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Chronicle exclusive: the vanishing station
For local news Bath, Bristol’s near neighbour, is served by the Bath Chronicle. Like the Bristol Post, the Chronicle is part of the Local World group and shares its close neighbour’s reputation for (lack of) accuracy.
Today’s Bath Chronicle carried an exclusive, but readers had to read the caption under the photograph accompanying the report to realise it.
Bath Spa railway station used to look as shown in the photograph below.
Bath Spa railway station. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Close observation of today’s Bath Chronicle report, especially the photo caption, reveals there is no nowhere for InterCity 125s or any other passenger rolling stock to stop where Bath Spa station once stood.
The site of Bath Spa railway station according to the Bath Chronicle For the life of me I cannot understand why the Chronicle ignored the disappearance of a major piece of transport infrastructure and had its piece concentrate on delays to train services between the West of England and London Paddington. 😉
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Post exclusive! Soccer slump leads to bank branch closures
A strange phenomenon is occurring in Bristol: people not playing football is resulting in the closure of bank branches in the city.
The source of this curious news is the ever (un)reliable Bristol Post, which yesterday carried a story headlined: “Two HSBC banks to shut in Bristol following slump in customers“.
The relevant section is shown in the following screenshot*.
Either football is vital to the survival of HSBC bank branches or there’s a typographical error in the third sentence.
To help readers decide which of the two above alternatives is correct, your correspondent has not noticed that the floors of HSBC bank branches are marked out with white lines to resemble football pitches.
As a final thought and a bit of idle speculation, are more errors creeping in to news reports appearing online due to modern “journalists” working with predictive text options switched on?
* = The article’s copy has since been amended with “footfall” replacing “football” in the third paragraph.
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6 West Street saved
Arts Side West and SPACE will continue to provide community arts at 6 West Street in Bristol’s Old Market area following after its online and paper petition (posts passim) gathered more than 1,000 signatures, Bristol24/7 reports today.
The venue was threatened with closure after Bristol City Council announced it wanted to rent the premises out commercially for £15,000 per year – not even petty cash in view the £60 mn. in budget savings (i.e. cuts) the council is stating it will have to find in the next few years.
The council went back on its original decision after a series of meetings was held with deputy mayor Cllr. Estella Tincknell.
Emma Harvey of Trinity Community Arts, which manages the venue, is quoted as follows by Bristol 24/7:
The support we’ve received from the public has been amazing…a big thank you to those involved who have helped us to achieve this fantastic outcome for Old Market.
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Tidy BS5 in the Post
At the weekend, Cllr. Marg Hickman, the cabinet councillor for neighbourhoods and a great supporter of the Tidy BS campaign, shot the video below at the junction of Perry Street and Stapleton Road – a notorious fly-tipping hotspot which your correspondent has been reporting to Bristol City Council for the best part of two and a half years.
However, Marg also sent the video to the Bristol Post, which used it as the basis for a piece in yesterday’s online edition.
The Post’s report states that Marg also sent the footage and photos to the city council in the hope Bristol Waste, which manages street cleansing and waste collections, will finally begin to get to grips with the problem.
According to the Post a council spokesperson said:
The refuse team emptied the bins this morning, and Bristol Waste Company have two men on Stapleton Road every week day, so they will clear up following attendance from the refuse crew.
One of the street cleansing supervisors has been sent to check the area to make sure everything is clean and tidy.
The council may have sent out a street cleansing supervisor yesterday to check, but one needs to be at that location 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, since your correspondent reported another load of fly-tipping had mysteriously appeared in the same spot overnight.
Although progress on the ground may be slow, the Tidy BS5 campaign seems to be making better headway in the corridors of power since Marg’s intervention prompted Marvin Rees, Bristol’s elected mayor and past resident of Easton, to tweet on the filthy state of Stapleton Road, voicing his commitment to get our streets tidy.
However, Marvin and Marg have a big problem on their hands, as dumping litter and rubbish seem to be endemic throughout the city, not just in deprived BS5. Bristol’s annual Harbour Festival ended on Sunday evening and the Post noted in a separate report that the clean-up from the event is still continuing today, Tuesday.
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Keep SPACE & Arts West Side open for community use
Two of Bristol’s key arts providers – Trinity Community Arts & Artspace Lifespace – have launched a petition to save SPACE & Arts West Side, both located at 6 West Street in the Old Market area. The petitioners are urging Bristol City Council to keep the property as a space for community arts.
The two groups recently applied to the Council to keep Arts West Side for community arts use, but the city council has decided it wants to let the premises commercially, which the council estimates will generate £15,000 per year in rent – not even petty cash considering the council is facing an estimated budget deficit of £60 mn. forecast for 2019/2020.
This decision will have a huge impact on the grass-roots community art work taking place in the Old Market area, which sits in Lawrence Hill, Bristol’s most deprived council ward.
Trinity has been running the venue since August 2011 through Bristol City Council’s Community Asset Transfer Policy (CAT). The policy seeks to make publicly owned spaces across the city available for community use.
Emma Harvey of Trinity said: “We’re surprised by this decision, given the lack of commercial value of the premises and how it seems to conflict with the city’s vision of Bristol as an inclusive city of culture. We opened Arts West Side to support regeneration of the area. At a time when communities in Bristol are concerned that they are being left behind as other parts of the city prosper, it is sadly ironic that the Council themselves are acting as an agent of gentrification.”
More information about saving Arts West Side.
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Blunders at the speed of light
There was good news this week for Bristol businesses with a yearning for high speed internet connectivity.
The Bristol Post reported on the deployment of ultra-fast 1 Gbps internet in the city.
While journalists at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth are quite competent at their main task of churnalism, such as copying and pasting the words of wisdom given in press releases by men in suits – as in the article in question – standards slip dramatically and the absence of sub-editors and the associated lack of quality control are patently obvious when Post staff try simplifying complicated technical concepts, as shown by the following sentence.
Shall we just examine the above sentence in detail? There’s plenty wrong with it both technically and grammatically, which schoolchildren sitting their SATs examinations at ages 10 or 11 years would be embarrassed to get wrong.
Firstly, those glass cables. The proper designation is “optical fibre cable“; and as is well known the correct use of terminology is important. An optical fibre cable is a cable containing one or more optical fibres that are used to carry light, whilst an optical fibre itself is a flexible, transparent fibre made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. So an optical fibre cable can be made of either glass or plastic, i.e. not solely glass.
Data from an internet connection is transmitted as light down an optical fibre cable. Light travels at the speed of light. However, it is the method for providing the internet connection which is “highly reliable and efficient, not the speed of light. The subordinate clause, i.e. “which is highly reliable and efficient is misplaced and should at any rate have been preceded by a comma.
Finally, there’s that speed of light; it’s so reliable and efficient that its precise value is 299,792,458 metres per second (approximately 3.00×108 m/s). It is commonly denoted as c, as in Einstein’s famous mass–energy equivalence formula. Furthermore, c is the maximum speed at which all matter – and hence information – in the universe can travel.
In the slightly better old days when the Post still employed proper sub-editors, any decent holder of that position would have taken that sentence to bits and re-written it roughly as follows:-
“These fibre optic cables deliver an internet connection reliably and efficiently at the speed of light.”
Or alternatively:
“These fibre optic cables deliver a reliable, efficient internet connection at the speed of light.”
Unfortunately, local newspapers and their online analogues nowadays seem to have forgotten that quality matters and with quality comes a reputation and with the latter, authority.
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Diversifying greengrocer?
An A-board spotted today on Redcliffe Hill, Bristol 1.
A number of questions arose in your correspondent’s head upon seeing this.
Firstly, who is Mac and why is this exclusive service being offered to him/her in respect of computer hardware?
Would the owner of the sign fix my broken kit if my name wasn’t Mac?
Has a greengrocer diversified into the hardware repair business?
I think we should be told. 🙂
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Community litter pick tomorrow
Apologies for the short notice, but there’s a community litter pick taking place tomorrow, 15th June, at Owen Square Park in Easton (map) from 3.00 pm to 4.30 pm.
See the poster below.
Owen Square Park is having its grand re-opening on 18th June, so Tidy BS5 supporters Up Our Street were asked to get involved and support a litter pick just prior to the weekend event.
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Postballs – Boxer dies when asked by Bristol’s Mayor
Like many, I was saddened to hear of the death of Muhammad Ali. As a young lad growing up in the 1960s and keen on sport of all kinds, he was a large presence on the TV sports programmes and the newspaper sports pages.
His achievements in the ring and his stand against conscription and the Vietnam War helped reinforce his reputation: he really did end up as “the greatest“.
However, news emerges via the Bristol Post that Ali’s death may not be all it seems: Muhammad’s demise could have been at the behest of Marvin Rees, Bristol’s newly elected mayor.
However, as per usual, it is merely a case of the endemic bad use of English, appalling grammar and ambiguity by the Post’s semi-literate hacks.
In contrast, Ali was renowned for his eloquence and use of the English language, something which the current crop of Post journalists will never, ever emulate.
