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This isn't at all true. The rents on Bedlington Front Street are some of the lowest commercial rents in the area. Significantly less than on Ashington high street. I've sat in on several negotiations in recent years. The ownership if fairly broad. Point to a property and I will find out who owns it, assuming I don't know already. A lack of parking places in Bedlington!? So evil Mr Out-Of-Town Developer is going to make a fast buck at the Town's expense is he? Do you know how much it costs to keep a commercial property empty these days? This money goes back to WDC in the form of the UBR, which is supposed to be spent on local amenities. It's also loaded onto the prospective tenant. The latter is just one of the reasons why we really do have empty shops. Please please do!

This is interesting. Turning a shop into flats would make the owner money? Some examples where this has happened maybe? If this has happened then why would anyone have a problem with it? Why wouldn't it be for the general good? I think that what we are getting at here is exactly what is wrong with our Town; but maybe not in the way that you think!

Not at all true! The Bedders CoT have no such powers, and are in reality just a nice old club of almost-near-retirement businessmen who meet up for a chin wag! They'd be happy to see almost any kind of shop but an empty one. I speak as one who has never been a member personally, but has sometimes got so close to the action that it seems uncanny! :D The real reason for the empty shops... oops, got to go to a chin wag - back soon!

So... you've heard my (and other people's) arguments why not. Now see the movie: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6705375.stm Believe me, if there's one think you will learn as you get older it's that you can't trust big government. By the time most people wake up to this fact it could well be too late. You don't have to look too far around our World - or too far back in history - before this stark truth stares you in the face. "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." -- Thomas Jefferson.

AAMOF I met Helen Savage early last year. Or rather she spotted me getting off an aeroplane near London, else I'd probably have walked straight past her. Anyway, she's more than happy with her lot despite the fact that she has made a far bit of money for the tabloid press. A more decent person it would be had to find. The fact that her partner has stuck by her through all shows a lot of strength of character on both their parts. More strength of character than the average Sun or NOTW reader I'd guess! Do too many people here know who Dusty Springfield was, or has there been a revival I never noticed?

There's nothing wrong in talking about coloured people. The law says only that you can't incite racial hatred. But.. if you want to talk seriously about coloured people then perhaps you should start a serious discussion in the correct place?

The former!

As an experiment there's a now a new Forum called Chat Central (working title). It's the only place where off-topic remarks and incessant banter will be permitted. That leaves his Forum for serious discussion on the Town, and other serious issues of the day. Threads started off here in a light vein will be rapidly moved to the new Forum. Off-topic posts added to serious threads in this Forum will be deleted - don't complain! Though the moderator(s) may, at their sole discretion, and without having to explain why to anyone, split a thread and move the off-topic tail to the new forum (even change the title) - BUT DON'T COUNT ON IT! In future threads in this Forum that seem to have reached some sort of conclusion will be closed. If you want one reopened to add something then contact the moderator(s). This is because some of the threads have grown to ridiculous lengths making them of little future use to anyone. The experiment continues! [uPDATE] ..ummm.. and of course people starting off apparently serious threads about local topics in the Chat forum may well find them moved here. Or was that a test of the new system?

Absolutely not! It's basically a good idea, but I was rather hoping someone would turn their brain on and fill in a few of the details.

OK let's get this straight: You want a forum for chat about the Town and a separate forum for General stuff? So what happens if someone starts a thread off about something of interest re. the Town then someone posts something off-topic. Does the tread then get moved, or does the off-topic stuff get deleted - to cries of censorship? Either way the moderator can't win! Should either or both of the forums be public? IMHO we don't want the chatter one public as it could detract from the Town to visitors, and we don't want the serious one public as local posters won't bother to join and make a commitment. Private forums don't attract anything like as much spam, because the main reason for spamming boards is not to get the spam read, but to place links to hijack our considerable search engine traffic. The aim is to get crap sites a search engine ranking, and search engines can't spider the private forums.

We've made the captchas (numbers you need to type in to register) a lot more difficult to OCR (read by a computer program). So far no bots managed to register overnight. Generally two or three manage to find the numbers after lots of tries. It's a shame when you have to make it more difficult for disabled people just to stop morons! Wouldn't know, never give the stuff the time of day. If other people took the same view it would all die out. Never been able to understand the mentality of people who will buy anything at all from spammers. It just takes that one in a million idiot to keep the whole sordid mess going.

Reet the forst teem bonny lass! Dozens of links posted, but they never saw the the backlight of anyone's LCD.

Google on Alexdunkant and you will find that its a mindless bot written by mindless people! No place for those here, but they would be a lot easier to detect if genuine members filled in a few fields in their profiles. We may have to make some of these "required fields" at some point.

How can you protect something that isn't an absolute measure in the first place? A DNA profile is open to interpretation. It's not like a cell has a check summed electronically readable code in it. It's smears on gel of various densities, and the result depends on the processing technology and interpretation. You are only dealing with probabilities! History shows that courts have a very poor record of comprehending such things... http://society.guardian.co.uk/nhsperforman...1511799,00.html ..which is how OJ walked, and why it's just a matter of time before some innocent person doesn't. An ID card system is only as secure as its weakest link; all the rest is illusion. How can you ever be sure that the person presenting that ID card is the person who is entitled to hold it? Or how can you be sure it was issued to the right person in the first place? Answer is that you can't! We've plenty of methods of ID already, and anyone who thinks that all the hassle and huge expense of another one is going to improve anyone's lot is kidding themselves! Like very many things the govt brings in it's likely to be counterproductive for Joe Average. It will be misused too, and all the assurances about this protection or that safeguard will ultimately go out of the window. This has happened time and time again in history, and is a standard tactic of big government.

"Just a minute sir, we'll only detain you for half a day whilst we speedily carry out a DNA profile on our new high-speed lightweight equipment! Of course it's not entirely accurate, and the result could be open to interpretation, so you have the right of appeal, and a second test - at your own considerable expense, of course!" I don't think you've thought this one through somehow. I wouldn't trust the UK govt with my fingerprints - see the recent carry-on in Scotland for example - and I'd rather suffer imprisonment before I conceded a DNA sample. Any large organisation follows its own agenda: generally the survival and increase in power of that organisation. When the organisation is large enough - as large as government - the problem becomes terminal. If you think differently then you haven't lived long enough. It would be the duty of any sane right thinking citizen to confound, confuse and bring down any such system of citizen control. And.. I'm very sure that millions would be queueing up to do so! Bring it on Mr Politician - this law abiding near model citizen will be the first to the barricades - you won't last the month out!

DNA will put you away unless your name is OJ There's no credible case for ID cards. Only another way for big government to exercise control over (and tax) honest people, and something else for the dishonest ones to steal and forge. Think of how many ID documents you already have. Is one more going to make anything more secure? Is losing or not carrying your ID card going to be a criminal offence? Yes, and a lot of harmless and innocent people are going to be needlessly hurt. No, and they are a totally useless waste of billions of pounds.

There are fewer recorded crimes, but that's not the same thing at all. People no longer bother to report minor ones because they know there's no redress and it's largely a waste of time. Also the police and Home Office (or department of whatever it's been re-badged this week) spend a fair portion of their time playing with the statistics. What matters is how people regard their community, and it's pretty clear that the vast majority fear for the future. Blaming the newspapers - or the ones you don't agree with - for the situation is a poor excuse. We've had ten years of a government totally dominated by spin, and most people no longer believe anything they are told by big government. Even Gordon B. seems to acknowledge this in his latest speech. And.. isn't the colloquialism going to hell in a handbasket?

Of course! About a dozen a day; and someone protects you from all the pills porn and poxy goods. For every genuine member registering there are about fifty instances of Internet slime. And four out of five of the ones who have a genuine interest in our Town either don't read the rules on registering or don't have the courage to post a hello. Result: they get zapped after a polite reminder! As it says somewhere, the site is for active members only, we aren't collecting lurkers. That's why when you join you get a membership number of about 1300 at present. Do not confuse the graffiti police with the thought police though. Superwoman and Batman+Robin rarely have a convo, and I'm not aware of any visible posts having been removed recently.

Spot on! The practise was called Hall & Tully, and they operated from a former private house in a one of the terraces on the Victoria Terrace side of the road - park right outside! The waiting room was the downstairs front room and Mr Tully had his surgery in the downstairs back room. There was a (main?) surgery at the Guidepost too, though I never went there. Mr Tully was actually a very good dentist of the old school. I visited him quite a number of times in the 1970's when I got a little fed up with Mr Henderson on Front Street West. Though his gear wasn't anything like so up-to-date as Mr Henderson's, he was nevertheless a very competent NHS dentist. He was also fairly sociable, and, sad to say, he clearly knew and remembered a lot more about me that I ever remember about him! He did have an appointment system, though I can't recall anyone else ever being in his waiting room when I was there - generally midweek. He didn't employ a dental nurse and I can't recall any sort of receptionist on site. I think there was quite probably another surgery upstairs, but it didn't seem to be in use by then. Overall the practise did leave the impression of being from a bygone age, even in the early 1970's. I guess that by that time he was fairly close to retirement though. I vaguely remember someone telling me that they'd closed the Station Road surgery, and that I now needed to go to Guidepost. It could be that they'd closed that too by the time I needed him again - because I never ever got there!

The A had (4x) 120MW generating sets and the B had 275MW generating sets. That's a big M for megawatt, not a small m for milliwatt. I'm told that the B was the second largest station in the country for quite some time. Technology moves on!

And, you can bet Northumberland will suffer more than most! http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6664109.stm

Yes, you may be right on that one, I could well have been thinking of the (much lesser known) Oddfellows Arms. But, hasn't that vets now closed down too? I remember a closure notice on the door.

1) It's now supported directly by the board. 2) Most people don't use non-MS browsers.

The only association of the name I can recall is that the stone building (now flats) just before the easterly entrance to Hollymount Square was originally "The Gardner's Arms" public house. I know this because I've seen the title deeds to the property, though I'm no longer sure about the precise spelling.

Means absolutely nothing, except maybe he didn't do his homework and/or was far too greedy. An uncontested CC judgement is not even a platform ticket! This one will run, and run, and...