AN OUTSIDE VIEW

Sharpham Rainbow Originally uploaded by seadipper . There was a massive downpour and then the sun came out again.

Sharpham and the River Dart Originally uploaded by seadipper . Met up with a group of old friends in Dawlish and we went to the Sharpham estate near Totnes and walked round. It is in a loop of the River Dart.

Ornamental Squash Originally uploaded by seadipper . My friend grows these - they are mainly for decoration.

Effects of the buy-to-let craze - my neighbours at the back Originally uploaded by seadipper . My previous neighbours at the back had a nice garden and grew a lot of vegetables. Then they moved and the house was bought by a builder who destroyed the garden and paved it over. Then it was bought by somebody who has just let it and the tenants use it to store their rubbish, which there is a lot of. Which has not improved my view. Buy-to-let has been a disaster for areas like this, as stable communities have been replaced by people who are on the move and don't care about where they live. The government has made matters worse by encouraging it. The effect has been to stoke up house prices beyond the reach of people who want to buy them to live in. This has helped to inflate the house-price-bubble. Of course, it is not the price of houses that has risen, it is the price of the land upon which they stand. Like all bubbles, it will burst, the only question is when? Then the place...

I sent in my tax return using the on-line submission facility. This is a well thought-out system and easier than filling in the bundle of paper forms they send out. And it will do the calculation right up to the end of January deadline, instead of you having to send it in by 30 September. Highly recommended. Give it a try instead of paying an accountant to do a job when you have to do most of the book-keeping work yourself anyway. That said, there is no excuse for taxing people's labour. It is unnecessary, complicated, discourages people from working, is a cause of the problems resulting from having 85% of the population living in one-third of the land area of the country. One can go on and on. The reality is the tax is not paid by employees - that is just an illusion. It is in reality paid by employers. To put some figures on this. A nominal wage of £25000 costs an employer £27560, and provides an employee with a real wage - the net value of what people can actually buy with their...

Last Saturday, there was a minor derailment outside Brighton station at about 9 am. But trains were still not running at 7 pm, and the disruption continued next day. A crane had to be brought from Derby to put the train back on the track. This did not arrive for several hours, apparently because it is "out of gauge" and special arrangments had to be made to give it the necessary clearance. There always used to be breakdown train and crane kept at Brighton, just outside the station. In the early 1980s, a new one was provided, complete with modern emergency lighting for working at night. Why was it taken away? Twenty years ago, trains would have been running within three or four hours after a minor incident of this kind, with a normal service next day. Are we letting too many decisions be made by the bean counters?

I have been back in Britain six weeks and it is starting to get to me. So here are some positive images. Balcombe Viaduct; Water meadows near Salisbury; Pavilion Gardens, Brighton; Oxford - Clarendon Building and Sheldonian Theatre - amongst the finest groups of buildings in Europe

The council handed out these folding boxes for people to put their rubbish in to stop the seagulls breaking open the bags and spreading rubbish everywhere. But there are such a lot of people in the city centre who just stay a few months and move on that they don't know or don't care about taking the boxes off the street, so they are left lying about and are an eyesore in their own right. And the council doesn't care either, or it would warn and then fine people who were leaving them out - at £50 a fine it has to be worth sending someone out to deal with the problem.

A popular spot for our rough sleepers

Outside the Swimming Club on the sea front

Somebody bought this with the idea of putting up a tiny house but there isn't enough room so it has been abandoned to the paint sprayers

Another silly test but fun if you don't take it seriously ARE YOU CATHOLIC?

You do not need two fence posts next to each other like this. There should be a single post with the horizontal bars fixed to the adjacent corners. To do what they have done is seriously incompetent as well as looking unsightly. This should have been picked up and prevented at the design stage. If it slipped through at that point, planners ought to have noticed - this is in a Conservation Area. And if not then, the contractor or railing manufacturer should have picked it up. If it had got through the the designer and the planners, the job architect or engineer, or even the men on the job, ought to have realised the detail was wrong. It seems as if everyone involved had their brain switched off, but that is normal for Brighton and Hove Council.

How Brighton earns its title of "Skidrow-on-Sea" 1 - Rat-breeding area. 2, 3 - Rubbish boxes are never taken in and Brighton and Hove Council does nothing 4 - This one is persistent. I hope the kitchen is better managed. Strange that customers don't mind sitting right next to this. 5- Just what you need on a narrow pavement on a busy Saturday afternoon.

TAKE THE TEST - ARE YOU A HERETIC You scored as Chalcedon compliant . You are Chalcedon compliant. Congratulations, you're not a heretic. You believe that Jesus is truly God and truly man and like us in every respect, apart from sin. Officially approved in 451.

Here they are in front of the Swimming Club Arch, probably settled in for the season and more will be along later. Their stash of Tennant's is kept well-guarded.h

Brighton Swimming Club committee has issued a new set of rules, exhorting people to keep the arch tidy and make new people and visitors welcome. It has been beautifully printed and mounted in a posh wooden frame screwed to the wall. It is nice to know our subscriptions are put to good use. However, what we have to encounter regularly is not at all welcoming. The problem of undesirable people messing in front of the arch would be solved if we could take over the space in front, which we need because the arch is too small for the growing number of people who use it, but the club is not seriously interested in this. The officers in Brighton and Hove City Council responsible for the sea front are not interested either, and the police are not interested in enforcing the "no drinking" rule. In fact, they hardly ever patrol the Lower Promenade, so it is used for all kinds of nefarious activities. In fact, you could load an army of terrorists on Brighton beach and it is unlikely ther...

TODAY Interest rates have been raised to curb inflation. The biggest inflation driver is high land prices which shows up as higher property and house prices. Higher interest rates will hit marginal firms and businesses and even those borrowers who rent their properties and do not have mortgages. The beneficiaries are those who are not producers but those who live on investments. Instead of higher interst rates why does the Chancellor not tackle the problem at its source and introduce an Annual Land Value Tax on all land (LVT)? This would reduce inflation, allow lower interest rates, dampen the property boom and provide the government with income for essential infrastructure and to enable it to reduce harmful taxes like VAT. In addition, a useful side effect of LVT would be to encourage the use of brownfield sites which would reduce property prices, making homes and business premises more affordable, create more jobs and ease the pressure and costs of urban sprawl. This was sent to me...

It has become increasingly difficult to get Brazil nuts in their shells, and the ones without shells that I get from Infinity Foods are more often than not rancid or mouldy and I have to take them back, which they are OK about. The reason it seems is due to EU regulations which are meant to cut down on the risk of people consuming aflatoxin which causes cancer. The aflatoxin comes from a mould that grows on or in the nuts. I had correspondence with my Euro MP, Caroline Lucas, and she followed it up. Eventually I was told that it comes down to the method of testing when the product comes into UK ports. They are ground up and tested, shell and all if they are shipped in their shells, even though nobody eats the shells. But the shells often have this contamination so nuts in shell nearly always fail the test, so they have stopped shipping them. But if they are shelled and dehusked in South America before they are shipped, they start to deteriorate and often go rancid. Also, some contamina...

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled in favour of a property company, J A Pye, based in Oxford, when it appealed against a decision by the House of Lords to allow the occupant, a farmer, “squatters’ rights” - the ancient right in English law to claim ownership of land if it has been occupied without challenge for 12 years. For many years, the farmer had been using the land, near Newbury, Berks, for grazing. Originally, it had been leased from the company under a grazing agreement, but in 1984 the company refused to renew the lease as it intended to develop the site. The farmer continued to use it and in 1997, registered a claim with the Land Registry, claiming to have aquired title by unchallenged occupation. Legal action followed, culminating in the Law Lords’ decision. The company then appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which ruled that the UK breached the human rights of the developers by not changing an ancient law sooner, to protect landowners. T...

Adam Smith's portrait will soon be replacing that of Sir Edward Elgar on Britain's £20 notes, which has brought his ideas about free markets back to attention. Whilst staying at a friend's house a couple of weeks ago, I came across an article he had written, drawing attention to the limitations of free markets. It was written about 15 years ago, but it is as relevant as ever, and this is an edited extract of what it said. One should perhaps not wonder after 120 years of Marxist/pseudo-scientific analysis of economics, to hear that people should have rights as consumers, but no mention of rights as producers. Such views are propagated in university economics courses and found in the writings of many independent philoso­phers. It suits the dogma of governments of both right and left complexions... ...following Adam Smith, the free-market economy was a Liberal concept. It was resisted by the Tories until quite recently. The aristocratic basis of land and capital ownership did ...

First Capital Connect Originally uploaded by seadipper . This must be about the fifth livery for these trains since 1989. They came out in Network South-East red, white and blue. Then they painted them grey and called them the Belgranos. Then they were blue and yellow, and then a few of them have been back in another mostly-grey livery. Now First group has taken the franchise from Govia and they have got up this psychedelic colour scheme. They have also given the service a new name, "First Capital Connect", which is completely meaningless. This is particularly stupid as Thameslink is the official name of the service and a well-known brand in the area it serves, as well as being a good description of the route. And what a mouthfull "First Capital Connect" is for station announcers. Railway privatisation has been good for the firms that cook up colour schemes for trains. Pity, too, that they haven't done anything about the horrible seating layout in this ...