Blogs - Newsroom and Reader Blogs for Epping Forest, Waltham Forest, Wanstaed & Woodford

Claire is a trainee reporter, who moved to Walthamstow from the Grim North and joined the Waltham Forest Guardian in May 2008. She was a student at UCL and went home to train at the Press Association Training Centre in Newcastle, but felt London Calling and came back. This blog chronicles her trials and triumphs as a "newbie in the newsroom". She likes writing, arguing, politics, religion, weird music and Chinese food. She is uncomfortable writing about herself in the third person.

All at sea again

Now that we have all returned, stuffed full of Easter chocolate and emerging from our Bank Holiday torpor (I say that - I imagine not everyone was torpid. I just like the word) it's all hands on deck. With EAE on holiday and therefore not at the helm (I'm going for a nautical theme here. I like a good extended metaphor) FCR is acting captain, meaning we're a man short and scrambling just a little bit harder than usual.

Fire and brimstone

Waltham Forest saw its very own towering inferno on Sunday night (April 5) as a fire swept through a Leyton industrial estate. Fortunately, there were no reported injuries but two warehouses were completely gutted, raining soot, ash and debris onto neighbouring properties and leaving nothing but hollow, blackened shells.

The protest that wasn't

I love students. They can be relied upon for a great many things - not just getting drunk and sporting ill-advised haircuts and/or charity shop purchases, but also getting hot under the collar about political issues and waving placards that reflect this. And this is why I love them this week.

Meeting and greeting

It's my turn to go out and face our adoring public this week.

Sunshine and shadow

It's spring at last and that means all sorts of things start springing up, as if from nowhere.

Bones of contention...

The row over LGBT history celebrations in schools continues to do the rounds this week.

Doom! Dooooooooooooooom!

Sometimes, I really think we must be living on the point of the apocalypse - economic collapse, fuel all but gone, death, violence, mayhem.

A season of privation begins

Sadly, we've had no stories of tap dancing ex-KGB grandmothers or globe trotting former elbow disorder sufferers and neither, indeed, have we had any tales of life-saving retired circus monkeys.

A change would do us good

I think we need to stir things up a bit.

No news is good news

It is, dear blogfans, that time of the week again.

SNOW!

Having snowed a bit on Monday, it naturally followed that the whole country ground to a halt.

Just another ordinary week in Waltham Forest

It's all kicking off this week.

We interrupt this blog...

...to bring you news of a new dawn - a new era in human civilisation.

The fastest news rundown in the west

Here goes then...

Failure! Horror! Catastrophe! Calamity!

Well, not really. It's actually just a slightly late blog because I was tied up trying to finish off the two stories I managed to dig out of Tuesday's planning meeting.

Happy New Year!

We can but hope it will be, anyway.

Merry Christmas, one and all!

Or for those of you who won't be celebrating Christmas tomorrow - happy Wednesday!

Stuck for that perfect Christmas gift?

How about a £20,000 book?

It's all just rubbish

Six months on, the Kier street sweeping row rages on.

From Leytonstone to Warsaw and back, via the local graveyard

Apparently, we could be stacking our dead one on top of the other in a matter of decades.