Category — Matthew's blog

I never saw the point of Tweeting but then again I wasn’t sold on weblogs but now I wouldn’t be without mine…

I started Tweeting ‘properly’ about 11 weeks ago and since then I’ve sort of caught the Tweeting bug.

I’m not as prolific as the real Tweeting community but I do one when there’s something to say and that’s two or three times most days. And I must confess that as my numbers following pick up it does please me.

Since my Tweeting I’ve also seen a big rise in my website numbers. Not sure why but numbers have gone up by a third in the last three months with around 30,000 people visiting this site monthly.

So, a Tweeter I am and if you want to see what I’m writing about in the magic 140 characters each time you can click the ‘follow’ me on the top right under the website banner. 

I was first to come out agaist HS2 and I remain opposed because any benefit just doesn’t stack up to the cost…

But with the Government announcing the go ahead it makes sense to look at mitigation early to ensure that if it actually happens we’ve made the best of a very bad job. It’s not about giving in it’s about being pragmatic and prepared.

MPs are the ones who could stop it but it’s County that can work to limit the impact as far as possible. Now, HS2 Ltd have announced the first round of community engagement meetings in April but I’ve had countless people ask for an initial public meeting catch up with County engineers in advance of the HS2 ones. Similar to the one at Whittington 16 months ago.

So with that in mind that is exactly what I will be arranging for the Drayton Bassett, Canwell, Swinfen, Packington, Whittington, Fisherwick and Weeford and Hints areas.

It is likely to be towards the end of this month and will be a chance for discussion and planning outside the HS2 Forums as well as an opportunity for engineers from County to hear views and set out some of their thoughts.

I’ll publicise details of the meeting via the HS2 email updates I send out. If you aren’t registered with me already and want to know the date you can let me know here by completing the subject field with ‘HS2 Meet’. Or you can follow me on Twitter.

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Intentionally or unintentionally some older people are parting with hundreds of pounds for no good reason

I have had older constituents, who aren’t exactly poor but are really struggling with high energy and living costs, pay massive increases in home insurance renewal because they don’t understand they can challenge the renewal cost.

I’ve had others who are on the most expensive gas or elecricity tariffs and are paying substantial sums by monthly direct debit despite being hundreds of pounds in credit with the utility company and not realising it.

And the most widespread problem is a growing number of older people who are persuaded to take out all sorts of extra insurance from boiler cover and  things already included to pointless drain cover and unemployment insurance when people are in their 70s.

Most, but not all, isn’t mis-selling but is simply a change in life and the way things are sold which is so different to even 20 years ago. But the fact is that I’ve found individuals and couples who are barely surviving financially but are spending as much as a hundred pounds each month uneccessarily.

That’s not to say I haven’t come across selling which was questionable at best and dodgy at worst but in the main it’s knaivety or misunderstanding by the householder.

I do think, from what I’ve seen, that utilities, insurers and cold sellers could do more to identify an individual’s circumstances or at least put their welfare on a par with company profits.

Over the last 3 months I’ve had a dozen or so cases like this which means there are probably many dozens or even hundreds of others who are just struggling on when they may well not need to be in that position.

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There’ve been a few programmes on recently about the universe, stars and our solar system…

The Wonders of the Universe with Prof Brian Cox was an amazingly thought provoking piece of tv.

In fact just thinking about how the Universe could possibly go on forever, or even more difficult still if it didn’t what would be beyond, makes my head hurt. Something where your thoughts go round and round.

But it did catch my imagination and resulted in me buying a telescope… although as often with me it’s something I haven’t had time to use other than the day I got it about a year ago.

Until the other night when I saw a news report that talked of the possibility of seeing the Northern Lights from the UK and also the best chance to see five of our solar system’s planets, potentially, at the same time.

It made me remember the Northern Lights in northern Norway a couple of years ago but also got me thinking about the telescope that was well overdue an outing. I hadn’t actually managed to see anything with it yet as for some reason the only time I used it… couldn’t see a thing… and got disheartened.

So out it came yesterday and I found on the Internet a YouTube clip on how to use it as well as an iPad App which I downloaded called StarWalk. You aim the iPad at the sky and it shows you where in the sky the stars, planets and other man made objects like the Space Station and other satelites are.

The upshot was a very pleasant three hours where I actually saw quite a bit. No Northern Lights, they were much further north, but I did see Jupiter and what appeared to be three moons (not four?) and also the International Space Station appeared to be a bright gold flicker.

And I saw the moon in far more detail than ever before. I even managed to get a picture of it through the telescope. So, not exactly what you see on the tv or web but a big improvement on my first attempt and very much wetted my apetite to have another go very shortly. As I said an enjoyable few hours.

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