AN OUTSIDE VIEW

Brighton Council has realigned the Volk's Railway. It has been laid to a high standard with proper ballast, which is good, but this shows the curves are too sharp - the four-wheeled cars squeal as they go round. This is wearing out the wheels and the track and could cause damage to the old trains, which weren't designed for such curves. There was no need to make the curves so sharp. This has been done to make way for a commercial development of various sports facililities, but these should have been fitted around the original route which dated from the 1880s, then there would have been no need to move the railway at all. Howver, the exposed situation is not very suitable for what is proposed, which could as well go in Brixton as Brighton, so it is squandering a seafront location. Meantime there is a massive unsatisfied demand for beach huts - if you want somewhere to change apart from on the beach, you have to joing Brighton Swimming Club, which does not make non-athletes welco...

For some reason people have got the idea that I am a vegetarian. A lot of people who come and eat at my house are veggie and vegan and they will always get the food they want. But although I hardly ever buy meat to have at home, I eat what is put in front of me and if I am in a restaurant I go for the best menu option. I don't think it is a good thing to separate yourself from other people by sticking rigidly to special diets. It is unkind to reject food when one is a guest, especially as they might have gone to a lot of trouble to prepare it. And I always look forward to a full English breakfast at the weekends. The sea dippers go off to Carotts at Southwick or some other place and we tuck into a big fry-up. After a long swim or a swim in cold water it won't do any harm to have once or twice a week and they keep you going all day. If done well, it is very tasty but probably quite unhealthy if eaten daily and you do a sedentary job and drive everywhere.

Brighton's sea front cleaning team do a wonderful job against all the odds, but this should not be happening. If food and drink containers were subject to a heavy tax if they were not re-usable, then people would collect them and take them back to the shop to get their deposit, if for no other reason than to buy more beer. This is one for the EU - have the bottle manufacturers knobbled the Brussels bureaucrats so they are not going to do anything about it?

I was on the way to Germany with a load of football supporters. Here they are having their fry-up and beer on the boat. When they had finished they cleared their tables and took their trays and dirty plates back to the serving hatch.

SUMMARY Brighton and Hove Council proposes to amalgamate the city centre parking zones into two large zones. The proposal is unsound on economic grounds as the Council is foregoing very substantial potential revenue. This loss of revenue renders the proposal unsound on grounds of economic justice and equity, since it is at the expense of the poorest members of the society. The proposal is not based on sound economic principles of resource allocation. The proposal will generate additional traffic in the city centre. The proposal will cause hardship to residents. The scheme needs to be re-thought. Any scheme should: 1) Recognise the differential demand in different locations within the city centre from one area to another in as fine-grained a way as reasonably practicable. 2) Avoid queueing as a means of allocation. There should normally be places available, if at a price, since, amongst other benefits, this enables the true economic value of the parking spaces to be manifest. 3) Optimi...

At 4.00 am, all the ferries are converging on Mariehamn, population about 10,000? Where is Mariehamn? It is the capital of Åland, which is ethnically Swedish but belongs to Finland. Rather than blowing each other up, they agree to go their own ways, so they opted out of the EU tax regime. The ferries stop there so they can have a duty-free shop on board. Nutty, isn't it?

I walk down to the sea front every morning around 7.30 and the streets all look like this. Obviously Brighton and Hove Council doesn't care that much or it would have worked out other systems of dealing with rubbish.