Items we throw away such as bed, television, clothes, furniture, printer, toys, sofa and computer can pass to someone in your community.

Recycling is an effective way to cut down on the use of these limited resources as well as promoting community involvement in the process.

If you haven't heard yet, there is wonderful organization called Free Give Group ( http://www.freegive.co.uk ). Free Give Group connects people who are giving and getting unwanted items for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills and, at the same time, helping someone in your community by gifting them the item you no longer need. Another benefit of using Freegive is that it encourages poeple to get rid of junk that we no longer need and promote community involvement in the process. By using Freegive, not only are you able to get rid of your item with the minimum of fuss; you will also be doing your part in stopping another reusable item ending up in a landfill. It's completely free to join and everything posted must be free.

Visit Lambeth Free Give Group at http://www.freegive.co.uk/p/lambeth.htm

Freegive group is active in all London boroughs. Find a group near you at http://www.freegive.co.uk/londonfg.htm

This is a great idea! Encouraging people to reuse and recycle things by giving them away and not sending them to the garbage bin!

I think freegive ( http://www.freegive.co.uk ) is a great way to build a bond in the community and it's always good to recycle. I think it's a fantastic idea and everyone should join!

Came up from Dorset for a party on a Friday night, never having been to the Mint bar before. What a treat! Fantastic atmosphere, great service, amazing music, this place had it all! Best night out in years. Cheers guys, you were all great!
Jenny

Hi, I'm just wondering if there is anyone who considers themselves a good cook?! I'm sure there's plenty in Streatham

I'm looking for people that can make good bread, cakes, cheese, dairy products, and who would be interested in making a small quantity on a weekly basis for a new enterprise.

regards
Keith Watson

The Roadhouse Restaurant is very famous in Covent Garden for American food! You can get American dinner on the side of an expansive bar floor. Seriously you will find here the cheapest drinks then anywhere in Covent Garden! The tables can be booked in advance and you can book your table from [url]http://covent-garden.fluidrestaurantguide.co.uk[/url] site! The average price per head is really cheaper! You must visit here so that you can enjoy your valuable time!

StretahamLife.co.uk is planning a website rebuild later this year. We would like to hear from you with your suggestions on how we could improve the website as part of this rebuild.

Regards,

Dan

Webmaster

Just thought I would add this as a follow up. This is my solution to all the orange bags sprawled across peoples gardens and streets as well as providing a good reason for the council not to have to root through my rubbish every week. Quite simply you have one colour bin for rubbish and one for recycling. What could be easier?

Paul Merton is a British actor, deadpan comedian and writer, who is best known as a panellist on Have I Got News For You and Just a Minute on BBC Radio 4 and as the host of Room 101.

Born Paul Martin in the Parsons Green area of London, he gained his earliest professional credits under that name. On joining Equity he found that the name Paul Martin was already taken, so he renamed himself after Merton, the district of London where he grew up. Merton's Father was a train driver on the London Underground and his Mother was a nurse. When his Mother returned to work, Paul and his younger sister were looked after by their grandfather who lived with them in their council flat. He often claims that he was inspired to go into comedy at a young age watching clowns at a circus, remembering "I had no idea that adults could behave like that." He failed his eleven-plus, and famously received an unclassified grade for metal work at CSE before moving on to Wimbledon College just as it became comprehensive.

After leaving school, Merton worked at the Tooting Employment Office for ten years. Though he had harboured serious ambitions of becoming a performing comedian since his school days, it was not until April 1982, at the Comedy Store in Soho that his dream was realised. He recalls that, on only his second or third night, he found the dour role that was to inform his comic approach ever since.

One of these early routines at the Comedy Store involved the report of a policeman who had been given a hallucination drug. This routine was very popular and went on to be included in his television series. Merton recalls "I walked all the way home to my bed-sit in Streatham. I was on a cloud. And that one night got me through every single bad gig after that - and there were a lot of them. I was so lucky to get that encouragement early on. It kept me going over the next eighteen months of just dying the whole time."

In 1986, while performing on the Fringe in Edinburgh, he was mugged while helping a friend put up posters. He was kicked in the head and had to go to hospital. A year later, Merton returned to Edinburgh. His one-man show was receiving very good reviews. However, while playing football with fellow comedians, he broke his leg, and whilst in hospital, he suffered a pulmonary embolism and contracted hepatitis A. He lost the £3,000 he had paid up front for the theatre and would have been in worse trouble had the Comedy Store not held a benefit for him.

His breakthrough as a television performer came as a result of the improvised comedy show Whose Line Is It Anyway? from 1988 onwards, which moved to TV from BBC Radio 4. Have I Got News For You started in 1990, and two series of his own sketch show Paul Merton: The Series followed soon after. Since 1999 he has been the host of Room 101, a chat show in which guests are offered the chance to discuss their pet hates and consign them to the oblivion of Room 101.

Shortly before becoming a household name on HIGNFY, Merton had suffered a mental breakdown and booked himself into Maudsley psychiatric hospital for six weeks, about which he has since talked frankly. He had begun to hallucinate conversations with friends.

He has been a member of the London improv group The Comedy Store Players since 1985, and still regularly performs with them.

After seven nominations for a BAFTA award for Best Entertainment Performance, Merton finally won the award in April 2003, ironically defeating fellow HIGNFY star Angus Deayton who had just recently been fired from the show.

Merton married the actress Caroline Quentin in 1990, but they separated in 1997. Merton's second wife, Sarah Parkinson, died on September 23, 2003, of breast cancer.

In 2003, he was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy. In The Comedian's Comedian, a 2005 Channel 4 poll of fellow comedians, he was voted the 20th funniest comedian in the universe.

http://www.comedy-zone.net/standup/comedian/m/merton-paul.htm

Now I am not new to recycling and can remember taking all the bottles and cans to Tesco's and separating them out according to colour back in the 80's.

Today things have moved on, and the council now offers a home collection service which involves collecting your recycling and putting it our in an bright orange plastic bag outside your house.

So far so good, but I have to admit that I am not that impressed with seeing a whole load of orange bags littered outside peoples houses, especially when all other types of rubbish merits a dustbin!

I suppose that is the price for saving the environment right? However, to complicate matters, the council then decide to collect normal rubbish and recycling on separate days of the week. Well, apart from the additional cost to council taxpayers of 2 separate collections a week it generally leads to one service or the other refusing to take away the rubbish because:

1. It is recycling
2. It is not recycling

For example, I recently put out some metal poles in a bag that had previously formed part of an Ikea wardrobe set. They were probably made of some sort of steel, and almost definately could probably be melted down and recycled. However, on the day they were supposed to be taken away, they were actually put in the bin by the recycling people and a sticker which read:

"WE CANNOT TAKE YOUR RECYCLING" This bag contains non-recyclable items.

i.e. because the items were not on the list of acceptable items. they were rejected. However, because the items were in a orange plastic bag, chance are they would not be taken by the normal service the following week either.

So you see, I am all for acting in an environmentally friendly way even if it involves a little more effort on my part to separate out my rubbish. However when it becomes a battle with the council to take your rubbish away, on top of the fact that it creates an eyesore of orange bags literally littered across the streets of Streatham in Lambeth, added to the fact that it probably costs more money to arrange two separate collections a week, not forgetting the fact that there is little or no tangible benefit to the recycler for their additional efforts (unlike other European countries where the emphasis is on manufacturer's to offer cash incentives for returning used bottles etc), I am afraid to say that I for one cannot see the benefit of continuing with this nightmare of a weekly routine.

If I am missing something here, please feel free to fill me in.

Here's another pic of the Water Tower taken on Conyer's Road.

For Ken Livingstone, today's defeat, (3rd May 2008) wrecks not just his dream of a third term at City Hal, it marks the end of an extraordinary era during which the boy from Streatham dominated London's landscape for nearly 30 years.

Ever since he started in politics as a Lambeth councillor in 1971, colleagues knew that Kenneth Robert Livingstone was a breed apart. Having left school to work briefly as a lab technician, he soon became a full-time politician and worked his way across the capital's Labour parties and up the ladder at the GLC.

Livingstone was born in Lambeth, the son of Ethel Ada (Kennard), a professional dancer, and Robert Moffat Livingstone, who was of Scottish descent and worked as a ship's master in the Merchant Navy. Livingstone has described his parents as "working class Tories".

Riding the crest of the Left-wing wave that flooded London in the late Seventies and early Eighties, his mastery at machine politics was never more in evidence than the "coup" that saw him take over at County Hall in 1981. Seen as a voter-friendly rising star by various socialist factions, he was made leader the day after Andrew Macintosh led Labour to a narrow victory over the Tories.

It was his battles with Margaret Thatcher that were most memorable, in particular his shrewd decision to hire an ad agency to campaign against the abolition of the GLC. Although the Prime Minister rammed through the closure of County Hall, Livingstone ran rings around her in persuading the public that they were losing their right to self-rule.

He switched his sights to Westminster in 1987 after winning Brent East but quickly found he had few friends in Parliament and was forced to give up his stated ambition of becoming Labour leader.

Ironically it was Tony Blair's decision to resurrect London government that gave Livingstone the second chance he needed.

Despite having earlier criticised the specific proposals for a new London-wide authority, Livingstone was widely tipped for the new post of Mayor. The mayoral election was scheduled for 2000, and in 1999, Labour began the long and trying process of selecting its candidate. Despite Blair's personal antipathy, Livingstone was included on Labour's shortlist in November 1999, having pledged that he would not run as an independent if he failed to secure the party's nomination. William Hague, then Leader of the Opposition taunted Blair at Prime Minister's Question Time: "Why not split the job in two, with Frank Dobson as your day mayor and Ken Livingstone as your nightmare?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Livingstone
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standar ... +cannier+enemy/article.do