Yak & Natter

So it looks like the West Pier (the remains, I mean) will be demolished. The Heritage Lottery Fund withdrew their £14m funds when the West Pier Trust asked for another £5m. After fires and weather damage, they couldn’t justify spending the money.

Who is going to pay for the demolition? I guess that I am, along with all the other council tax payers in the area. I was just trying to figure out what an estimated £2m demolition fee would cost me. It’s not easy to work out…

Brighton receives around £67m+ in council tax revenue (PDF report), from a population of 248,000. Guessing at four people per property, that makes 62,000 homes and an average council tax bill of £1,092. Seems a little high, but let’s run with it.

That means a demolition would add £32 to the average council tax bill. Or… how about considering the restoration as an investment? £19m contribution to a rebuild as a tax would add about £102 for three years (I’m assuming it’s going to take a while to rebuild the thing). Doesn’t sound so bad, but I’d need to see the guesstimates for the return on that investment to make sure the tax bill goes down in subsequent years.

I know all these calculations are naive, but it’d be interesting to see them run by someone who understood the politics, processes and accountancy.

Richard received some information about Squash on the Beach the other day – it sounds like one of the stranger Brighton events for the summer. It makes Beach Soccer look like a sensible suggestion!

Today was the first day on my c# course with Xpertise. I haven’t had an opportunity to work with .Net before so this is a great opportunity. So tonight I’ve installed the SDK. I don’t have a Visual Studio .Net license, so instead I downloaded #develop, a free development environment which so far appears to work okay. It comes with ndoc for documentation and #unit for unit testing, althought I’m probably going to use nunit instead.

If you need to take your car to France, seriously consider the Eurotunnel. You may have to try a few different departure times and dates to get a cheap price (we paid £34 for a day trip), but it’s worth it: 35 minutes from platform to platform, a very comfortable ride, and when you arrive you just drive off with no waiting (customs is all done at departure). I hope never to have to get on a channel ferry ever again.

Just a couple of things I saw in shop windows in Lewes last week…

1. A rather soothing poster:

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2. I had no idea anyone would even bother trying to convert arcade games into board games. The text reads: Centipede, the family version of the arcade game.

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I received a letter a month or so ago from a distant cousin who was interested in sharing some of her family tree research. This made me realise how long it has been since I did any work on the tree whatsoever. So this evening I decided to try out the 1901 census online. £5 later I’ve found out addresses for where 2 of my Grandparents were, along with more general information about the third’s parents. The fourth’s family, however, remains elusive. It’s a pretty good service, and seems to be pretty responsive when you consider the amount of people who are in the list.

If anyone happens to be looking for a George S Duffield (aged 6 months) or a John E Duffield (aged 26 years, lodging with the Catley family) in Hull in around 1901 then drop me a line as I have information on these people.

And if anyone happens to know anything about my Duffields then please get in touch.