The Council are now selling tickets to see Prince...

I think that most people know that the Council spent about £95,000 on having a corporate box at the O2 for one year.

About a month ago the council ran a competition to win tickets in the box to see a Prince concert. Only Greenwich Card holders could enter and I mused at the time they were trying to get more people to buy a card to offset the extravagance of the box.

Well they've taken another step now, they're actually selling tickets for the corporate box.

This is the announcement:

GreenwichCard is offering you an exclusive chance to see Prince perform at his sold-out concert on 16 September.

Fifteen tickets for prime seats in the Council's box are available for £31.20 per ticket. There will be a maximum of two tickets per person.

For your chance to snap up your tickets, simply email greenwichcard@greenwich.gov.uk indicating how many you would like to buy and your GreenwichCard number before noon on Monday 10 September. The lucky winners will be contacted by 5pm that day.

Find out more about GreenwichCard offers by following the link below:

http://www.greenwich.gov.uk/Greenwich/LeisureCulture/GreenwichCard/NewPromotions/O2TicketsWithGreenwichCard.htm

On the one hand surely it's a good thing that they're making some money out of the box that they spent so much of our council tax on.

On the other is it legal? Remember that the Council has already got and paid for these seats.

I also can't help but wonder what happened to the tickets for all the other nights...

You'll also note that the offer is more than a bit weird. There's 15 tickets on offer and you can apply for a maximum of 2 tickets. So are they expecting someone to go on their own? On the web page they refer to the "lucky seven people", 7*2 = 14, doesn't it?

Does anyone out there know how many seats the box has? I wonder who's going to be in the other ones.

If anyone does get tickets and go please let me know who was in there with you.

Taking a step into the Daily Mail Zone...

...which is a bit like the Twilight Zone, only far scarier.

It seems all quiet in Charlton at the moment. I've had a bit of a break and not a lot seems to be happening right now. So, as happens at times like this, my mind turns to bigger things.

I was talking recently with some friends who are teachers within Greenwich. It turns out they've had a training course and in it were advised to refer to Britain and not Great Britain when talking about our country.

Uh?

Great Britain is the name of our country, it says so on our passports, so it must be true. They're going to be misleading and misinforming a whole generation of Greenwich children. What are they going to think when they see a passport or "team GB" at some sporting event?

Great doesn't imply anything to do with us claiming that we're fab or anything, even the French call us "Grande-Bretagne". It's got a lot more to do with our size as the largest part of the British Isles and Brittany in France, England's rulers became French speaking after 1066 and needed to differentiate between the two bits on either side of the channel.

To take my final step into the Daily Mail Zone, it's "political correctness gone mad"!

I'm hoping something more Charlton related will pop up soon.....

It's Football Season again

I'm not a follower of football, it's an entire tide to life that just used to sweep me by. I now have to pay a bit more attention to it, if not my car gets towed away when Charlton play at home.

There's been a few matches now and I'm getting back into the swing of keeping an eye on what's happening.

However couldn't it be made easier?

I'm sure that Charlton used to pop a letter through local doors giving the dates of home matches, I certainly didn't get one this year. The little sign up by the station isn't much use as it's often only updated a few days before a match.

I'm lucky, I can get into the habit of checking on the internet for what's going on.

On that matter does anyone know of an online calendar in a format suitable for use in iCal on a Mac? At the moment watch the fixtures page and manually update my diary. Oh how easy it would be if they just offered one on the internet. Maybe I should suggest that to them.

As for last nights match well it all seemed rather subdued, perhaps it wasn't that important a game? I was pottering around at home and hardly noticed the fans coming or going. I've got to say they usually are very well behaved and no trouble at all.

All Quiet on the Charlton Front...

...or not as the case may be.

There's a club near my house, well I think it's a club. It tends to host Country & Western music nights on Fridays and what seems to be Weddings or Birthdays on a Saturday (I've heard Hi Ho Silver Lining way too many times now, it must be a tradition, or an old charter, or something).

All's usually fine, they wrap up at for midnight on the Saturday and they're usually pretty good about it too.

However last Saturday they were going on until about 12.25am. Then add in the noise of people leaving and it was about 12:45am until it quietened down. I wasn't too happy, I had an early start the next day.

I'm tempted to complain but it seems that my only official route is to lodge a request to investigate their license, which is really rather serious, and not called for yet in my opinion. Perhaps a quick anonymous letter to them asking them to stick with their licensing limits, which I believe say that they must stop at midnight.

I'll see how they go over the next few weeks. Saturday's DJ was particularly rubbish, I wasn't listening for that long and I heard way too many fluffed links between records. Hopefully it was a one off.

Greenwich's Corporate Box Tickets for the O2

The Council are holding a competition to win seats in their Corporate Box at the O2 for two of the Prince concerts.

GreenwichCard holders have a unique opportunity to use Greenwich Council's Corporate Box at The 02 to see Prince in concert on 17 August.

There are seven pairs of tickets up for grabs.

For a chance to enter this amazing competition, please email your name, address, telephone number and GreenwichCard number to Greenwichcard@greenwich.gov.uk.

Cut-off for competition entries is Monday 13 August at midday. Winners will be notified by 4pm on that day.

GreenwichCard holders will also have a second chance to win tickets for the box to see Prince on September 16 - so if you don't already have a GreenwichCard now is the time to get one!

Find out how to get a GreenwichCard and check other promotions by following the link below:
http://www.greenwich.gov.uk/Greenwich/LeisureCulture/GreenwichCard/

So that's why the Council spent £95,000 of our money on that corporate box, to encourage people to get a Greenwich Card. A card costs between £1 and £2, so let's average it at £1.50. If they can get about 63,000 new people to sign up for one they might cover the costs of the suite!

I do try not to be cynical about the Council, I really really do. I keep telling myself "inept, not corrupt." However I do note that the competition was announced after Greenwich Watch announced they were taking a summer break....

Anyhow if you've got a card then enter the competition, it would be nice to get some residents into the corporate box. Then when you read about the Council cutting more services or giving up on giving up on collecting another large chunk of the rent arrears you know where your Council Tax is going.

Charlton Chic

Watch out Paris here comes Charlton! We've entered the age of the pavement cafe and Charlton's never far behind the curve of fashion and culture.

The valley cafe's popped a table on the street outside it's window.

While I'm on the subject of the cafe they do do a very good cooked breakfast, a great thing the morning after the night before.

Shooting in Charlton

There's a board up in Charlton Church Lane about a shooting that happened there in the early hours of Saturday the 14th of July. It doesn't sound like anyone was hurt, shots were fired and the shooters fled.

The News Shopper web site is also carrying a story about another shooting at the same place, on a Saturday and at the same time. Click here to see it.

So were there two incidents or one? Have News Shopper got the date wrong? Any ideas?

Anyway I'm not sure how I feel about this. It should be rather frightening but for some reason I don't feel too phased by it. Am I viewing it with the correct sense of proportion or somehow in denial about it?

I also wonder if this is connected with the gang situation that is rumoured to be rife in SE London.

I'm sure that you're all bright enough to realise that if you did see or hear anything, absolutely anything, about this then you should be phoning the police. As for me I really don't recall a thing, I think I was sound asleep at the time as I had an early start the next day.

Thanks go out to John-Paul for sending me an email about the notice a few days ago, it's much appreciated.

Edited to add: I emailed the newspaper and they've confirmed that there was only one shooting on the 14th of July. They've fixed the story to make clear that they're not talking about Saturday just gone but one several weeks ago. Nice to see them move so quickly to clarify things. Hopefully someone out there knows something and can help the police out.