The dog ate my husband's nuts

NO sniggering in the back row, there. It’s true.

The dog has turned out to be a Secret Nut Nibbler.

I’d ticked my husband off for leaving the shells of his Christmas brazils and walnuts in the waste paper bin next to the sofa, because I kept finding sharp pieces of shell on the carpet.

How did I keep finding them? By treading on them in my bare feet, having failed to spot them lying there on the dark patterned background.  Not nice, especially first thing in the morning.

I thought the dog must be fishing them out of the basket to play with. Reader, I was wrong.

He was fishing them straight out of the bowl on the coffee table, cracking them open with his teeth, holding them between his paws, and settling down for a good old chew. But only, of course, when we weren’t in the room, because though he looked up at me calmly with innocent brown eyes when I caught him, he knew he shouldn’t have been doing it.

Having removed temptation from canine nose level, and with every spare surface in the sitting room festooned with swags of greenery, I dumped the bowl in the kitchen, where I shall have to leave it safely every night now.

He’s further disgraced himself by making off with a dog-shaped doorstop, which I retrieved from the hallway minus one floppy ear.

Unfortunately, this doorstop had been given to me by a girlfriend last Christmas, and I’d always suspected that Glen might regard it as fair game so I’d kept it out of harm’s way all year on a chest of drawers in the bedroom, like a sort of heavyweight cuddly toy.

Having invited some girlies (including the doorstop donor) round for a festive soiree and banished my husband to another room to watch the football, we needed to prop the dining room door open so we could listen out for the curry delivery van.

In the five minutes of confusion that followed its arrival as I paid the driver and sorted out three large carrier bags of food, you can guess what happened.

I turned round and there was the doorstop halfway down the hall, with the ear lying sadly and soggily next to it.

However, Glen still has some way to go to match the destructive power of our previous collie, who once demolished an entire silver salver full of smoked salmon nibbles, intended for Christmas dinner starters, after being accidentally shut in the lobby where my mother-in-law had left them to keep cool.

Who will buy the thousands of extra homes to be built in Salisbury?

AT the end of my three-year apprenticeship as a reporter I was on £50 a week. Not a lot, even in 1975.

But a little terraced home in the South Coast resort where I shared a flat would have cost about four times my annual salary.

I briefly considered it, decided to go to university instead, met my future husband on my first day there, blew my savings on having a good time, and I’ve never regretted it.

But in those days there were jobs aplenty and redundancy was a word rarely heard.

Now a two-bed house in that same town costs eight-and-a-half times the salary of a newly qualified senior reporter.

Even with two such incomes, the repayments are barely affordable. And what if interest rates rise, which they will? Salaries are nowhere near keeping up with the cost of living (unless you’re a Wiltshire Council boss, of course).

There’s a widening gulf in this country between the haves and the have-nots, and the possession of a middle-class upbringing and a decent education is no longer any guarantee that you will end up on the right side of the divide.

It doesn’t matter how many extra houses ( 7,000, county-wide) the government is ordering Wiltshire to find room for if young people haven’t got the cash to buy them. And by and large they haven’t, not on local wages.

They’re likely to end up renting many of these properties from private landlords. And that won’t leave much to save for a deposit.

Social housing? Fat chance.

Wiltshire’s target is that 40% of new homes should be affordable. But that’s “too challenging” according to the inspector, and must be reduced. In other words, developers won’t play ball.

The county’s housing spokesman, Richard Clewer, calls this “morally offensive”, and he’s right.

For once, I feel a smidgen of sympathy for our planners. Theirs is a mission impossible.

They were told that if, with due public consultation, they drew up a strategy for South Wiltshire allocating large chunks of land for development and got it approved at government level, we’d be legally protected against a builders’ free-for-all.

They played by the rules, and look where it got them.

The government’s moved the goalposts and imposed its own free-for-all instead.

Cllr Clewer’s view? “Don’t ask us to find out what people want if you aren’t going to listen.”



I couldn’t have put it better myself. Happy Christmas.

What do we expect in return when we give to charity?

NEWS that major vascular surgery is to move from Salisbury to Bournemouth has prompted understandable speculation about which other services might in future be transferred to some ‘regional hub’ miles away.
That’s a subject for another day. But here’s a related thought.
When the plot to shut down Hillcote, our respite home for handicapped children, was being hatched, did anyone take account of the input of local people into this facility?
Some £30,000 was collected for a minibus and a specially-equipped quiet room.
What happens to this stuff if the closure goes ahead? Are they planning to flog it off on ebay? Cart it all up to Devizes? Or just scrap it?
Whatever the answer, what message does it send to the fundraisers who worked so hard?
Now we are in the final throes of a huge appeal for a CT scanner. All over the area people of goodwill have been busting a gut to raise £650,000. That's brilliant.
Would they have devoted quite so much time and energy to buying a scanner based in Southampton or Basingstoke? I’m not knocking, just asking.
We pay for these things gladly, because we think they will be there to help us, our friends and our loved ones as well as the wider local community in our hour of need. And because we think our hospital is great.But these are times of upheaval for public services, and there can’t be guarantees that any piece of kit, or indeed any department, will remain here.I'm not saying we shouldn’t give to good causes. Of course we should, and to forestall criticism, I’ll tell you that I am a member of a charity committee.
But experience suggests that we should be wary of subsidising what our taxes ought to be buying.
We can’t expect the state to provide everything for us any longer, and we will all have to become more self-reliant.
But in the interests of social cohesion, the public must have a meaningful part to play in deciding what happens to publicly-owned assets.
People with power over our lives need to understand that ‘give and take’ is what makes any relationship work.
And it doesn’t just mean that we give, while they take away when they feel like it.

A festive freebie in Salisbury car parks? Not likely!

SO Wiltshire Council has very graciously consented to free use of its car parks on Sundays to encourage shoppers into Salisbury during the run-up to Christmas and the New Year sales.
Free? Wiltshire? Pull the other one, it’s got sleigh bells on!
I don’t know how you define ‘free’, but in my dictionary it doesn’t include the words ‘pay later’.
Conservative members of our city council have gone cap in hand to Trowbridge and offered to make up the £17,000 in income that Wiltshire might otherwise forfeit by accepting their proposal.
Apparently their overlords Up North were ‘receptive’ to this novel idea. I bet they were. It’s a no-brainer. Heads they win, tails they can’t lose. And ‘free parking’ has such a lovely headliney ring about it at this time of year, doesn’t it?
Chief cheerleader for the festive so-called freebie appears to be city councillor Sven Hocking, who says his group of Santa’s little helpers are “aware of the issues around parking charges” but would rather “work with” their “colleagues” than “antagonise” them.
I think that roughly translated into everyday English that means “They’ve got us right where they want us, lads, so we’ll just have to put on a brave face and make the best of it.”
Presumably, political opponents who object to this wizard wheeze will be branded ‘bah humbugs’ who don’t care about giving the city’s struggling traders a little Christmas cheer.
But hold your horses – or maybe that should be reindeer. Who will really be footing the bill?
Why, the city council, through its reserves, silly. They told you so.
The same city council that’s expected to be £160,000 overspent this year because of the cost of doing up the Market Place and crematorium and that was warned last month that it could face a £164,000 cut in funding?
Yes, but it doesn’t matter, because they’re going to recoup this little extra via your 2014-15 council tax bill and by that time you’ll have forgotten all about it.
After all, it’ll only amount to £1.30 for the average Band D muggins, whether he or she actually used the car parks or not.
See? Clever, isn’t it? It’s called bribing us with our own money.
And it’s the only wriggle room our unitary authority has left them.
Please, please, do support our city traders. Just don’t be fooled by politicians and their bogus giveaways.

Well done to Mayor for making a stand over council chiefs' pay

CONGRATULATIONS to the Mayor of Tidworth, Chris Franklin, for breaking ranks over the issue of Wiltshire Council leaders' pay.
He has left the Tory party in protest against the huge rises in allowances that Jane Scott and her cabinet members have voted through for themselves at the same time as they are axing jobs and squeezing pay for their remaining staff.

How are they managing to get away with it? By upping the salaries of a few favoured execs at the same time to keep them onside. It's the classic 'divide and rule' technique.

An excellent hospital, but medics upset by surgery plan

THIS week’s column will be short and mainly sweet.

Why short? Because I can only type with my left hand. And I’m right-handed.

Why sweet? Because it takes the form of a thank you-to all the lovely staff I encountered at Salisbury District Hospital last week.

Why only mainly sweet? Because I subsequently – and quite separately -  learned of an issue at the hospital that deserves a wider public airing.

I went in on Friday for day surgery to remove a large lump from my finger. Not a pleasant prospect, but lots of people have far worse things to contend with.

The nurses on C Ward, though extremely busy, were kind and jolly, and consultant plastic surgeon Kerstin Oestreich and her team were the perfect combination of efficiency and sensitivity.

Being a bit squeamish I couldn’t watch what they were up to, though I wanted to be told.

They put on some music – a bizarre selection ranging from Nessun Dorma to one of those silly but very catchy Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep tunes that haunt people on package holidays - and kept me chatting (not difficult, my husband would say) to distract me.

The lump turned out to be one of those that’s definitely better out than in, and with luck that will be the end of it. It certainly wasn’t a ganglion, which I’d been told previously.

So I’m glad I persevered in getting it looked at again. Pestering overworked doctors can make us feel guilty and apologetic, but we have to trust our instincts.

On the day, 10 out of 10, SDH. And thank you.

Thanks also from my husband, who went to casualty straight after dropping me off, having injured a finger playing volleyball the night before.

It’s now in a splint for eight weeks, leaving us with one undamaged left hand and one right hand between us!

Of course things sometimes go wrong, but overall we are lucky to have such a good hospital, offering such a wide range of expertise, on our doorstep.

I hope that the service received by vascular patients who will have to travel to Bournemouth for major procedures in future will be just as good.

I understand that some medical staff are deeply unhappy about the change, but don’t expect any hint of that to emerge in official statements.    

Wiltshire Council leaders' pay rockets as a fortnight of fireworks distract us

FIREWORKS were ruined for me the day we adopted our first dog.

November 5 and  New Year’s Eve reduced him to a shivering, dribbling wreck, hiding under one of the dresses hanging in my wardrobe.

Thirty-four years later we’re onto our third border collie, and things are even worse.

The poor little fellow is so terrified of the random explosions that plague our parks for a fortnight either side of November 5 that I don’t really like to go out at night and leave him. Fellow pet-owners tell me they have the same problem.

The inability of our police force to actually police our public open spaces during the hours of darkness is disappointing.

And the fact that this yobfest occurs at the same time of year as a great deal of shooting on the estates surrounding the city compounds the problem.

The pops and bangs echoing across the hillsides some days make me reluctant to walk Glen off the lead in case he bolts for home.

Unfortunately we’re in for another dose of (officially sanctioned) pyrotechnics tonight, to mark the switching on of the Christmas lights.

This is a pity, since as an avid Strictly fan I’d rather like to watch Craig Revel Horwood - what a coup for the city council - perform the ceremony.

I hope it launches a super whizz-bang festive season for our traders.

And I hope the investment of their own hard-earned cash in the Business Improvement District (BID) project, starting in the spring, will help to counter the deterrent effect of our parking charges.

Actually, I can think of somewhere I’d like to set off a rocket or two tonight, and that’s up the backsides of the Wiltshire Council leaders who are responsible for those charges and who have just awarded themselves whacking great increases in their own allowances, weeks after voting to make 252 staff redundant.

This selfless devotion to the public interest even raised eyebrows on the Conservative Home website - hardly a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment.

Its blogger Harry Phibbs quoted the Taxpayers' Alliance as saying: "Wiltshire residents have every right to feel badly let down."

If you agree, you might like to know that there's a petition calling on the Trowbridge elite to resign at www.38degrees.org.uk.

Time for a shoppers' revolt in the bagging area

PITY the poor shop assistants who have to man the tills next to those automated checkouts.

Imagine being forced to listen to the phrase “Unauthorised item in bagging area”, delivered in a robotic tone, a hundred times a day. It would drive you demented.

It can only be a matter of time before some hapless employee sues a supermarket, claiming it’s a new form of repetitive strain injury.

These maddening machines are all about the stores saving money by employing fewer people.

As is their kind offer of allowing you to pay at the pump after filling up the car, thereby saving you the huge exertion of walking a dozen steps to the kiosk where you might help keep an attendant in work.

While it might boost the big chains’ profits, this culling of cashiers is bad news for society.

With fewer jobs for unskilled workers, more people on zero-hours or rolling short-term contracts, wages frozen except for the bigwigs (Wiltshire Council, leading by example as usual), and public services such as our hospital laundry flogged off to firms that the unions say will drive down pay and conditions, who do we imagine will be earning enough money to keep our businesses in business in the future?

I try to avoid being bossed about by a machine if there’s an alternative of dealing with a human being.

But I’m aware of subtle ways in which this is being made more awkward.

For instance, the spaces allotted to ‘baskets only’ in our superstores are now so narrow that you can only just fit the basket in lengthways.

And there’s only room for one carrier bag by the till. You have to dump any others on the floor while you rummage for your purse.

Not forgetting your loyalty card, of course. So you feel you’re getting some reward for your trouble, even though you know they’re not really giving anything away, it’s all factored in to their prices.

Most of us put up with being treated like this, but one of the joys of writing this column is that I can grumble if I want to. And increasingly, I do. It must be my age.

I’d like to place an unauthorised item right in the centre of every bagging area in the land. A sledgehammer, wielded by a champion weightlifter.

anneriddle36@gmail.com

Another old-fashioned pub gets an unwanted revamp

MY husband and I rarely go out for a drink.

Without doubt, we consume more wine than is good for us, but mostly at home.

As a result, recycling day is always something of an embarrassment, listening to the clinking and smashing of bottles being tipped into the dustcart. I remember a binman asking me once: “Been having a party?” Sadly, we hadn’t.

Yet I can’t remember the last time the pair of us walked in to a pub without the primary intention of ordering a meal.

When we were younger we often popped in to our local to socialise over a glass or two, and maybe play darts. Not any more.

I think it was having a family that scuppered it. Paying a babysitter made no sense when you could stick the kids in bed and collapse on the sofa with a cheap supermarket plonk. And we didn’t have to argue about whose turn it was to drive.

Nowadays, being middle-aged and boring, we’re more likely to head out to a restaurant, and maybe take a taxi home.

The occasional girls’ night out is a different matter. We do still like to find a civilised pub where we can set up a tab and natter nonstop until they chuck us out.

Sounds like the Anchor and Hope in Winchester Street would have suited us perfectly, had we discovered it in time.

It was touching to read about how much the place meant to its regulars, and how sad they are to lose the landlord and landlady who made it the heart of their little community.

What they are mourning is one of the vanishing breed of no-frills drinkers’ pubs that didn’t mess about with hideously misspelt ‘Pub Fayre’ straight out of the cash-and-carry, but simply offered a genuine, personal welcome.

The owners, Enterprise Inns, say it will be revamped and reopened. They are looking for someone to take on the “business opportunity”.

That’s the trouble, say the regulars. The bean-counters regard it as “just another asset”, and it will lose its soul.

In our increasingly corporate world things seem to go that way, whether it’s ‘cloned’ High Streets, Tesco buying up corner shops, or the plethora of chain restaurants.

Sometimes, I confess, I’m as guilty as the next man of failing to value what we’ve got till it’s gone.

Why we need to listen to the Hillcote families

MOST people would agree that one of the measures of a civilised society is how well it cares for its weakest members.

Nevertheless there are many minority groups in need of our squeezed public funds, and we have to accept that they can’t all have everything they want.

Some things may look, on paper, like easy targets for cuts.

One such is Hillcote, the respite centre in Salisbury for the families of young people with severe disabilities.

Severing this lifeline for a handful of vulnerable citizens won’t make a jot of difference to the vast majority of voters. Many won’t even know it’s happened.

Wiltshire Council and Wiltshire Clinical Commissioning Group justify its proposed closure by saying that the number of people using Hillcote is in decline.

But if you don’t direct people to the help that’s available they won’t be able to make use of it, and there is evidence that this is what has happened here, presumably because the closure plan was in the offing.

I haven’t visited the centre, in Manor Road, but years ago I spent time at a similar one elsewhere. I left filled with admiration for the people who work with such optimism in these circumstances and for the families who cope with challenges unimaginable to the rest of us.

The last thing the Hillcote families want is to travel across the Plain to Devizes to the only other respite home on offer. If their children, some of whom suffer from fits, are taken ill they’ll be bundled off to hospital in Swindon, making it hugely difficult to visit them.

They are also unconvinced by talk of foster care as an alternative, given the need for adapted housing and specialist equipment.

I know our MP John Glen sympathises, and has voiced “grave concerns” about how fairly they are being treated.

Over the years well-wishers have raised at least £30,000 to equip Hillcote. Their efforts ought not to be dismissed.

The families recognise that it’s an expensive place to run for a small number of users. But within Wiltshire’s fiefdom, Salisbury is the biggest centre of population. At the very least can’t somewhere cheaper be found locally?

On Wednesday at 10.30am the families present their case to the authorities at a public meeting in the Guildhall. They need your support.

Kerr-ching! Money's no object when you've got it

I’M suffering from Wandering Mind Syndrome, I suspect. This week my mind has been wandering in all directions.

Firstly, the University Technical College, that wondrous redevelopment of our police station that will fill in the gaps in Salisbury’s educational ‘offer’ without having Any Adverse Effect on our existing schools - honest.

On Tuesday Wiltshire Council’s rulers committed £2million to this monument to political vanity – sorry, that should have read “much-needed educational facility” and “sub-regional centre of excellence”.

I love the phrase “custody suite”. It sounds like somewhere you might spend a kinky honeymoon. A night in the cells is what it means. And they still haven’t worked out where it will be once the police are relocated, although we’re assured it will be “modern and sustainable”. Thank goodness for that.

Incidentally, wasn’t it delightful to read that Wiltshire’s former £183,000-a-year chief exec Andrew Kerr was confirmed this week as Cornwall Council’s top man on a salary somewhere between £158,000 and £176,000?

I actually felt quite sorry for him when he was ousted from Planet Trowbridge two years ago because a) he came across as a pleasant chap even though he had to ‘reorganise’ so many underlings out of their jobs and b) he so clearly didn’t have a clue that his political overlords had been plotting his own demise.

A £144,000 redundancy package must have eased the blow, but it was still gratifying to see that shortly afterwards he found a new role as £140,000 chief operating officer at Cardiff Council, where he was reportedly “looking forward to driving improvement” until the lure of the laid-back surf dude paradise proved irresistible.

Surely that’s as far as he can go. Any further west and he’ll fall into the Atlantic.

I don’t blame him, by the way. Or anyone who tries to do better for themselves.

It’s just interesting how teachers and firemen who protest about the decimation of their pension plans are portrayed as not caring about the inconvenience they cause while, among the upper  echelons, the gravy train hurtles on.

What a shambolic way to run essential services in Salisbury

IF you might be about to lose your job, and the first you heard about it was via your local newspaper’s Facebook page, how would you feel?

That’s the unpleasant situation that people caring for the disabled residents of Salisbury's Douglas Arter Centre found themselves in this week.

The charity Scope announced a proposal to close it, apparently without first informing all of those most closely involved.

Staff were quick to express their dismay online, as were relatives of the residents, who have no idea what will become of their loved ones.

“My sister lives there,” said one. “What next for her?”

The charity asserts that such homes are outdated and that disabled people would rather have help to live independently.

Yet its website is currently lambasting the government for failing to provide any support for 69,000 disabled people who need it to live independent lives. So how’s that going to work, then?

The care of individual residents there is funded by Wiltshire Council and the NHS. 

Two months ago Wiltshire declared its intention of shutting down Hillcote, the city’s only respite home for the families of children with severe disabilities.

The council claimed the number of people using the centre was falling. The families said that was because the council had stopped telling people it was available.

This, of course, is the council that last week rejected requests for an independent investigation into staff morale after nodding through huge pay rises for its top brass while their subordinates face a freeze.

The same council that has for years ignored requests to plan for a transport interchange in the city and is now reduced to hurriedly digging up our streets to create new bus stops, for which it admits there is “no public support”, before the bus station closes.

Now we learn that Balfour Beatty Living Places has lost more than £1million in the first three months of its contract to carry out highway maintenance, grass cutting and litter picking for Wiltshire.

So some of the firm’s staff will be made redundant while others will be moved from roadworks to lower-paid duties.

That’ll sort out those potholes, won’t it? 

Just as well Wiltshire don’t run a brewery. Because we all know what they couldn’t organise there.

Shoplifters are stocking up early for Christmas

 AMBLING around the aisles at Waitrose in a bit of a daze, as I tend to do these days,  I pitched up at the meat counter and was mildly surprised to notice that the reduced-price leg of lamb I was contemplating had a sticker attached to the packaging, proclaiming it to be “Security Protected”.

A glance round the chiller units showed me that some cuts of pork and beef carried similar statements – though the burgers, meatballs or sausages didn’t, and neither did some of the items in the Essentials value range.

My first thought was that we must be in the grip of some new food contamination scandal.

Maybe meat products had become the latest target of urban terrorists or animal rights activists?

But no, I decided, that couldn’t be right because the free range pork was stickered, too, and even the most committed activist would be hard pushed to protest about that.

So I asked the girl behind the counter what it was all about.

“Ooh, you’d be surprised,” she said, “what people steal these days – especially in the run-up to Christmas.

“High value joints of meat – they’ll stuff them under their arm beneath their coat, or cover them with cushions or a load of bedding.  It’s not just batteries they’re after these days, or bottles of alcohol. You’d be amazed how much gets stolen.”

I thanked her for this interesting insight into the behaviour of genteel Salisbury and returned to my trolley.

I had realised, of course, that the dreaded season of goodwill was approaching.

I could hardly have missed it, since there were strategically placed offers of organic chocolate mini-bars and those boxes of scarlet-wrapped truffles, the kind I only ever buy to stuff into people’s stockings or hang off the Christmas tree, around the store and at the checkout.

But that phrase “the run-up to Christmas” really drove home the message and filled me with dismay.  It was the first week of October.

Good Lord, there I was, stocking up on boring everyday groceries when I really should have been forging ahead with my preparations for the festive frolics.

Clearly, I have been failing in my duty as a consumer. And do you know, I suspect I will continue to do so until at least mid-November  - by which time they’ll probably have run out of everything I want.

I recall only one more heart-sinking moment in the supermarket this year, and that was the sight of “Back to School” signs over racks of grey winter uniforms before the poor little kids had even broken up for the summer holidays. Talk about spoiling their fun.

•  Two days later I popped back in and the whole place was knee-deep in Christmas kitsch, with assistants busily setting up arrays of glittering baubles just past the display of lurid Halloween merchandise. Why not stick a few Easter eggs in there, too, while they're at it?

Let's try switching off Salisbury's traffic lights

TRAFFIC lights. Are they a boon or a ****** nuisance? Answers on an email, please.

Here’s my answer.  I believe they are often counter-productive and Salisbury might be better off without almost all of them.

I would like to suggest that  the highway authorities switch them all off for a trial period of two weeks, to give drivers time to get used to the change and alter their behaviour accordingly.

Then I’d like to see an assessment of the effect on traffic flow, which I suspect would be improved.

If it doesn’t work, by all means switch them on again.

If it does, just think of those plummeting energy bills.

It’ll make the savings from switching off a few street lamps at night look like small change.

And if the effect is that fewer vehicles end up filling our air with exhaust fumes while they wait for the lights to change when there’s nobody coming the other way, then that has to be a bonus.

I fell into conversation about this with an acquaintance at a car boot sale not long ago and found him in complete agreement. As was the lady whose stall we were standing by. We were soon discussing which were the most annoying and pointless sets of lights, and I imagine everyone has their own particular bête noire.

My personal favourites  for extinction are the ones as you come in to town down Fisherton Street. They take forever to change and cause pointless delays.

As do the ones at the junction of New Street and Exeter Street, holding up traffic trying to get out of the multi-storey car park and out of town.

Certainly, whenever the lights at the Harnham gyratory are out of action I get round there a lot faster.

You’d have to leave the special lights for the park and ride buses on, I suppose, to avoid slowing them down.

I’m not saying yet that we should banish the rest for ever. Just give it a try. What have we got to lose?

Airfield plan should be shot down in flames

YET again on a planning issue, we have to ask despairingly: “Why do we bother to care?”

Old Sarum airfield, beset by would-be developers, was once memorably described by Winterslow’s councillor Chris Devine as “like a wagon train being encircled by Red Indians”.

He was right, and they’re brandishing their tomahawks again.

Back in 2010 when sites for new housing in South Wiltshire were being designated under the Core Strategy, a surprise, last-minute proposal for development at the southern end of the airfield was put forward by its owners, without public consultation.

Wiltshire Council officers had identified enough sites already, and they said so to the government inspector in charge of the process.

But he had other ideas, going so far as to suggest that the runway could be realigned to ease the way for builders.

The airfield is a conservation area. Three of its hangars are listed buildings. English Heritage calls it “the best preserved flying field of the First World War” – in other words, not a collection of unrelated buildings but a complete entity, and a national treasure.

Dismayed local councillors tried to get the scheme dropped at a City Hall meeting, but were told they couldn’t tinker with the Strategy without it becoming null and void.

They had to accept the whole package or risk a development free-for-all. Those were the rules.

Still, so strong was the opposition, led by councillor Ian McLennan, that Wiltshire boss Jane Scott stepped in.

To sighs of relief all round, she suggested getting the runway listed to protect it, saying there was “more than one way to skin a cat”.

No sooner was the meeting over than her idea was shot down by planners, who told her land can’t be listed. But by then the rest of us had gone away with the impression that something was being done.

Now residents have been invited to a ‘public consultation’ by the airfield’s operators, who claim they need the profits from new homes on its perimeter to manage the conservation area and put up a visitor centre, which Wiltshire policy currently requires.

For how long do you imagine the buyers of these homes will put up with the noise of flying, literally on their doorstep?

And if flying is restricted as a result, how long before our historic airfield is closed down as uneconomic?

Wiltshire Council and the spider in the bath

THAT’S it, I said to my absent husband on the phone.  Proof that it’s autumn. There’s a giant spider in the bath.

When we first bought our house the previous occupants had thoughtfully covered it with a kind of Russian vine.

To call it an invasive plant would be an understatement.  A rampaging monster, it was constantly having to be cut back from all the front windows to avoid a blackout.

As soon as we chopped it back it seemed to put on a growth spurt. And it brought with it a wealth of insect life. It was the spider that brought it to mind. At this time of year in particular we used to be haunted by them.

They would scurry out from underneath one armchair and dive under the next, to hide. My husband, keenly interested in wildlife even at the most inopportune moments, said he thought they were wolf spiders. Then, upon reflection, he decided they were giant house spiders. I said I didn’t care what they were, with legs that huge they’d have to be caught and put outside.  It was them or me, and I couldn’t sit with my feet up off the floor all night.

“They’ll only come straight back in again,” he would say, reasonably. But I was beyond being reasoned with.

Grasshoppers used to climb up where the vine snaked through the sash windows in the boys’ bedrooms and perch on the ceilings, bemused at suddenly finding themselves in a blank, white, alien environment with no idea how to get out again, so they had to be removed, too.

What with the added peril of the annual wasps’ nests in the attic – I came to dread that dozy time of year when I’d find them crawling across my young sons’ bedclothes – it was all a bit much.

The day my husband finally decided to tackle the vine some 20 years ago was one I will never forget. I know it’s a cliché, but it really was like Jack and the Beanstalk. Its fallen remains filled the front garden twice over.

Now we still get enormous spiders, but mostly they only pop up through the plughole, and since they can’t climb the sides of the bath, if I’m on my own and I’m not feeling up to trying to catch them in a jug, I can always just have a shower instead.

Speaking of fairy tales, as I was in passing, there will certainly be a happy ending to 2013 for the top brass at Wiltshire Council who are to enjoy pay rises of up to £19,000. That’s more than many people in Salisbury earn in a year, as a quick glance at Journal Jobs will show.

Apparently the council fears it won’t be able to attract and keep executives of the right calibre because its current rates are “adrift of the market”.

I’d have thought there’d be plenty of competent candidates prepared to settle for six-figure sums and comfy public sector pensions in the current economic climate. But maybe it’s a different world up there.

Or maybe Wiltshire’s problems have as much to do with morale as with money.  Certainly among the lower orders, who can only look on enviously at their bosses while they are stuck with a below-inflation ‘rise’ of just 1 per cent.

Does leader Jane Scott know that they have their own version of the ‘Where everybody matters’ motto?

It’s ‘Where everybody mutters’.

The Alice in Wonderland world of law and order

A FRIEND has given me a garden ornament – it’s an owl with solar-powered light-up eyes.

I was relaxing in the garden one lovely warm evening last week, chatting to my husband, when I had a sudden feeling of being watched.

I turned, and found two pairs of eyes gazing unblinking at me from a flower bed.

One pair, of course, belonged to the owl, which had switched itself on as the sun sank. The other belonged to my dog, who was crouched, motionless, alongside the bird, peeping over the petals, his eyebrows raised as he willed me to notice him and throw him a ball.

They made a surreal picture, and we laughed. It’s like a scene from Alice in Wonderland, I said.

So what have my dog and Wiltshire Police’s plans for Salisbury got in common? They’re both barking, for a start.

I’d been regaling my husband that evening with tales I’ve been told about events at the increasingly crowded Melksham police station as more and more staff and functions have been transferred there from Salisbury - including the trial preparation unit, which has made it difficult to maintain day-to-day contact with the officers involved in some cases.

Apparently there have been power cuts, most people have to eat and drink at their desks because the canteen can’t seat them all, and the sewage system recently overflowed, flooding an upper floor and causing a ceiling to collapse – “not a pretty sight”, I am told.

Plus there isn’t enough parking space to cope with the influx. As a result, people are parking on the surrounding roads. So Wiltshire Council proposes to paint double yellow lines to stop them. Now that last element does sound all too believable.

Of course, as I said to my husband, my informants could be making it all up. But it’s so bizarre, so Alice in Wonderland, that I don’t think they are.

Meanwhile I’ve heard that the former Imrys Quarry on Wilton Road is the favoured site for new police facilities. Not a bad spot, I suppose, as long as any new buildings are completed before the force is turfed out of its current home.

Unfortunately, I’ve also heard that this site would be shared with Wiltshire Council, which raises questions about how the privacy of users such as victims of domestic violence or witnesses to crimes could be protected.

 A week or two back there was even a rumour that a vacant factory at High Post might be adapted for police use by having its roof taken off and a prefabricated custody unit lowered in. Was that just a joke, or a sign of desperation?

If it was true, what would happen when people were let out of the cells? Would they have to walk all the way back into town along the pavement-free A345? I suppose they could always hop on to a park and ride bus at the Beehive. That would be one way to boost passenger numbers.

Lurching from one crisis to another in education

I FEEL so sorry for the teenagers who found themselves left high and dry by the withdrawal of A-level courses at Salisbury College, or Wiltshire College Salisbury - a ridiculously unwieldy title that I’ve never got used to using.

Why was the decision so last-minute, announced just a couple of weeks before the start of term?

I can see that it doesn’t make financial sense to run AS-level courses in a range of 16 subjects for a new intake of only 30 or so students.

The disappointment for these still-very-young people is equally understandable. It must have been horribly worrying for them to have to scramble about to find a place at another institution.

Presumably, some of them will have been away on holiday when the announcement was made, and will have had to take whatever they could get on their return.

But those who had already completed their AS-levels and were about to embark on their A-levels were in an even worse plight, seeking to transfer to institutions following the same syllabus set by the same exam board and having to hope that their new classmates would have covered exactly the same ground.

Surely the college authorities must have known how many students had just taken their AS-levels and would be expecting to continue for another year? It cannot have come as a surprise to them? Were there factors other than class sizes affecting their decision?

With the city’s proposed University Technical College facing a year’s delay due to a lack of proper planning to relocate the police, and a new Salisbury Sixth Form College due to open in a year’s time although nobody knows where yet – it might be to the east of the city or it might be in the city centre, according to its website - it all feels like a bit of a muddle, to put it mildly.

Once the Sixth Form College is up and running it will offer everything that Wiltshire College did and more in terms of A-level provision. With luck and a couple of years of good exam results, students will no longer feel forced to travel out of the county to get the education they deserve.

It’s going to focus on science, technology, engineering and maths – just like the UTC, funnily enough – while offering other subjects, too.

So do we need both? And which would our scientifically-minded young people prefer to attend? 

Why aren't our councillors standing up for Salisbury?

IT’S all too easy to blame Wiltshire Council leader Jane Scott and her cabinet from across the Plain for the plight of Salisbury’s retailers.

It’s true that she was in charge of the iniquitous rise in parking charges which drove motorists away and has ended up costing her own council money.

It’s also true that she’s refused to rule out raising them further, which is hardly what I’d call a conciliatory attitude in the face of so much hostility from the paying public.

Having observed her in action at many a council meeting, I’d hardly expect her to back down in the midst of the current bout of bad publicity.

Maybe once it’s died down a bit she’ll go away and have a quiet rethink.  We have to hope so, though I’m not holding my breath.

But in the meantime what about the Conservative backbenchers who represent Salisbury and South Wiltshire divisions on her council?

I haven’t heard a peep out of any of them since I reported the council’s own figures showing what a counter-productive policy this has been.

Why aren’t they standing up for us and declaring publicly that it’s time she changed her mind? Any of them care to comment?

Meanwhile, another week, and more shop closures.

I’ve got no problem with charity shops. I love them, and check them out frequently for bargains.

They seem to be thriving, as there are always plenty of people flicking through the clothes rails and poring over the bookshelves.

We’ve even got a British Heart Foundation furniture shop now, as befits our Heart City status, and jolly popular it is, too.

But it’s getting to the point where charities, along with cafes and hairdressers – how many haircuts can people possibly need, I wonder? -  must soon outnumber our embattled independent retailers.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read that Cllr Scott was blaming the recession, the internet and out-of-town shopping centres.

I’d like to echo Tony Blair’s 1997 election anthem (not that I supported him) and say that things can only get better.

But with this lot at the helm, I fear they could get a whole lot worse.

A lesson learned over plan to close police station

HOORAH! Common sense has prevailed and the rush to turf our police out of their station to make way for a University Technical College turns out not to have been so essential after all.

With all the authorities apparently dead set on 2014 as the launch date for the new school, it was Chief Constable Patrick Geenty who wisely called for extra time in the end, admitting he was “not satisfied” that police would be able to maintain their current level of service.

Last month in my newspaper column I voiced the concerns of serving officers about the same thing, only to be accused of “falling into bad habits” as a journalist in a letter from UTC project chief Gordon Aitken.

I’m not infallible (don’t tell my husband) but on this occasion I was right.

One thing I hadn’t realised, until Mr Aitken pointed it out, was that the UTC will only take in “around three students per year group” from each of Salisbury’s secondary schools.

The rest, he explained, will commute from a 20-mile radius, with 46 feeder schools in all.

As I’ve said previously, I see nothing wrong with a UTC in principle. But it doesn’t sound as many local children will benefit from it.

And whilst a “sub regional centre of excellence” may be a desirable extra for the chosen few, for their employers, and for local politicians seeking a bit of glory to bask in, it’s the general public of Salisbury who will pay the price unless Mr Geenty can say in a year’s time that he’s convinced the loss of the police station will have no adverse effect.

People may well feel inclined to ask whether it’s a fair exchange. That’s a question which could be avoided if an alternative site could be found for the UCT.

I do hope this breathing space will be used, at the very least, to reconsider plans to base response cars at Amesbury.

We’ve been told up until now that this won’t affect how long it takes officers to reach an emergency in Salisbury.

But unless the force intends to recruit the new Time Lord, Peter Capaldi, and beam bobbies about the place in his old police telephone box, logic suggests this can't be true.

In another recent letter to the Salisbury Journal, Police and Crime Commissioner Angus Macpherson stated that the "direction of travel" on this whole project was agreed between Wiltshire Council and the old Police Authority back in 2011.

I'm sure he is correct. I just don't remember anyone bothering to mention it to the public at the time, or in the run-up to May's elections.

The decisions that really matter are all too often presented to taxpayers as faits accomplis, and this climbdown shows what a bad strategy that can be.

Creeping suburbanisation of Salisbury's parks

I USED to walk the dog in Queen Elizabeth Gardens maybe once a fortnight. He loves to jump into the river at the little beach area and fetch a stick, and passers-by are always amused by his headlong enthusiasm.

Having given up on the habit while the noisy and messy refurbishment work was going on, for some reason I hadn’t strolled across Town Path from Harnham for months.

So on Sunday when I finally got round to it, what I found came as quite a surprise.

I know the old planting needed replacing, and that new planting schemes take a while to mature, and that’s fine. We’ll just have to be patient. It’s a work in progress.

But in the meantime the hard landscaping is just that – hard on the eye.

In a less-than-mellow shade of yellow, it looks as if someone has simply upended a few dozen packets of Rice Krispies on the pathways. This gritty stuff is being trodden all over the place, filling the gaps between the boards on the bridges, and spilling over onto the grass, and whatever lies underneath it is already starting to show through.

I remember when the parks department wanted to build a diagonal path across Harnham recreation ground. That was going to be golden breakfast cereal, too. Residents protested that it would stand out like an airport runway, and the project was shelved, thank goodness.

In my view both these much-loved parks should be treated, as far as possible, as visual extensions of the water meadows, since they lie at either end of them. That means green, leafy and natural.

The city council’s wildflower planting in the Harnham field was a welcome and appropriate addition.  But the Environment Agency’s flood defence scheme with its pumping station control kiosk has already spoiled the view towards the picturesque Old Mill. And now a bright red charity clothing bank is sprouting an unsightly crop of carrier bags at the entrance from Netherhampton Road.

It may be for a good cause, but haven’t we got enough recycling facilities at charity shops in town, at Churchfields, and at skips in our supermarket car parks?

Part of Salisbury’s charm lies in the way these two parks have remained semi-rural oases, linked by the Town Path, within the heart of a built-up area. They are places where we could almost imagine ourselves to be in the countryside. I’d be sorry to lose that.

Council's parking income falls after it raises charges

I NEVER for one second believed that squeezing motorists till the pips squeaked would work the required wonders for Wiltshire Council’s bank balance.

And hey ho, what do you know? I was right.

Quite by coincidence, in the week that city councillor Mark Timbrell called for Wiltshire to bring forward a review of our parking charges because of the hardship they are causing, I received a reply to a Freedom of Information request I submitted a little while ago.

I asked Wiltshire how much money it had taken from parking in Salisbury, both on and off street, in the most recent financial year, 2012-13. The answer was £2,991,894.

How much did it take in the financial year 2010-11, before its Conservative leadership imposed massive price rises? £3,171,553.

So one might argue that the policy that sent trade plummeting and led thousands of readers to join the Journal’s Show Some Sense campaign also resulted in a drop of £179,659 in annual car park income.

At the Maltings, takings were down £69,777 compared with two years earlier. At Culver Street, they slumped by £53,383.

Not exactly a howling financial success.

I asked for further figures, to work out how people’s behaviour has changed since the increase in charges.

Overall, they showed big falls in the numbers of vehicles using the council-owned car parks in the city.

And I’m sure the local ‘pop in’ shoppers didn’t all ‘pop out’ to the park and ride sites instead. Like me, they probably looked for a cheaper space on a meter, did what they had to do, and didn’t hang around browsing or making impulse buys.

I’ve saved a fortune, which is probably not what our traders want to hear, although it makes my husband happy!

Anyway, I decided to compare how many drivers parked in the Maltings in March 2011 and in March this year, the most recent month for which figures were available.

The total for just that one month was down more than 10 per cent, from 38,312 to 34,242.

One-hour stays were down from 19,048 to 15,094, so it wasn’t just a question of commuters moving out.  Two-hour stays were up by 4,529, though, so maybe people came in less frequently and stayed longer. But then again, three-hour stays were well down.

Sorry to bore you with statistics, but we need to know what’s going on.

At Culver Street, the number of users was down by well over 40 per cent. At that rate I expect Wiltshire will soon argue that the site is redundant and flog it off for some lucrative development. Which will be fine till all the new housing estates are built and the thousands of new residents want to do some shopping.

In Brown Street, user numbers were down by 1,512. Hoteliers have complained that the imposition of a three-hour limit there has damaged their conference trade.

It’s true that usage of Salt Lane, where a three-hour limit was also introduced, rose marginally. But its takings were more than £10,000 down. I can’t make head or tail of it … though I do know that some council staff used to be given free parking there at one time.

No questions about Southampton Road car park, though. It’s what the Sex Pistols might have called ‘pretty vacant’. Too expensive now for most students, it was used by just 258 vehicles in the whole of March.

All in all, there were 11,339 fewer vehicles using council car parks in Salisbury this March than there were two years previously.

Some all-day parkers have undoubtedly been forced out to the park and ride network, and they will account for some of its improved performance. Its income (not profit, I hasten to add) rose over the two-year period from £569,191 to £755,361.

And Wiltshire may be encouraged to see that the number of people opting to pay for two hours has risen in most car parks since one hour became relatively expensive. Perhaps it feels like better value?

I’d love to know what readers think. But please don’t accuse me of being negative and ‘talking down’ Salisbury.

I’d say I’m simply being realistic, and hoping our elected representatives will deign to reopen the debate about parking sooner rather than later, for their own good as well as ours.

How will the new UTC affect other schools?

I'VE been wondering what the impact of the new University Technical College will be on other schools in the area.
This planned development will have 600 students aged 14-18, specialising in science and engineering.
Our MP says it’s “excellent news for the young people of Salisbury and South Wiltshire”, giving them a “vital new option”. And so it is, even though I don’t agree with closing the police station in a mad rush to accommodate it.
But where will the UTC draw its students from?
I haven’t spoken to local headteachers about it, so I’m only guessing. But isn’t it likely to cream off the most able pupils from our non-selective secondary schools?
And if so, won’t that make it tougher for these schools to attract good teachers and sponsors, and hence disadvantage those pupils who are left behind?
I don’t disapprove of academic selection at all. Neither do I disapprove of selecting pupils for a whole range of other talents, such as sport and music.
But I do firmly believe that all children should be given equal opportunities in terms of funding, facilities and most importantly, quality of teaching, and I would like to hear from the powers-that-be that plans are in place, maybe through incentives to teaching staff, to make sure that no pupil, anywhere, leaves school feeling like an also-ran.

Keep doing new things - a good motto for life

ON Monday evening last week you’d have found me in the small hall at South Wilts School, wandering up and down among a barefoot crowd, clapping and muttering, with a manic grin on my face.

What was I muttering? If you must know, it was that old Right Said Fred hit, I’m Too Sexy For My Shirt. It’s more than a bit sad at my age, isn’t it? Positively tragic.

But why on earth would I do that, I hear you ask?

Because that was the tune that the rhythm I was clapping brought to mind – as did watching the very charming young man running the workshop in which I was participating.

He was Brazilian Pedro Consorte, formerly a cast member of the long-running West End show Stomp, and he’d been roped in by choir leader Fiona Evans to impart a sense of rhythm to the mainly middle-aged members of two of her ensembles, Babes & Ballads and Guys No Dolls.

It was fun, and at times it was unintentionally funny, because it was clear that many of us were outside our normal comfort zone.

Some of the Guys in particular started out with sheepish looks on their faces as they were made to lie on the floor and meditate, yoga-style, visualising the various bits of their bodies, to chill out and get in tune with their inner selves. “I suppose it’s all right for those Latin types,’ I could imagine them thinking to themselves, ‘but it’s not terribly British.’

The Babes, in general, proved more amenable, though one or two looked resigned rather than relaxed.

Still, in the sweltering heat, they could console themselves that at least a nice lie-down was one way of keeping cool.

And when we stood up I think we were all in a different frame of mind, and astonished ourselves with our ability to take part in some amazing free-style harmonic improvisation without any self-consciousness.

We ended up creating the sounds of a tropical rainstorm by clapping and tapping our hands.

When the workshop came to an end everyone had a huge smile on their face. The whole thing was as unexpected as it was refreshing.

By the time you read this I’ll be on my way to Cornwall, where we’ll be singing at the Minack Theatre, St Michael’s Mount and Truro Cathedral, just for fun. And while we’re on tour we’ll be meeting a choir from Falmouth who are putting on a ceilidh for us.

Keep doing new things, that’s a good motto for life, I reckon.

Happy days.

Questions for the Police and Crime Commissioner

I WAS unable to attend last night’s public meeting at the Guildhall about the proposed closure of Salisbury police station because I was on my way back from my son’s graduation.

Dedicated though I am to the fearless pursuit of truth and the public interest (!) the boy’s big day was not to be missed.

But had I been around, these are some of the questions I’d have asked Police and Crime Commissioner Angus Macpherson, or ‘Nine Jobs’ as  he’s been nicknamed by Journal website commentators (surely that should be 999 Jobs?)

Mr Macpherson, I gather you are intending to base emergency response vehicles at the Five Rivers ‘community campus’ once the leisure centre has been extended to accommodate this new role.

I am reliably informed that there can be upwards of a dozen such vehicles parked at the police station at one time.

And then there are the officers’ own cars, needed to get to and from their shifts from all over South Wiltshire. I can’t see officers using the city centre shuttle bus instead.

What I can foresee is a large number of spaces being lost by gym users and swimmers. Unless, of course, you’re going to Tarmac over all the surrounding grassed areas?

Wherever you accommodate them, there’ll be a lot of extra vehicles entering and exiting a family leisure facility where free-range children behave unpredictably (especially, in my experience, after one of those swimming-pool birthday parties when they’re stuffed full of E numbers).

And blimey, what about school sports days on the running track? I’d love to be a fly on the steering wheel when a proud mama in an outsize 4x4, desperately trying to reverse into a parking space so she can watch her little darling win the 100 metres, encounters one of Wiltshire’s finest setting forth, siren blaring, blue lights flashing. It’s a breach of the peace just waiting to happen.

Is it true, by the way, or just a baseless rumour that the Salisbury intelligence unit had thousands of pounds spent on special security doors, only to be moved within months to Melksham?

I’ve heard that a gradual exodus north has been under way for a while now. If so, no wonder you say the station is under-occupied.

Other matters are puzzling people who understand more about police procedures than I do, and I quote: Where will the child protection unit and domestic violence units go? Where will officers carry out video interviews of victims of sexual assault? Where will the sex offenders unit and vulnerable adults unit be based? What about CID?
Then there's the million-dollar question (let's hope that's not what it costs) - where will the new custody unit be?
Finally, who first suggested that a city as important as Salisbury, with its vital military connections, doesn't need a proper police station? This plan was kicking around long before your election, Mr Macpherson. So whose bright idea was it really?

A little treasure that's in need of some TLC

WHY can’t you write about the state of the Poultry Cross, I was asked at a recent book club get-together.

I was quite surprised by how strongly the whole group felt. This quaint little survivor from the 15^th century shouldn’t be allowed to deteriorate further, they said.

So, having mugged up on its history – last week’s Journal Scrapbook article by Peter Daniels was most helpful - I went and had a closer look at it, and decided they’d got a point.

At the beginning of the 19^th century – minus its original decorative topping of flying buttresses, which were restored later – the Cross was the focal point of a painting by Turner.

Now it’s the focal point for pedestrians strolling down Butcher Row, enjoying the burgeoning café culture, yet it’s covered in pigeon droppings and some kind of moss.

The stonework looks as if it could do with a clean. In places it appears to be crumbling, and the paving around it, as elsewhere in the city centre, is pock-marked with chewing gum. All in all, it is a bit of a mess.

It needn’t be like this, said my book-clubbers. And how lovely it has been lately, they added, to see the farmers’ market gathered around it on a Wednesday, using it as its creators intended.

The Cross belongs to Wiltshire Council, not to the city. Grade 1 listed monuments can cost a fortune to keep up. There are many competing demands on the public purse in these hard times.

And they say distance lends enchantment, so it probably doesn’t look quite so neglected from 33 miles away in Trowbridge.

I remember a leading light in the old district council telling me with unholy glee four years ago that Wiltshire didn’t know the headaches it was letting itself in for when it appropriated Salisbury’s ancient treasures, such as the Cross or the prison in Fisherton Street. A bottomless money-pit, was his opinion.

Wiltshire’s leaders were itching to get their hands on our assets, he added sourly. We couldn’t stop them, so let them find out the hard way.

Well, the days when the people of Salisbury had the power to run their own affairs are now long gone and we are, as they say, where we are.

However, structures such as the Cross are the priceless relics of days even longer gone, a past which gives our city its unique character and makes it such a tourist attraction. Someone must take care of them.

I can’t imagine that the Market Place refurbishment will be costing Wiltshire quite as much as was originally budgeted, given the way the project’s been scaled down since those first grandiose plans. I seem to remember a figure of £3million being bandied about. Isn’t any of that left in the Vision’s coffers?

Saving Salisbury's wildlife

I TRIED to ignore the pigeon drooping in the baking heat on my neighbour Mike’s patio.

Hunched and pathetic, it sat there for hours on end, barely stirring on the first really hot day of this so-called summer.

We’ve had landscape gardeners in, extending our own patio, and by midway through the  afternoon they, like me, were tiptoeing over to the fence to keep an eye on the poor little thing.

Coincidentally, I’d been watching a pair of pigeons nesting in Mike’s honeysuckle for a few weeks (whilst trying not to appear as if I was training my binoculars through his bedroom windows).

The female had seemed to be sitting on eggs, and my first, mistaken assumption was that this was a youngster that had tumbled out.

We tried tempting it with birdseed and breadcrumbs and it made a half-hearted attempt to peck. We put down a dish of water but it wasn’t drinking.

In the end I could stand it no longer and rang Creatures In Crisis, previously known as Wiltshire Wildlife Rescue.

Would I mind trying to catch the pigeon, asked their full-time volunteer Kevin, while he finished cooking the family dinner. Then he would take care of it.

So there I was, distracting the bird by inching my way across its line of vision while Ian from over the road, a keen angler, crept up behind it with his landing net.

And bingo! We got it first time, popped it in a shoebox, and took it across town to Kevin, who answered the door with a young jackdaw tucked under one arm, its beak wide open as it anticipated its next mouthful of food.

What a wonderful organisation this is, I thought. Thank goodness it’s there when we need it.

I’ve called it a couple of times before – once for an injured bat on my front path (it later died), and once to remove a panic-stricken pied wagtail from the Bishop Wordsworth’s School kitchen, where I was helping to serve refreshments at a parents’ evening.

If only the mums and dads sipping tea and nibbling biscuits as they waited to talk to the teachers had realised what a chase was going on behind the serving hatch!

Sadly the pigeon turned out to have a head injury and it only lived for a couple of days. But I know I left it in the best possible hands.

The team at Creatures in Crisis deserve our admiration and thanks. Their job is sometimes pretty grim. And if anyone feels moved to offer them help, either practical or financial, I know they’d appreciate it. Just email creaturesincrisis@live.com.