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150 days of community in West Ealing: Week 2

We’re now one week into our new project for West Ealing. Last week, we asked you for examples of some of your day-to-day ‘acts of community’ in and around West Ealing, and you sent in some brilliant stories. Things are starting to kick off (in a good way!) on our Facebook page, so please have a look there if you’re that way inclined. Here are some of ‘acts of community’ from last week that we really liked:

I was by the spirits looking for sherry, in Sainsbury’s, and I smiled at a lady next to me and said ‘I’m going to make a trifle and I only want a small sherry’ so she proceeded to suggest many things I could put in this trifle. She said, ‘Have you got any whisky at home’, I said ‘I don’t know, I’m at my daughter’s’, she said ‘phone her up and ask her.’ I decided eventually just to use fruit juice.  This was one of two conversations in West Ealing Broadway this morning. I also obtained at least five smiles from different people!
– Margaret, a visitor to West Ealing, aged 89, who likes the Broadway!

https://twitter.com/sherocker1977/status/434777448304365568

We had two community fundraisers at Christ the Saviour School yesterday. Donuts for Dads breakfast, inviting Dads and carers that otherwise wouldn’t get to drop their children at school as they need to get to work and a year 5 and 6 bake off. We had 150 for Donuts and 28 teams for the bake off. Lots of smiles, lots of humour and I felt blessed to be part of an amazing school with the most lovely children. Made my valentines day.
– Diane

Now we’re into Week 2, here’s our next list of seven things we reckon are good for making things better in West Ealing:

  • Volunteer your special skills to an organization
  • Donate blood (with a friend!)
  • Join the community garden
  • Offer time, or ask for help from, a mentoring scheme
  • Surprise a new neighbour with a homemade cake or bread
  • Audio- or video-record your parents’ earliest memories and share them with your children
  • Plan a holiday with friends or family

We’d love to hear from you if you do any of these things, or anything else that makes people smile in West Ealing. We have loads more suggestions of things you can do, if you want to jump ahead!

Ways to send us your contributions:

Send us an email – 150daysofcommunity@gmail.com
Write on our Facebook wall – https://www.facebook.com/groups/124290860921562/ 
Tweet at us – @WENeighbours
Add a comment to this blog post (below)

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Introducing 150 days of community in West Ealing

What do you think of West Ealing? Many of us who live here think that it’s a great place to live, work and play. But not everyone shares that perception, and that’s something that’s important to acknowledge. Here’s a sampling of some of the less pleasant tweets about our area from the past few years

It’s difficult reading isn’t it? Or perhaps you think that it’s about right, or at least that there is a grain of truth. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. With these negatives in mind, we’ve resolved to create a new project – starting today – and we want you to get involved. We call it 150 days of community in West Ealing.

Neighbours in and around West Ealing
Neighbours in and around West Ealing

You don’t need to do anything you don’t normally do, in order to join in. We just want you to share your acts of community and kindness over the next four or five months with us. All the things that make you smile!

A bit like Facebook, the idea is  just to share certain things with your neighbours. These are the things we might count as ‘building social capital’ – but we often take for granted as ‘just life’.

You can share, via images, videos, text, twitter, Facebook, email, blog. A few words, a story, a picture or a video clip, a useful link, is all that’s needed. You might be recording something momentous or something very ordinary, something that happened to you or something that you witnessed.

We’re defining our area quite loosely – anything that happens in West Ealing and its ‘borders’ – Ealing Broadway, Hanwell, Pitshanger, Northfields, South Ealing. We’d love to hear from all of you!

To inspire you’ve we’ve created a non-definitive list of ideas for things that create ‘social capital’. We’ve already got 150+ ideas, and there are seven a week that you can use to inspire you. You don’t have to do all of them in any given week, or any of them – you can even skip ahead and do some of the other 143! You can also send in uncategorised ‘evidence’, too and we’ll tag it and organise it.

We’ll summarise contributions weekly and suggest the next seven topics.

By the end, we’ll have all of your contributions in a great big online list, so that we can all see the great things that we do and, even more importantly, can do, in and around West Ealing.

This project is loosely based on the work of Robert Putnam (author of ‘Bowling Alone‘) on social capital.

West Ealing Neighbours wants to create the antidote to the impression that we sometimes have that people think West Ealing is a dump.

So, neighbours, we’ve got 150 days to make a collection of evidence that proves the naysayers wrong – can we do it?

Our suggestions for Week 1 – week beginning 14 February

Ways to send in your contributions:

Send us an email – 150daysofcommunity@gmail.com
Write on our Facebook wall – https://www.facebook.com/groups/124290860921562/ 
Tweet at us – @WENeighbours
Add a comment to this blog post (below)

 

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New Clocktower Cafe opens in Hanwell W7

I know this is W7 and not W13, but I thought this new Cafe deserved a mention. Just opened last Tuesday I managed to vist at the weekend and talk to the new owner. It’s been busy since opening and looking at the decor and food on offer I can see why! We visted when the brunch was on offer, it’s a shame I was going out for lunch later otherwise I may have been tempted to order their eggs benedict or buttermilk pancakes. Instead I opted for a cappuccino. We sat outside and enjoyed the sunshine. Another welcome addition to Hanwell and a great representation of how West Ealing COULD be going forward. Check their Facebook page out and ‘like’ them.

Clock Tower Cafe Clock Tower Cafe Clock Tower Cafe1 Clock Tower Cafe2

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What do you think about night flights? Deadline April 22

The Government is consulting on night flight regulation for Heathrow and other large airports. The deadline for response is Monday 22 April.

If you are disturbed by flights late at night or early in the morning, take this opportunity to tell the government and influence the new rules which will come into force from October 2014.

Current rules
Under the current regime, the night period extends from 11pm – 7am but the night quota period, where most flying restrictions apply, is shorter: from 11.30pm – 6am. About 25 flights are scheduled to take-off from Heathrow between 6 – 7am. No flights should take-off after 11.30pm but delays during the day result in planes often flying over Ealing later than this, sometimes much later. Heathrow operates at 99% capacity, so there is little contingency.

Consultation process
This is the first stage of a two part consultation. The government is gathering evidence at this stage in order to develop proposals which will be issued for consultation towards the end of the year.

Key points to make

  • Question 2 of the consultation asks ‘Do you have any comments on our assessment of the extent to which the current objectives [to minimise noise disturbance during the night] have been met?’ This is an opportunity to write about your personal experience of being disturbed by planes at night (eg how frequently you are disturbed by night flights, whether this has worsened over time, any other patterns you have noted).
  • Question 4 asks ‘Do you have any views on whether noise quotas and movement limits should apply only to the existing night quota period or to a different time period?’ Many groups representing overflown communities believe that there should be a ban on night flights between 11pm – 6am and the phasing out of flights between 6-7am. This would give residents the 8 hour respite from flights recommended by the World Health Organisation.
You can submit your response in one of three ways: 
  • by using the response form on the Department for Transport’s website. 
  • by emailing night.noise@dft.gsi.gov.uk
  • by post to Department for Transport, Great Minster House (1/26), 33 Horseferry Road, London SW1P 4DR.
For more information, the ‘HACAN Clearskies’ group has produced a short guide to the consultation and an assessment of the economic cost of night flights. The Ealing Aircraft Noise Action Group website has links to the consultation and reports on the health effects of noise disturbed sleep.

You may also be interested in a rally against Heathrow expansion on Saturday 27th April, 9.30 – 10.30am at Barn Elms Playing Fields, Queen Elizabeth Walk, SW13 9SA. This has been arranged by the Richmond MP Zac Goldsmith, and speakers will include Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, and Justine Greening, who was Secretary of State for Transport until last year’s re-shuffle.

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West Ealing Neighbours Facebook is nearly up to 150 – join us if you can

Even if you’ve avoided facebook up to now, it might be worth joining just for WEN Facebook which is now romping along with 148 members. I’m a recent convert thanks to others posting in a way which engages me (especially Tony Luckhurst our butcher who was on The One Show talking about horsemeat the other day and was very enlightening).

It’s a bit like local radio where you can chip in in passing, with either a comment to an existing post, or put in your own post about your own event, activities, queries. You can be funny, whimsical, serious, as brief as you like, add pictures/videos, link to other interesting websites; you can be personal or talk about things to do with our town. Think ‘neighbours chatting over garden fence or in the pub or high street’.

You do need to sign yourself up with your own page first (here: http://www.facebook.com/) and then ask to join the WEN Facebook. But you don’t have to accept all or any friend requests or become active within your own page if you don’t want to.

 

If you already have a FB page, just log on and ask to join WEN Facebook.

Here are some good guides: http://digitalunite.com/guides/social-networking-blogs/facebook .

Hope to encounter you there soon – and here’s hoping we make it to 500.

 

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David gets the T-shirt

david and tshirtIt’s not smart, it’s not clever – but it is BIG and also unique and imbued with  a huge thank you from local members of the West Ealing community.

WEN’s chair David Highton was cited in this year’s New Year Honours for his contribution to our community in West Ealing which, as most of us know, is considerable.

So local neighbours and tradespeople signed a logo’d T-shirt and thanked him and toasted him in a small local celebration. No royalty were present and he maintains he’ll wear a smart suit and shirt when he receives his well-deserved British Empire Medal later in the year.

 

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‘Under her skin’ – great show at the Drayton in January

singingLaurel Swift (the one with the double bass) teaches her long-running folk workshop to local folkies at the Drayton on Monday nights, and now offers to West Ealing:

‘Under Her Skin’

Directed by John Wright

The Drayton Court, The Avenue, West Ealing  **   15-17 January 2013  **  7:45pm  **  £5

An epic tale, a modern twist, two voices, four feet and eight strings.

Debs Newbold and Laurel Swift bring a rich and innovative collision of forms to their first full-length collaboration – a story of loss and regret that is also funny, irreverent, moving and dripping with streetwise credibility. Combining dynamic performance storytelling with the effusive energy of traditional dance and music, Under Her Skin sweeps audiences into a rich imaginative landscape.

 “…a glorious, raucous, joyful show which manages seamlessly to combine the raw energy of dance, the earthiness of social realism and the magic and wonder of myth into an entirely integrated, expertly realised evening’s entertainment.”

GILES ABBOTT

This is storytelling crafted especially for adults. Based on an ancient British Selkie (seal people) folktale and set firmly in the here and now, it is an integrated show, inventive and theatrical yet with no fourth wall to get in the way of any mischief!  Debs Newbold’s highly acclaimed and charismatic storytelling voice joins the double bass, fiddle and clog dynamism of Laurel Swift to create an explosion of joy.  Under Her Skin plays freely with the conventions of storytelling and gives an ancient British folktale a strong contemporary retelling.

 

Laurel Swift is an Associate Artist of the English Folk Dance and Song Society

www.debsandlaurel.co.uk

www.morrisoffspring.co.uk

www.gadarenemusic.com

www.gloworms.org.uk

 

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Anyone else having problems with waste collection?

Hi, I’ve phoned Ealing Council about 20 times since April to report missed collections and have had 4 letters acknowledging my complaints but nothing improves. About 25% of the time all the recycling and black bag rubbish goes on the right day. About 50% of the time, one or two categories (varies which ones) are not picked up; when I report it to the call centre the next day, whatever didn’t get collected is then collected. About 25% of the time, two categories are missed and the recollection only picks up one of the missed categories and the other one stays till I ring again or the next collection day.

I spoke to one of the recollection gang today and they said it was because the new contractors, Enterprise, had reduced the number of waste vehicles available by 16, and increased the size of the remaining ones – and this means they can’t get round some of the street corners.

Thinks: if that’s the case, why don’t the operatives move the rubbish up to the nearest accessible street corner and collect from there?

The recollecters said that they had hundreds of tasks on their log-sheets – and they think it’s more expensive to recollect than collect correctly the first time.

I asked the call centre at Ealing council how I can escalate my complaint but have heard nothing yet (only rang yesterday).

Is anyone else having problems?

Gill

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Videos from West Ealing craft market, Dec 22, 2012

Rain? What rain? Thanks to Ealing Winter Night Shelter and Ralph of King Ralph who provided the entertainment on Saturday.

The craft market, and its music, will reconvene in March. To stay in touch, subscribe to this blog or email westealingneighbours@gmail.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHarxf_ME_Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TJJMcNVXl0