I’ve never seen this before, but a fantastic 1970s car chase from Brannigan around Battersea (including a lot of the Shaftesbury Park Estate) then Wandsworth before heading up York Road and taking a left on to, um, Tower Bridge.

But if you are interested, here’s my attempt at Storifying the meeting. Essentially I’ve interleaved my tweets from the meeting with the speeches on the two debates on early intervention and the Southside shopping centre.

Another great year for Battersea Park’s fireworks: and my video of some of the best bits. (OK, the queuing wasn’t really one of the best bits.)

Years ago, as a new councillor, one of the old salts told me that he now couldn’t go anywhere in the country without seeing a housing estate and looking for indications of how many of the houses or flats had been bought or how the estate was managed.

I’ve found myself doing the same looking at public sector organisations. So today, at St Thomas’ hospital I was taken with the robot dispenser in the hospital pharmacy which you can see going through the motions in the YouTube video above. Apparently it works by placing drugs where they fit, so they are stored in the most space efficient way, then remembering the location. It will then retrieve drugs within 10 seconds of them being requested. It is quite mesmerizing to watch and MiniMe and I enjoyed seeing boxes with names I couldn’t pronounce being moved around (as well as nicotine patches, they had lots of those).

However, given that the advertised wait time for dispensing prescriptions was 15-20 minutes I couldn’t help feeling that the space saved and time saved by having a robot, rather than a human, go to a shelf and get some tablets hasn’t really made that much difference to the patient experience – who still have to sit in a waiting area and have fairly minimal human contact with the pharmacist through a small, bank-style, dispensing window.

Guy’s and St Thomas’ is a good NHS Trust, so I don’t mean any criticism, but my equivalent of asking myself about the housing mix is to look and wonder whether the design took more account of measurable outputs, like how long it take to retrieve a drug, than the important outcomes, like informed and happy patients. Too often the public sector concentrates too much on what it can measure (and is new shiny), rather than on what’s important.

Anyone who was there will know that Saturday’s Battersea Park fireworks were superb. Congratulations to the council and Pains Fireworks for organising them.

If you missed them, or want to see them again, but you don’t have a full 20 minutes, then my video might help. 20 minutes of fireworks compressed into 2 minutes… well, more accurately, 19 minutes of fireworks compressed into one minute, and then the final minute in full.

The reaction on Twitter was certainly positive, some going as far as to rate them as the best they’ve ever seen:
https://twitter.com/rdepom/status/1048146373255168

Some made cultural references I just don’t understand:
https://twitter.com/davidjsparkes/status/1058196156325888

Some just made me proud to be a Battersea, rather than Clapham, resident:

fireworks over Battersea Park seen from our terrace tonight knocked the socks off last night's Clapham Common ones.

— Natasha Wilkinson (@editlondon) November 6, 2010

Although some people were facing the wrong way:

Nothing is happening. The Battersea fireworks must be experiencing technical difficulties. Another local authority with egg on its face.

— G S (@IrrelevantProse) November 6, 2010

I’m not sure the real benefit of a new underground station is that the first thing travellers see is The Duchess, but it shows that the benefits of regeneration come in different shapes and sizes for different people.

I’ve just been reminded that tonight is the final of Mastermind and one of the finalists is Jesse Honey who kicked off with Wandsworth as a specialist subject – the perfect excuse to feature the video again.

Good luck to him tonight (even though it’s a bit late to wish him luck for something that was recorded weeks, or maybe months, ago).

Update And congratulations to him. A fantastic win to become Mastermind champion, I’m really pleased that Wandsworth was part of his path to the title.

Putting this video on here isn’t being a creep like it was with the other two, because I’m in it. It means I’m being egotistical.

But it also gives me a chance to highlight the Wandsworth Conservative manifesto which I am, obviously, standing under in this election.

On of the things that strikes me about it is how some of the themes, like community and responsibility also come out strongly in the national manifesto. Given that the two were drawn up independently (and I wouldn’t pretend that ours would have influenced the national one anyway) it’s interesting to see how basic Conservative principles have shaped both documents.

I’m probably a creep, but I rather like the videos that have been created for the Wandsworth Conservative council campaign. The latest to be featured is on education.

Wandsworth has a lot to be proud of, especially when one considers the challenges faced by inner city schools, but there’s even more to be proud of in the future, with the development of free schools.