Your letters
To the Editor:The Village Shop is a great institution and when it first opened it did me the great favour of stocking liquorice. But I have a complaint. Over the years the amount of liquorice per penny has diminished to almost invisible proportions. Just the other day I was obliged to pay 15p for a stick of liquorice only four inches long. When the Shop was first opened 15p would have bought a stick at least twice that length. Just to make matters worse, it is impossible to buy liquorice pipes. The official reason given is that liquorice pipes are politically incorrect because they might encourage children to smoke!
We liquorice junkies, and I know there are many in the parish, need our regular shots. No liquorice means no life. I realise that this massive price inflation (and absence of pipes) is not the fault of the Shop, but couldn’t they use their purchasing power to get more liquorice per penny?
I know I speak for liquorice-lovers everywhere.
Mike Senior
The Lee
To the Editor:
We have all become used to the vagaries of local maps and signage in trying to explain to visitors how to find their way to and from our homes in The Lee and I am grateful that GPS navigation systems using post-codes seem to avoid most of these problems (at least when finding our house).
However, I was amazed recently when I asked Multimap and Googlemap (on-line mapping systems) to find the best way from our home to an address in Kent. No problems, except that my journey from The Lee is supposed to start on West India Dock Road. Apparently this is what on-line mapping systems seem to think is the name of the road between Sly Corner and Ballinger. Try it for yourself. Just type ‘West India Dock Road’ into Multimap or Googlemap and it will ask if you want the London one or the one near Ballinger. Just goes to show – don’t trust everything you read on the interweb-thingy!
Colin Sully
Swan Bottom