Chris on the air!

One of your local webmasters is spending the month presenting the breakfast show on EchoFM in Farnborough. If you are not in the area to tune in on 87.7 you can listen in March from Monday to Friday, 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. on line at www.echofm.co.uk . On his first show on Monday Chris attempted to break a world record. Did he achieve it? See here...

 Village innundated with "Limoges Porcelain" sales telephone calls

(Updated Febuary 9th 2010)

They started at the end of last week and have continued for many villagers since then. Some people answer and hear nothing, other get the full sales message! Many villagers get the calls every hour or so and even after they have taken the bait, they STILL get the same call an hour later!

We understand these calls may be coming from a company variously called Regency Porcelain, Regent Porcelain, Regent China etc. If so then they are well known to Trading Standards Officers - 'nuf said! (Other companies with similar names exist.)

The people who call (probably from a call centre in the Philippines) claim to be calling from Limoges, France but simple questioning shows that they have little knowledge of world geography, or even the name of Limoges railway station! Your webmaster was "lucky" enough to speak to a real Frenchman just once! Perhaps he was there for the day giving the other call centre staff instruction, as it has been genuine Asian "French" callers ever since!

If YOU get a call we would be extremely grateful if you would tell us where and when the "event" they are advertising is. They will tell you that if you go you will get a bottle of "real" French wine, a plate and a Christmas cracker wrist watch as an incentive, so you simply MUST attend! ;-) PLEASE let us know anything that you can find out from these callers and we will pass it on.

We have a local BBCtv News film crew on standby too - might be an enjoyable event!

Please contact the webmasters URGENTLY if you can help.

VILLAGE ACCESS GRADUALLY RETURNING TO NORMAL

Live daylight picture of the Ludwell crossroads

10" of snow affected the village!

Update Friday With the thaw comes soggy and saturated ground but village life is returning to normal following the heavy snow falls earlier in the week.

MAJOR TELEPHONE FAULT HITS DANE HILL EXCHANGE

Villagers woke on the morning of Sunday 13th December 2009 to find that most could not contact the outside world by phone. Whilst many people still had an internet connection nobody could make or receive calls from beyond the local area.

Whilst some local calls worked as usual, if your call was for Haywards Heath or London you could forget it! Mobile phones of course do not work well or in many cases at all in this area due to the lack of cellular masts. All in all it was rather like being back in the 1950s - but then of course there was a phone box on the green.

When villagers managed to get through to the BT fault reporting service it tested the lines and said that nothing was wrong or alternatively the phone was in use and was working normally - such is the modern world where computerised testing replaces human beings!

Services were restored for some villagers at lunchtime and the rest of the village got its services back later on Sunday.

An evening back in the 1990s

A broadband "outage" affected much of the village on Tuesday evening cutting off connections and returning us to how it was in the last century. Computer users had to look out their old dial-up cables to get on line and connect to the internet, hearing again the beep-beep that was so familiar long ago.

It is perhaps a sign of the times that at HorstedKeynes.Com our phone hardly stopped ringing as people were astounded that such a thing could happen and wanted reassurance that it "wasn't just them".

Of course broadband is now used for so much more than web surfing, and people who had subscribed to the BT television on demand as well as those who use an internet radio found themselves completely without service.

Connections were restored on Wednesday morning. The affect on the village birth rate has not yet been determined!

Controlled explosion follows Jefferies "Explosives" find

Large area of village evacuated - Many roads closed

TV and video crews invade the village!

By a quarter past five it was all over!

Updated  8 February 2009

A Bomb Disposal Squad have performed a controlled explosion in the field opposite Jefferies after finding a haul of ordinance in the home of a recently deceased security expert. Apparently a small quantity of Semtex was found amongst the haul which also included bullets and replica weapons.

Police, fire, ambulance, Red Cross, the council emergency officer and just about every other emergency service took over a large part of the village, and blue tape went up to block local roads just after 2p.m. 

Villagers from a 200 metre radius were evacuated ("take your pets with you") and asked to go to the Village Hall until the bomb disposal team could attend. Apparently there was a problem finding the key to the Village Hall (we think that there may have been confusion between the Martindale and the Village Hall) so some residents instead settled down in the Green Man! Apparently a few older people were taken to the Claire Hall in Haywards Heath to protect them from the intense cold and snow.

Just after 5p.m. a very loud bang and a cloud of earth and sand signalled the end to the emergency and villagers were able to return home in time for a late tea!

www.boardinsight.co.uk Management Potential

 Advertising on Horstedkeynes.Com

Local residents, societies and similar may have an advert on the village web site without charge - if you make money out of it though we would hope to get something back to help towards our hosting costs. The amount is entirely up to you. Businesses may of course advertise here too but we would have to negotiate a payment of some sort up front. Nothing too onerous, but we do have to pay for our hosting costs!

Lineage copy will be reproduced as received in our choice of format, subject to normal acceptance conditions for propriety, length, etc. We reserve the right to remove lineage adverts after a month or two, if you want them to remain longer please remember to get in touch. If you sell the item quickly we would greatly appreciate your letting us know so that we can keep our pages up to date.

Display adverts should conform to the standard internet sizes. This is to make sure that adverts can be swapped about by our server without the pages going "askew". There is a good article here which gives the standard web sizes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_ads .

We would be happy to design and advise on your advert upoon request and again subject to some sort of recompense. The site gets nearly 60,000 hits each month, about 45% new visitors and we are linked from many large web sites including several recommendations from the BBC.! Your advert will therefore be seen by many people, however a  majority are from overseas, particularly Canada and the USA so your local event might need to be advertised elsewhere too!

Finally, as we are at the very top of the first page on some Google searches you can be guaranteed that your web site (if the address is included in the advert) will be added to the Google database with a high rank. This can be the quickest way to get on Google and we are prepared to offer a short term front page link for this purpose. Charges on request and far less than professional internet promoters charge!

January 2009 - website hosting changes now completed

After some delays we have now completed the change of host server for this web site. As far as you are concerned there should be no noticeable difference to the service that you receive from HorstedKeynes.Com - if you do notice anything wrong please let us know.

The new host arrangement does have an advantage in that we can now store 20 times more data on line than we have previously. If you are local and think that you might be able to use some of our extra storage capacity please get in touch. For example in the past we were running at 98% of our maximum capacity and have had to refuse requests to add lots of extra pictures to this site - we can now be much more flexible as our storage has been increased to 1GByte. There is still one restriction which we have had to keep to save us money - as many of you will be aware, with some major exceptions, WE still pay for most of this web site hosting. Therefore to keep our costs down we are still somewhat restricted in how MUCH data can actually pass to the host server in any month. This means that while we can now be more flexible if you want to use a lot of our storage space we may still have to limit your usage if you want to upload a lot of data at once.

ALL the above restrictions are for UPLOADS, please feel free to look at and DOWNLOAD from this site as much as you like. ;-) Please get in touch if you have any ideas about how we can carry the web site forward.

If you happen to be interested here are some more details.

When you ask your computer to show you a web page you don't actually get it from our computer in the village. You actually get the pages from a server which may be situated quite literally anywhere - in our case it happens to be in Docklands, London. We upload the 120 pages on this web site to this server where they are stored and you get the info from there. This means that we don't have to leave our computers switched on all the time and also means that more than one person can access the site at a time. Rather handy considering that at busy times there are often a dozen or more people browsing at the same time!

Since setting up our site we have used a company called Clara.Net as hosts. They were at the time we set up competitive and have proved very reliable, the site is almost never unavailable. However now that this site is so busy Clara.Net were proving to be less competitive. They give us just 3 Gig of transfers each month which was fine in dial up days but is now nowhere near enough so we have to pay an extra fee almost every month to cover the extra downloads. Remember as we have told you often enough although one or two people contribute to our costs we pay for this site ourselves. Because of these limits we have had to turn down requests from villagers wanting to put space intensive things (like pictures) on the site. WE would have had to pay for the extra data used and we just can't afford the money! There is also a limit on how often we can upload data to the site - we pay for both ways remember! This is one of the reasons why we decided to make the site of historical interest - less changes!

Now whilst we have more storage there is still a restriction on the total transferred each month but things are a lot less stressed than they were before!

Some good power news

We have been criticised for only giving negative news, well you know the old story "Man Bites Dog" is news, "Dog Bites Man" is not! However we are pleased to report that the night of February 29th was one of the stormiest for a long time yet we did not suffer a single power outage! So it's "well done" to E.D.F. for keeping village lights alight. Perhaps the recent spate of power line tree cutting helped?

Crown Inn sold - Press Report

We are pleased to announce that the Crown has been sold and is to reopen as a pub in the near future. Now let's get that plastic down! More details soon. If the new owners would like to give us some firm info we would be delighted to pass it on to the village. It beats a natter outside the Post office anytime. ;-)

VILLAGE RUNS DRY TWICE IN ONE WEEK

The freezing weather not only disturbed travel arrangements this week. After being without water earlier this week when a leak was fixed, taps in Horsted Keynes again started to run dry on Saturday night when workmen set to repairing a leak that had been fountaining out of the road near Ludwell Grange for several days.

As soon as this leak was cured early on Sunday morning and full pressure restored, another part of the same pipe literally blew a hole in a field a hundred metres away near Medhurst Farm.

This meant that the village was without a mains water supply for the whole of Sunday. On what must have been expected to be one of the busiest days of the year The Green Man was forced to close, as was the British Legion.

Supplies started to return just after 6 p.m. on Sunday evening and are now back to normal.

South Eastern Water recorded contact details

More lightning on the Green!
June 23 2007

After the Crown strike another of the remaining Horsted Keynes hostelries was attacked by the elements today. The British Legion was near the centre of yet another lightning strike which came out of an almost blue sky. It seems that this time it was telephone lines rather than the power cables that were hit as with little warning a massive bang could be heard all over the village. Electrical items and computers took the brunt as they suddenly came to a halt at about 2.30 on Saturday afternoon. Fortunately there was no structural damage reported.

Is someone, somewhere trying to tell HK drinkers something or is it all a sinister plot by B.T. ? ;-)

New BBC Show Heir Hunters Features Former Horsted Keynes Resident

A new daytime programme to be shown on BBC1 will feature a former Horsted Keynes resident Clive Mussen. The programme Heir Hunters covers people throughout the UK who have died intestate - without leaving a will - and looks for their relatives who might be about to inherit a small (or large) fortune.

We understand that Clive Mussen has left property in the centre of the village and so far no relatives have come to light.

UPDATE

The series was shown on BBC1 at 9-15a.m. starting on June 4th. 2007 however  in the end there was no mention of Clive or his former home. Perhaps this is because the Government reportedly got the cash this time?

February 7th 2007 - Hosepipe ban lifted at last!

South-Eastern Water lifted their 18 month hosepipe ban today. 'Bout time too! This means that all areas of the village can once again wash their cars and water their greenhouses. Let's hope they don't reinstate a ban the first time that the sun shines on the village green.

 RAVING MAD?
(Updated Wednesday 14th. June)

An all night "Rave" caused much consternation last Saturday night - it could be heard as far away as Ardingly, Lindfield and Haywards Heath!

There is now a news report on the BBC web site about the rave. One interesting point is that the police say that they broke the rave up at about 2a.m. All together now... "Oh no they didn't!". We could certainly hear the thumping until well after dawn. Perhaps the police broke up a different rave?! ;-)

Another question worth asking is if it is Mid-Sussex Council's responsibility to act on this disturbance then why do they not have 24 hour "noise patrols" like other areas?

We received the following email just as things were breaking up and before the full facts emerged. Some of the comments are therefore still justified, while others may need to be modified as fuller information emerges....(Due to developments of news we have unusually decided to remove the entry)

Could the village centre do with some fixed public lighting?

More than 100 years ago they used to hang oil lanterns and candles from the trees whenever there was an event at the church so that villagers could walk down the hill without falling into the hedge! Indeed we are told that there are still some of the hangers on the old trees in Church Lane if you know where to look. At the recent carol service there were many people walking down the lane holding lanterns and torches as the way was quite dark despite there being a full moon.

It's now nearly 2006 and perhaps time to consider a few strategically placed street lights again - this time we could use electricity instead of oil! Following requests from local residents we have decided to ask your opinions on the matter.

We do appreciate that Horsted Keynes is one of the few places between London and the coast where it is still really dark at night, and many residents want it to stay that way without the dreadful orange glow that can be seen on the horizon. Clearly some of the people who are suggesting a change are newcomers to rural living who have not been brought up to store a well charged torch by their front door!

On the other hand it is possible that a few more people might park at the top of the hill and walk down to the church instead of blocking Church Lane with their cars if they could see their way more clearly at night. (We did say possible - that's all ;-)

Anyway, we have been asked to solicit comments, so ask you to have a think about it and let us know your views. Obviously you could instead have a chat with your local Parish Councillor if you prefer the old non-electronic way of passing on your thoughts!

We try to publish all comments received but cannot guarantee this as the web site is run as an unpaid hobby rather than a business. As usual we will use your name or nickname unless you specifically ask us to keep your comment annonymous.

As a rate paying village resident I wondered if there might be any other residents out there interested in getting some attractive street lighting down the village high street? I twisted my ankle so badly this summer on the dark high street that it's not been the same since. Other residents I've spoken to say they'd love to go down to the local pub if it wasn't for walking in the pitch black. The local pub and shop would surely benefit from some extra trade from residents enjoying a lit walk to their venue? I feel the high street would look so much more beautiful and welcoming. Let's admit, lovely as HK is, isn't it feeling a trifle dead? The ghostly Crown doesn't help much I know.   Could you put this idea to residents on your website and get some kind of petition going? Not to scare them off though with the idea of dreadful neon lights, but the attractive old fashioned variety. What do you think?   Yours sincerely Sonia Knox

Hi I would vote NO on this one unless there is clear evidence that people are being injured  ( Although I have now lived here for 16 years, I had never previously lived anywhere without street lights  - However the lack of lighting never bothered me. Indeed it rather adds to the charm of the place). A more useful ( and cheaper ) safety measure might be to persuade the parents of young children that Church lane is a public road and not an extension of the School playground! Regards Trev

34 New Houses in Hamsland?

UPDATE, May 2006: We understand the development will not take place - for now! More details soon.

On the South Eastern edge of our village lies Hamsland, an estate built in the former fields adjoining the mansion of that name. Half way along this road is St. Stephen’s Catholic Church and behind this is a field.  

It seems that Mid Sussex District Council have put this (literally) green field site on a list of areas where new housing could be developed. You can read all about it here.

As can be imagined residents in the area are not too keen on having 34 houses built where they now have uninterrupted views across the Sussex countryside and have raised the matter vociferously at Council level. One of their main objections seems to be that the inclusion of this field has not been widely publicised (although we understand that specific public objections will be sought in the future).

We will try to keep you abridged of developments but in the mean time should you wish to comment on the proposal as it now stands we will be pleased to add them to this page.

Emails to the usual address please.

As residents most affected by this proposal, we have been looking at the MSDC website again to check on developments and notice that a list of objections is now available. http://www.midsussex.gov.uk/Nimoi/sites/msdcpublic/resources/022%20-%20GF04.pdf What is causing us concern and anger is that the Parish Council appears to be in support of the development:  Council recognises the need for affordable housing, and that there are limited sites available. Development of this site should be considered, but there are a number of issues that should be addressed. Parish Council supports further consideration of the site, but believes the number of houses proposed would create unacceptable traffic, and that the development should only be considered if a much lower housing density is agreed. We cannot but think that there is an ulterior motive behind this, possibly in using the possible development as ammunition against the Freshfield Tip. In any case, we feel that the Parish Council is not in tune with the thoughts of local residents, as we never received a reply to our first letter to them last July. Perhaps it is time again to raise this matter on the website so that people in the village are aware of what is happening.  Regards – David Cotterill/Len Walton

WOW - Horsted Keynes live on the BBC!

We are delighted to announce that the BBC have selected Horsted Keynes as one of the most photogenic places in the UK and they are now taking our live web camera pictures so that visitors to their site (which is the largest web site in the UK and one of the largest in the world) can see up to date pictures of our beautiful Sussex village. This will of course bring the name Horsted Keynes to the attention of readers and viewers all over the world!

Whilst we are showing the best pictures that we can from our location, there are two things that would make this service complete. These are two windowsills, one overlooking the village green, and another looking out on Horsted Keynes station. How about it, do you have somewhere suitable? You would need a broadband internet connection but we'd provide the special cameras which don't need a computer to run and wouldn't interfere with your normal internet use at all.

Please email us if you can help.

If you'd like to see the new cameras that we are using take a look here.

PLEASE DO NOT STEAL OUR WORK!

If this web site was a book that you had written and you found that a local book shop was selling off photocopies with a different authors name on the cover you would be a little miffed, wouldn't you? This web site contains more than 50Meg of material most of which is unavailable anywhere else in this form and which has taken us literally years of work to compile. The fact that it is published on a computer is immaterial.

Lately we have found several cases of sites (mostly larger than ourselves) stealing our source material just to make their half empty pages look better. In one case more than 100k (that's probably 30 A4 size pages of text) have been found on another site - complete with our grammatical and spelling errors - now corrected. It just forgot to mention that we wrote the material! This is not only unfair it is illegal.

When we do a picture search for Horsted Keynes things are even worse; we see photographs from this site all over the internet! Let's make this 100% clear - if you find a photograph on the internet you cannot just right click it and then put it on your own web site. Photographs (up to a certain age anyway) are copyright and reproduction is illegal. Without exception if we have found a recent photo that we think might look good on these web pages we ASK FIRST. Usually people are honoured to help (as are we) but occasionally we get stonewalled. That's life!

As our site gets bigger and the village gets better known, more visitors will come to us both electronically and in person, so we are determined to make HorstedKeynes.Com the best village site in the UK. To do this we have to publish content that is both exclusive and accurate. This won't happen if out of date, unchecked, material is available all over the internet.

Here is our final warning. We now have a copyright lawyer who lives locally and has offered us free use of her services. Warning emails have been sent to the miscreants (sorry, copyright thieves) and if the theft continues we WILL sue and claim damages. You have been warned!

The silly thing is as we say at the foot of every page. Other web sites are welcome to use our material free of charge, as long as they ask first and acknowledge us as the original authors of the material! In this way we can advise them of amendments and updates, it's not much to ask, is it?

If YOU see our work (that's pictures or text) on other web sites please do let us know. As far as we are aware we have not lifted a single sentence from another web site without permission (except addresses and 'phone numbers which we copy and paste for accuracy), so if the text is the same or the pictures seem familiar, it's probably been "borrowed" from us!

Please email copyright@horstedkeynes.com with the address where you saw the information. We will take a look and in most cases can confirm with 100% accuracy whether it's our work or not. You may remain anonymous or give us your name as you wish. We won't contact you back unless you say that we can, and your name would never be mentioned publicly in form.

Thanks,
Your webmasters.

p.s. ANYONE may provide a link to this site without asking first. If you do link to us (and let us know) we will link back to you, this will boost both our ratings as we are at or near the top of many search engines!

Recently retired gentleman who regularly drives to Europe - can I help you?
Special urgent service delivering and collecting from Sussex to Europe

As the above heading says I regularly have occasion to travel with my large estate car to France, Belgium, Holland, Germany etc. I have often thought that my spare "capacity" might be used to someone else's advantage and help cover my travelling expenses. I am also prepared to travel specially for an urgent job.

Perhaps delivering or collecting where some "intelligence" is required or even using my experience as an electronics engineer where technical skill is required. How about obtaining a signature and returning urgently? Perhaps to meet your client or even just picking up some beer on the way back (subject of course to the current legislation!).

There must be times when you wished that someone with a bit of intelligence could "go over there now" to act for you. I have a lot of experience driving in Europe and living locally in Mid-Sussex as well as being a Eurotunnel "regular traveller" means that in an emergency I can claim a ticket on the very next shuttle and therefore be driving on the European road network within a couple of hours of leaving Mid - Sussex. Naturally driving a private vehicle means that I am not subject to commercial vehicle driving restrictions.

If you think there might be any way that we might be able to help each other do please drop an email to europe -at- horstedkeynes dot com. Written that way so that the address isn't used for spam, so you'll have to type the email address into your browser in the normal @ way.

I look forward to hearing from you. No obligation either way.

If you worked for Eric Walker Film Projection and Public Address Services Ltd. ...... (rest of posting deleted)

Contact now established. Isn't the internet wonderful? ;-)

Narrow gauge railway in East Grinstead

Exactly 700 years since William Wallace's Death
We love anniversaries and it won't have escaped your notice that Scottish patriot William Wallace was put to death on August 23, 1305, exactly 700 years ago. This should be recognised as a holiday, especially in Scotland. (Please don't try and understand why this is here, it's just too complicated to explain! ;-)