3 posts tagged “balham”
When I went to bed last night, this was a rather pretty tree stump and a garden fence that didn't have a large hole burnt in it.
We're trying to find out what happened. And trying not to think about what would have happened if the rain hadn't have put the fire out.
Update: More details emerging and it's not pretty.
We had a friend staying the night. He was out in the back garden having a cigarette after we had gone to bed. It looks like he didn't stub it out properly. I'm not sure when this was.
At about 1:30 this morning, people were walking past our house and saw a raging inferno. They woke our neighbours who assumed it was started by vandals. Our neighbour got out his fire extinguisher, but the fire was too strong so they called out the fire brigade who put the fire out.
So it wasn't a small blaze that was put out by the rain as we previously assumed. We were very nearly the people who burnt the whole street down.
And somehow we managed to sleep through it all.
The internet is a fabulous source of news. And it's now becoming so ubiquitous that you can find out local things that you might never find out otherwise. Here's a slightly sad example.
Harry is a local celebrity. He's never far from the bar of our local pub. He lives on our road and you only ever see him either in the pub or walking between the pub and his house. He's very old though. And very ill. Whenever you don't see him around for a few days you always wonder if he's died. But he always pops up again.
Except, now he won't. Harry died yesterday. I saw an ambulance going down the road, but I didn't think of Harry (who I vaguely assumed to be indestructible) until I read this LiveJournal entry. And I found that through Planet Balham, which aggregates various new sources about Balham, including a Technorati search.
Without these, it would have been weeks before we realised what had happened. I can't imagine Harry's death being mentioned in any mainstream news medium.
The internet means you get your news quicker. Even if it's bad news.
There were some strange and spooky goings on in the skies last week, prompting one observer to eerily predict "I think there is something out there."
Stunned witnesses described how gobsmacked crowds were drawn out onto the streets to watch two sets of unidentified shining bright orange lights fly perfectly in formation through the skies above Balham and Tooting.
The UFO's, which lit up the skies for a short while before shooting up and disappearing into the distance just before midnight last Friday, also had people standing in their gardens trying to capture the action on film and mobile phones.
From the Wandsworth Guardian
I, of course, saw nothing.
