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Please don't moan if your news or event isn't mentioned. If
you don't tell us then we can't
tell everyone else!
Are you
interested in all things ‘garden’?
If so, why not join our new gardening club open to everyone from
beginners to the most experienced. The plan is to meet up once a month,
to exchange plants and information and the odd glass of wine while
admiring/talking about all things horticultural. Please contact
mhents03@hotmail.com or ring
01825 791543 and, depending on numbers interested, we will aim to set up
our first ‘get-together’ before the end of this summer! Contact: Mary
Ellen Hentschel
ROAD CLOSED - BUT WHICH ONE?
May 2019
Last week residents received a letter from Balfour Beatty
saying that Cinder Hill Lane Horsted Keynes would be closed from 9am to 4pm
Monday to Friday for road repairs. Today they have blocked Waterbury Hill
with 2 containers and a portable garage! There are ROAD CLOSED signs and
diversions. We understand that Waterbury Hill and part of Cinder Hill Lane
will remain closed 24/7 until at least the end of this month. More details
soon...
Horsted Keynes end
Industrial estate end
Beside Station Approach
The road is actually closed from the south end of Waterbury Hill to the
industrial estate (marked Cinder Hill Clinic on the map).
There is also work going on the road down to the school.
September 24th 2018
Village virtually cut off from Haywards Heath!
The WSCC map shows the problem of two closed roads.
Exactly one year since the previous time when the new water main burst
the road to Haywards Heath has been closed in exactly the same place by
exactly the same thing. The new high pressure mains have burst yet again -
that will be the FOURTH time they have failed!
Unfortunately this time Monteswood Lane is also being closed so the village
is virtually cut off from it's main shopping and travelling centre. When
your webmaster contacted South East Water, who are responsible for the mess, he eventually received the comment
that the road needs to "settle" before it can be reopened.
Last time the bus was able to travel via Monteswood Lane
but this was due to close on 1st October for 15 days to clear up the mess
caused by the hot summer breaking the road surface. Unfortunately it seems
the road has been closed early - 24 September 2018.
At the time of writing it is not known if the bus service to Haywards
Heath will be able to run as the only way round now is under "Gerald's
Bridge" the smallest in Sussex and used in the famous 1970's AA road
advert. This is too small to let a single deck bus pass. Local children were
hoping for a few extra days holiday, while local workers are having to re
plan their way to get to and from the station. What a mess.
"Gerald's Bridge" Remember the advert?
March 24th 2017 Road
signs removed
WSCC did a splendid job removing two damaged road signs
at the bottom end of Sugar Lane this morning, it only taking them an hour to
arrive.
Because of an "accident" (yet another driver going too
fast to negotiate cross roads after closing time) both the Give Way and the
road name signs were extensively damaged. No sign of the offending vehicle
of course!
Let's hope that WSCC are as quick to replace the Give Way
sign as the road markings are very worn there so drivers get little advance
warning of the hazard at present.
Why is the Main Road
to Haywards Heath still closed?
You see before you Keysford Lane, the main bus and car
route between Horsted Keynes and Haywards Heath. Last Saturday South East
Water repaired a leak which you can just about see on the road surface - yet another and the second just this year. They then
closed the road with a few signs and went home. You can see how small the road damage was, it
didn't even extend across half a carriageway or a
quarter of the total road width on a straight section, wouldn't a barrier or temporary traffic lights have
sufficed?
The road stayed closed and villagers were forced to
travel an extra 4 miles each way all week. The school bus was late,
villagers were delayed and there were several near misses on the totally
inadequate diversion route. The road surface has been badly damaged by the
heavy lorries using the diversion by the way. So why did this happen when as
you can see from above that the road damage was very slight - your webmaster
has seen larger potholes!
It seems that the road surface was reinstated
late on
Wednesday - quite why it took 3 days to put down a couple of bags of mastic
is anyone's guess but then the job was again simply forgotten. South East
Water had obtained a road closure order which expires on Friday so why
should they rush?
Your webmaster - and several of his
neighbours - have been in contact with South East Water but they just seem
uninterested assuming that somebody else was dealing with it! Yes the girls in
the call centre are sympathetic but it's not them who are paying for an
extra 8 miles fuel on every journey is it? That means that a person who is
run to and picked up from the station will have travelled an extra 80 miles
this week! What about the extra pollution, and the cost?
We would
naturally be happy to publish any justification that South East Water can
produce here, in the mean time, as you can see from the tyre marks, some
people are simply ignoring the Road Closed signs!.
NOT a paid advertisement - your
webmasters personal view
BT CALL
PROTECT - HOW TO FINALLY DEAL WITH UNWANTED SALES CALLS
We seem to get more sales calls in this area than most
others - probably because we are seen as "rich" around here! We used to
get at least 3 or 4 dud calls a day but for the past week we have received
just one! Why and how?
If you use BT as your phone supplier they now have a
new service called "BT Call Protect" - it's free and it actually works! It
seems that BT have at last come up with a scheme that does not deny them
income (the real reason why they have been so reluctant to set up a
working scheme before) but it stops your home phone from constantly
ringing!
The basic scheme if absolutely free so let me explain
how this works.
BT have for a long time known who the scammers are but
as I said they did not want to stop their calls as it would deny BT income
as they get money from every call that is put through - even from
overseas VOIP calls. What happens now is calls that are definitely scam
(those that dial thousands of numbers each hour) are diverted to your
personal "Junk voice mail" folder. This records any calls that are scams
and you can listen to them when you want (as if!). If a call does get
through to your phone - we received our first today from a small company
who claimed to not have heard of the TPS - then you dial 1572 and their
number is automatically blocked. The system even followers scam callers
around and still blocks them if they change their phone number - clever!
This free scheme works for most people but if you want
to pay about £2 a month there are extra features available (for example
making certain numbers "white" so that they always get though
and a "Do not disturb" system). We don't
think this is really worth it - but that's up to you.
So how do you subscribe to BT Call Protect? BT have not
made it as simple as they might but what you need to do is log onto your
account via the BT web site and add it as a new Call Feature there. You
will need to know your account number to do this. We think BT should have
made it very simple to join by just getting you to ring a certain number
to enrol in the free scheme, this would make it easy for older people for
example.
All in all the scheme seems to be working well for now - time will
tell if the scammers find a way round the new system and our phone starts
ringing every time I get in the bath!
Our personal report with some details redacted showing no less than 14 blocked calls in the past few
days!
July 1st 2015
100F IN HORSTED
KEYNES TODAY!
The HorstedKeynes.Com weather station which automatically
reports to the Met Office recorded a temperature of 37.78c which is just
100F at 18:30 this evening! We think the sudden increase may be due to
people watering their gardens, as it was teetering at about 96F all
afternoon. More soon.
A new phone scam has just started in our area. You get a
call or calls from the above number - actually it's from Asia and the number
has been faked but we will
pass over that for now. The first calls can be silent and can be repeated,
it's just a way of annoying you.
Exactly 30 seconds later you receive a call from a very
helpful person - also from Asia but of course pretending to have a very English name.
This second person just "happens" to ring you from
"The National Do Not Call Register" or "The
Telephone Call Organisation" or a similar made up organisation name and they say they are
conducting a survey into nuisance calls.
When they hear that you often receive annoying calls
(of course you do it was them who made the calls in the first place!) they offer to
stop all such future calls by sending you a device to fit to your
telephone line at a "cost price" of about £100. This price is
negotiable and they will go down if you are reluctant to bite.
Eventually you receive a small box in the post from China. It is
about the size of two matchboxes and has s single phone wire sticking out of
it which you plug into a spare phone socket and hopefully forget. There are
no instructions so that you have nothing to remind you that its there. After
a few days just sitting there, and certainly not stopping any sales calls
the box starts to automatically dial out to expensive premium rate
numbers. You know nothing about this of course until you get your phone
bill. Even then you may not realise that this box is responsible and may go
down the phone company route of accusing everybody who has access to your
home including your children. It can get quite nasty - the hackers don't
care.
Oh the premium rate numbers are also of course owned by
the same scammer organisation - get the idea?
We will point out
here the threat of fitting any unknown device to your phone line as well as
of giving someone from the other side of the world your bank or credit card details and
would simply suggest that you AVOID answering calls from any unknown number as
this is the call that seems to start the whole process.
There are a growing number of messages on the internet about this
new scam and we are still looking into it but do, please be careful because
IF the device turns up - if you are lucky you may just receive an empty box
with a wire on the end (which is
the best scenario as all you will have lost is your original money) but far worse is the
active device that makes hundreds of chargeable calls to expensive overseas premium rate
numbers.
Obviously as you plugged the box into your phone line
these calls all came from your line and you are therefore totally
responsible for them! Indeed if you don't pay your phone can be cut off!
Many people think that you need a phone to initiate a phone call - you do
NOT!
We think that you will be hearing a LOT more of this
nasty new scam in the future. Beware and NEVER fit any device to your phone
line - or plug anything into your computer -
if you don't understand exactly what it is for. We expect to have people making
sobbing interviews on TV soon saying that they did not realise that they
were responsible for the multi thousand pound phone bill that they have just
received and expecting the phone companies (that's you and me) to pay for
them. We do in this case have some slight sympathy as the police and other
organisations do not seem interested but it should be obvious that it is a
scam really. That is why we are urging people to tell their aged relatives
who may be less technically savvy.
UPDATE Sunday 21st June, We
have just seen one of these boxes which had started dialling out (to who
knows where?). It seems that the internal clock had been set wrongly as it
was tying up the customers phone line during the daytime instead of what was
probably intended to ring out at night. When they picked up their phone they
kept hearing two girls talking in a foreign
language which rather confirms our suspicions. Looking inside the box there were two
micro chips with the identities rubbed off. We really need to get hold of
one of these boxes so that it can be investigated by a competent authority
as the memory will hold the numbers that it dials and that may be a clue to
the organisation behind the scam.
Please warn aged parents
etc and NEVER attach anything to your phone line if you don't know exactly
what it is all about! The householder had paid £120 for the box and still
awaits their phone bill with some trepidation!
WORST POWER OUTAGE FOR
26 YEARS AFFECTS HORSTED KEYNES VILLAGERS OVER CHRISTMAS
Updated 31st December 2013
A garden trampoline blown onto power cables in Ketches Lane.
A solitary engineer was roistered to deal with this incident, driving his
own car and armed with just a screwdriver and some boltcutters!
We are sorry that this news update has taken so long to
arrive on the internet but like most other villagers we have been without
mains power over the Christmas period.
Many villagers without home generators were forced to
throw their Christmas food away as the outages went on for more than 48
hours in some instances. One villager complained that the electricity kept
coming and going which meant food that was partially cooked had to be thrown
away too.
We do want to make one comment. That is that very, very
few villagers bothered to telephone UK Power Networks 0800 783 8866 to tell
them that their power was off especially when it went off for a second time. Now the way that their
repair work is prioritised is
that outages covering the largest number of homes are dealt with first.
Your webmasters were the only people in our road to
bother to report when the power went off for a second time (caused by a
completely different fault) which meant that in our corner of the village
power was not restored until Christmas Day afternoon. Had others reported it
we are told that we WOULD have been reconnected earlier. Please bear this in mind, next time!
We have to add that one of the casualties of the power
cut was the computer that had faithfully uploaded our web camera and weather
forecast reports. This has had to be replaced together with the
uninterruptible power supply unit. We will try to keep this new unit on line
but only the weather, and UK Power Networks can tell for how long that will
be!
December 31st
We have noticed that our lights have been dim since Christmas Day and first
reported the fact to UK Power Networks late on Christmas afternoon. Since
them we have telephoned several times to little effect. This afternoon,
after we formally reported the fault again yesterday, the voltage suddenly
dropped, to a little over 170 Volts, which instantly blew the power supply
on our server computer, this despite it being connected through an
uninterruptible power supply.
Yet another server power supply is on order, in the mean time we are using
an old laptop which can only be switched on for a half hour at a time. So
since Christmas we have had to obtain a new computer server, a new
uninterruptible power supply and just now order yet another computer power
supply!
It's all getting rather expensive and a little beyond a joke!
Exercise classes at The Martindale Centre
Monday 7.45 PM – High Energy Fat Burning Workout
Thursday 9.45 AM – Body Conditioning
Saturday 9.15AM – Mixed Circuit Training
For more information please call Lisa Moore 01825
791711
SWIMMING LESSONS IN
HORSTED KEYNES
Adult
and Child swimming lessons
Toddler and
Pre-School lessons
Small classes held
in a warm, private pool in the village
Fully qualified,
CRB checked, insured.
For more
information please call Diane on 01444 248482
COLD WEATHER AT LAST!
Photo: Chris Philpot
After what can only be described as a mild winter so
far we thought that we might have got away with it, but the village
awoke to find itself shivering under a think blanket of show on Sunday
5th February.
An overnight fall of 5 inches left side roads icy and difficult to
drive. Pavements were of course extremely slipper. The Sunday papers
didn't make it until later in the morning but a snow plough managed to
clear the bus route later in the day.
With winds coming straight from Siberia a hard freeze was
forecast to return for the rest of the week with more snow expected. Now let's just take a look at the
central heating oil level!
COLDEST NIGHT OF
THE YEAR - SO FAR!
Temperatures sank to the lowest so fat this winter
on the night of 10th February when the cold reached -11c. More cold
weather is forecast.
New Vodafone
mast live in the area?
As you will know we are not well served by mobile phones
in this area. We have reports that Vodafone signals have dramatically
increased in the area possibly from a new mast in Sharpthorne. If anyone has
firm details we are sure that other villagers would be interested to hear.
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...
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!
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!
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? ;-)
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! ;-)
