Well, at least the world hasn't ended... (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

Well, at least the world hasn't ended...

1:47pm Wednesday 10th September 2008

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The title, if anyone is unsure, is a reference to the huge experiment going on underground on the Franco-Swiss border at this very moment, using the Large Hadron Collider, which may or may not cause a black hole that will swallow the earth. But on to less apocalyptic things.

The verdict is in and three of the eight alleged bomb plotters have been convicted, though not of the most serious charges against them.

It's been a trial fraught with absent jurors, disputed evidence and near-derailments, and now, two years after the initial arrests were made, it's still not over.

With these first convictions coming in, it's been a mad dash to gather together as much as we can for this week's paper, which meant everybody pitched in. While FCR (that's Fearless Chief Reporter) dug up background information from the stories we ran at the time, one senior went to the home of one of the plotters in Leyton and I went to Walthamstow where the supposed bomb factory was. It was a difficult and fairly fruitless hour or so in which I got only a few useable quotes, more than a few funny looks and had one threat of physical violence. It wasn't too serious - just a crazy and somewhat racist old guy - but a jolt nonetheless. I must admit, I didn't expect to have someone threaten to chop my head off in the middle of the day on a Tuesday, not least because my only crime was politely suggesting we might not be able to use his profanity-laden diatribe. Some people are just sensitive, I guess.

It's otherwise a pretty quiet bit of road. There are a few newsagents, some international supermarkets, two dry cleaners and almost all the other buildings are residential. And the reaction has been almost universal - no one ever suspected a thing or noticed anything remotely strange about the flat in which the now famous "martyr videos" were filmed and where a production line of liquid bombs was allegedly housed. They never wondered what might be going on behind that seemingly innocuous front door. And now that the truth is out, they're keen to go back to that quiet, blissfully ignorant existence. If there's a bomb factory next door, they'd rather not know about it.

In other news, I've been spending my time muck-raking (more or less literally) with a series of stories about the rather shoddy state of the borough's streets. Kier Street Services, as most people probably know, took over in June and since then, they've had no end of bother. Streets are going unswept, fly-tipped rubbish is strewn about left, right and centre and all the while, Kier are allegedly doing nothing about it - or rather, they are doing something about it but only after people point it out. And now, much in the manner of the credit card fraud saga, we're being inundated with calls from irate residents, sick to the eye teeth of having to live with all this muck.

Although I can empathise with them - my own street is not exactly sparkling - two thoughts have struck me. The first was that dirty streets in London are far from out of the ordinary. To tell the truth, I was under the impression it was more or less par for the course and didn't know people actually got this hot under the collar about it. The second is that the problem is not entirely caused by poor organisation and deployment - although that is a big part of it. Getting Kier to get their acts together and clean up the borough's streets would not wholly solve the matter. It would be attacking the problem, rather than the root cause, which is that people are still inherently wasteful, no matter where they live. Of course, fly-tippers are pretty definitely a minority, but I'm willing to bet that a high proportion of ordinary, otherwise conscientious people have unthinkingly dropped a crisp packet or a bus ticket or a cigarette end or whatever, or have just stuffed something in a bin which could easily be recycled - and it all adds up. But that's just my humble opinion.