MAY" provide a new pool. Is this the councils way of saying, we look at it now but we probably wont do anything about it for a few years by then, everyone would of forgotten about it. When this gets changed to Croydon Council "GUARANTEES", then I will start listening.

If a new pool is going to be built, maybe they should take a look why so many people from Croydon visit pools in other areas including Oxted and Bromley.

I think before we get excited as it says, there needs to be answers first.

Total Eclipse

It's late Saturday night and instead of visiting the local drinking establishment, a few of us spent a few hours last night sitting out in the back garden gazing up at the moon.

On reflection, and a few stiff neck's this morning, was it all worth it?

In my view, yes it was. To see the lunar Eclipse was something special. After a few hours (and a number of JD's) to finally see the moon turn a reddish color, we could now imagine what it would be like to see Mars.

The whole thing made us feel how small we are compared to everything else around us. To see it with our own eyes, was something special and even thoe there was only three of us doing the same thing in one back garden, we knew that there would be hundreds of thousands of people doing the exactly the same thing all over the world.

In all, it was great - Better than anything that was on TV, but that doesn't take much on a Saturday night.