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EDITORIAL: April 21st  2013

So Spring has finally arrived and the months of 2 degrees daytime temperature seem to have gone. Sun has arrived - a little spasmodic perhaps but it’s here -  and shoots are appearing in profusion on trees and bushes. White blossom has been leading the way and pink or red should not be far behind!  Hooray!
For those who have only recently found Rochford Life, and we’ve been hearing of such people, perhaps we’d better explain what this ‘Editorial Page’ is all about. Well it’s produced fortnightly and originally it was simply to record who has been added to the directory side of the magazine, but as the years have gone on, the ‘recently added’ have diminished because most people of Rochford and Ashingdon are already here (there are yet some sports clubs we have to add). Thus we enlarged the ambit of this page to cover all the other things we might have added over the past fortnight.
Just in case you didn’t know Rochford Life is free, non-profit making but seeks to serve the whole community of Rochford and Ashingdon. Being a one-man non-profit business, does have it’s drawbacks. For instance, it being the Easter holidays, for one of the two past weeks we’ve been away on holiday, so nothing happened here!
Once a page is on Rochford Life it remains here until circumstances change, e.g. a shop changes hands. If you are starting up a new business we’d be delighted to put you on here. In more recent days, using this page as an ongoing archive, we have started adding key pieces of news that have occurred in the last two weeks, just to be able to look back and see what was going on.
So the past week or so has been somewhat dramatic. In Boston USA there has been the awful drama of two bombs going off near the finish of the Boston Marathon, and then all the drama of the men-hunt that followed. If that wasn’t bad enough there was the massive explosion of a chemical plant in Texas which had a higher death toll than Boston. The Americans have had a bad week. On our own home front we had the not-quite-a-state-funeral for Baroness Thatcher. Don’t we do such things well!  I had to check on I-player to catch again what my ears told me I couldn’t have heard. Following the Bishop of London’s address, the rather aged presenter went to say that one of her favourite hymns was to follow but managed to say, one of her favourite films. Ooops! He quickly corrected himself and it was fun to notice that it had been airbrushed out of the hour long summary programme later that evening. Thank goodness for clever editing!
Here on the RL front, we’ve already noted, we were away for a week but various things have nevertheless come across our desk. Various ‘new things’ have appeared but will arrive online in the coming weeks. Instead, existing ‘clients’ have requested updates - Just Pampered have a  Special Offer Pedicure and Ashingdon Electronics have a change to their opening times. Our friends at Essex Wildlife Trust have extended their April activity listings with an excellent new web-site. It really is amazing the number of things that go on around the county now! Our ‘recreational pages have seen two additional articles - Silver Surfers - Goodbye Coins? and A  Mind to Grow Something on our ‘Growing Stuff’ pages. Well there it is, a quiet fortnight from our perspective at least, although not in the world at large. What will the next fortnight hold I wonder. Enjoy.

EDITORIAL: April 7th  2013

There is a child’s poem that begins, “The north wind doth blow” and goes on to talk about the poor old robin. Well I don’t know about poor old robins but I know a load of us who are fed up with the north wind that has been blowing (or east wind) for the last month making March and into April one of the coldest starts to Spring in my lifetime.
On the general news front, first came the Chancellor’s ‘non-budget’ and the fact that a whole of lot of new legislation in respect of Benefits has come in with the beginning of April and a new financial year, has kept headline writers busy through this last week. The Cyprus banking crisis in the earlier part of the fortnight has gradually been lost in the general news cycle. Intriguingly the 50th anniversary of the ‘Beeching Cuts’ on the railways stirred up much discussion as to the rights and wrongs of it, especially as some lines now need to be brought back into service with recent increased demand.
On Rochford Life we were pleased to be able to add Samantha Lines - a Maths Tutor who is also the inspiration behind Binky Watson Wedding Planners, a most unusual alternative approach to weddings. At the same time another unusual business project we have been able to add has been Bob Pointer with Body Language Learning. Interesting!
Meanwhile at the airport easyjet was celebrating its first year at Southend and so we’ve also been able to add easyjet’s first year figures which make for interesting reading. A lot of local people have, we suspect, been making use of this new resource on our doorstep!
This last fortnight also saw a local landmark lit up as the old mills appeared to have caught fire requiring local fire appliances to pour into Mill Lane. It seemed too good an opportunity to miss so we marked it with a picture page, The Day the World Caught Fire. That left us puzzling where to place this page and so having struggled a week or so beforehand with the review of a new book on Rayleigh, we decided to take the bull by the horns and create yet a further new section on our ‘recreational pages’ simply entitled ‘Miscellaneous’ and you’ll find the access button on the bottom left of the front page.
I think we commented recently how advertising events come and go. The last week week have definitely been in the ‘coming’ bracket and we simply note that we have eight events on the front page coming up in the next month or so. Just as a matter of interest, in addition to those eight ‘one-off’ coming events, we also note we have another eight regular events listed on our ‘Events Contents’ page. Do keep an eye out for the things happening in this area. There were also four pages of RDC news added in this fortnight (we only cover the things in Rochford and Ashingdon, even though a lot more RDC news comes out weekly.)    
Well here it is. Enjoy the rest of the Easter holiday period and have a good fortnight.

EDITORIAL: March 24th  2013

Two weeks ago I rashly spoke of “talk of more cold and even snow!!!!”  And yesterday it snowed most of the day, fortunately not settling - unlike other places in the country where there have been pictures showing two feel of snow. OK, think positive! It is good to live in this largely protected corner of the country!
The news in this past fortnight has seen Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce both going to jail for 8 months for perverting the course of justice, Cyprus getting in a twist over major banking problems with talk of snatching money from savers’ accounts, and David Cameron fencing with Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband about how to deal with the Press following the Levison Report, and then a week of the press jumping up and down about how unfair it is. Such is life!  The bizarre thing about the news is that in five years time we’ll have probably forgotten about all of these issues. Oh yes, and the new Arch-Bishop of Canterbury has caused waves at his induction, talking about gays and envisaging a future ABofC being a woman. That might not get forgotten.
As far as life in Rochford Life is concerned it has been a fairly quiet fortnight with family activities filling your editor’s life.  That happens when you aren’t running a money making business and can take time out. Nevertheless we have just had the joy of meeting the fairly recently appointed new Deputy Head of Waterman’s, Kelly Brown, and then meeting and talking with Jerry Gibson, the Labour candidate for the County Council elections in May. Two very different people but a pure joy to meet and talk with them both. It is one of the joys of creating Rochford Life, this meeting such an interesting spectrum of people in Rochford.
It seems whenever the going gets a little slow, we get a suggestion for an expansion in some new direction and this past fortnight has been no different. It was suggested that it might be good if we added a new section to our ‘recreational pages’ called ‘Thinking Green’ and so we have started the ball rolling.
During the course of the pasty fortnight we encountered such an excellent piece of service in a restaurant that we felt it merited a mention on their page and to that  end we have updated the page of the Monsoon Restaurant (the food also matched the service!).  We are always seeking to give our readers further insights into the workings of businesses they may need and so we dropped in on Fox Properties  and asked them a basic question about Estate Agency and so, as they were good enough to oblige, we have updated their page with what they had to say.
Although it went beyond our usual boundaries, we accepted an invitation to do a review on a ‘local book’ entitled ‘Rayleigh Through Time’ for those interested in local history. Finally, we also had, from our friends at Neighbourhood Watch, a request from the police to be aware of and make use of  Essex Trading Standards.   
So there has been the fortnight, a pleasantly varied time. We hope you find helpful these various things added in these last two weeks. Enjoy the weather - Spring is coming (Yes, I know it is officially here, having past the vernal equinox last week!) and don’t forget to put your clocks FORWARD next Saturday night (30th).

EDITORIAL: March 10th  2013

For the enthusiasts among us, be under no illusion, Spring is not here yet! Scanning through our ‘seasonal’  pages we are usually part of the “Spring is coming” brigade and for a couple of days we were led to believe it just might be, but now.... grey, drizzle, rain and talk of more cold and even snow!!!! Whose in charge of all this???? Ten days time and its the Spring Equinox and then another eleven days on and we are into British Summer Time. Incredible!
The past fortnight has seen the UK’s credit rating taken down a notch, sexual concerns about a Lib Dem Lord, and a Scottish Cardinal, a Lib Dem managing to get in Eastleigh but more coverage given to one Nigel Farage of UKIP. Figures seeping out from the 2011 Census tell us that 3 times as many parents today are single than  in 1971, 5 times as many 25-44 year olds live alone now than in 1973, there are twice as many one person households today than in 1971, and headlines declare life in the 70’s was less lonely that today. Interesting!   
In our own running we noticed an interesting phenomena. There are times when we have virtually nothing to advertise. We are here to serve the local community and following our tag, ‘bringing the community to the community’ we’re very happy to use the pages of Rochford Life to publicise YOUR activities free. As we said, there are times when it seems we have nothing at all sent to us, and then all at once it all happens and we hardly have enough room on the front page to itemise them all. That’s how it’s been this past two weeks. Crazy!
We have in this period also stepped out of our comfort zone or, to be more precise, out of the area to which we normally limit ourselves, Rochford and Ashingdon. We have done this in the past in respect of advertising events but in this last fortnight we’ve had two requests from Canewdon (not linked, to our knowledge)  and as both people provide a service that extends to and covers Rochford in that they provide a service for Rochford, we have included them both.  First of all we were contacted by Hilary Hunter who does pet food deliveries all over the area, and then by Mark Hughes who is a window cleaner who similarly is available to cover Rochford, so here they both are, willing to serve our area.  
Now we seek to provide a service by way of our trade directory whereby you can find whatever services are available in our area but sometimes we realise that we are limited here and have wondered about going outside the area to meet the short-fall. This has recently proved to be the case when we found the Internet was not coping with some specific travel demands that we had and no one else locally would have been able to meet this particular need. Now in the past we have used Macallen Travel of Hockley and again this time they rose to the occasion admirably and immediately sorted our problem. For this reason we now include them in our directory as being the nearest outside Rochford itself and very capable.
We are into a new month in this fortnight and so we have now added  the March Thought for the month: Easter - the Account, appropriate as Easter is only a matter of weeks away, and also our bi-monthly Review which this month is called The Good, Bad & Ugly. We hope you enjoy it and find it stimulating you as you travel around the area, to take note of the buildings that go to make up Rochford. So there we are, another fortnight. See you in two weeks. Enjoy.