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.