Beam me up, Scotty - resistance is futile

SALISBURY area board organised a very constructive debate on Salisbury’s parking charges last week.
The trouble was, only about 50 people turned up. And several of those were city or Wiltshire councillors.
Four years ago, when we faced a massive hike in our charges, a protest petition organised by the Journal amassed 7,000 signatures.
It led to an admission by Wiltshire leader Jane Scott that her administration had “let the city down”.
So what’s changed? The new proposals include a whopping £9 all-day rate and a derisory 10p change to some (not all) central short-stay tariffs when our businesses have been begging for serious reductions to revive the city’s fortunes.
So why the low turnout?
As the board chairman Ricky Rogers rightly put it, people have ceased to believe that anything they say will make any difference. The public’s mood, as in so many political matters, is one of sullen acceptance of our own impotence.
“Resistance is futile,” as those nasty old Borg were fond of saying in Star Trek. “Your culture will adapt to service us.”
Of those at the meeting, 55 per cent admitted they hadn’t even bothered to fill in Wiltshire’s parking review questionnaire. And these were the public-spirited few who had taken the trouble to turn up!
One commonly expressed view was: “If Wiltshire really wants our views, why didn’t they ask us first, rather than presenting us with a package for the whole county and expecting us to pick it apart?”
Others pointed out that the questions were phrased in such a way that they couldn’t give the answers they wished to. They called it “cynical” and “patronising”.
We didn’t even get round to talking about parking meters and the big increase in takings that the council expects when it gets rid of convenient 15-minute and 45-minute slots and raises the price of half-hour stays.
We know our city contributes more than half the parking revenue of the county, and is the only place that makes a profit.
And the feeling of the meeting was that while Wiltshire insists on any changes to its regime being ‘cost neutral’ it’s not going to forgo this nice little earner.
Making people in other towns pay more doesn’t seem to be on its agenda. But why should Salisbury folk subsidise the rest of the county?
We’re a low-wage economy and most users of the car parks are locals, not tourists, who tend to arrive in coaches.
Someone at the meeting suggested free parking countywide, funded by an increase in council tax. Would that be an idea worth exploring?
Another asked: “What about a cut-price parking season ticket for local people?” Worth a try?

Comfort and joy for Salisbury's 'late night economy'

CHEERS! Wiltshire councillors have decided we don’t need a tougher licensing regime to clobber anyone planning to open a bar, club or restaurant selling alcohol in the city centre.
Whilst there is a regrettable amount of drink-fuelled yobbery in Salisbury, I don’t believe such a crackdown would prevent it. Rather, the problem would move a few yards outside the boundary of any newly-introduced ‘cumulative impact area’.
The idea will be reviewed in a year’s time, i.e. it’s been kicked into the long grass. Let it stay there.
I do sympathise with those residents who have found unwelcome deposits or even overnight guests on their doorsteps but these are matters for the police, not excuses to load what is euphemistically called our ‘late night economy’ with regulatory burdens.
That being said, the Police Federation is telling us that “substantially” fewer arrests have taken place since the closure of the Wilton Road station because detainees have to be carted off to Melksham.
So we may have good reason to fear an increase in anti-social behaviour.
The Wiltshire force, on the other hand, says the numbers have remained stable.
We need facts and figures. We shouldn’t have to choose whether to take the word of one side against the other when it appears that an internal battle is raging over such an important issue.
After all, it’s amazing the way you can spin an argument depending on your point of view.
It’s easy, for instance, to say, as was reported this week, that most people “unless they’re directly affected” are in favour of the development of hundreds of houses around the perimeter of Old Sarum airfield.
What about those who are directly affected? Not just neighbours, pilots, plane-spotters and history buffs but those manning our struggling public services.
And more importantly, what about English Heritage’s view that this unique little survivor from World War One needs to be preserved in its entirety? That’s a lost cause now.
I may be idealistic, but I’m not naïve. I wasn’t shocked by the way this development site was shoehorned into the South Wiltshire Core Strategy at the last minute, without proper public consultation. But I was disgusted and continue to be so.

No fairytale ending for Pixie, or for Salisbury

WELL now, I haven’t been so shocked since Sunday, when head judge Len booted the lovely Pixie – the best dancer on Strictly - off the show.
He was, apparently, less than cha-cha-charmed by her illegal lifts.
Still, he could have let her off with a caution.
I, for one, won’t be watching the rest of the series because it can no longer maintain any pretence of being a serious competition.
But even that earth-shattering departure pales into insignificance compared with Monday’s announcement that the city may never get the new custody suite that was promised when we were being told not to worry our little heads about the loss of our old police station.
As Craig would say: “It’s a disaaaaster, darling.”
I find it very sad, quite frankly, that the poor old Chief Constable, Pat Geenty, was the one who had to make this announcement, rather than the Police Commissioner, Angus Macpherson.
It may have been, as Mr Macpherson states, the Chief Constable’s decision to review the location of the county’s custody units.
But it looks odd, given that Mr Geenty threatened as recently as April to resign if the city wasn’t allowed to keep one.
Now he’s having to execute a tricky reverse fleckerl, claiming he didn’t understand quite what a parlous state the force’s finances were going to be in.
He can only afford two custody units across the county instead of three, it seems, and one of those has to be in Swindon.
But sure as eggs is eggs, Mr Macpherson and his political masters must have known this.
Or did no-one at the top have a proper understanding, just eight months ago, of the savings required from all our public services over the next three years? It almost beggars belief.
Unfortunately we can’t vote off the Commissioner.
Of course this announcement is equivalent to a ‘Ten from Len’ for Wiltshire Council, which owns the land at Churchfields earmarked (alas, so briefly) for the cells and has always wanted to see it developed for lucrative housing.
Oh me, oh my, and they say journalists are cynical!
Officially, at least, there’s still a shred of hope that the review will come down in favour of Salisbury rather than some more northerly nick, saving our miscreants and their lawyers a 36-mile far-from-quickstep home.
But I fear that’s about as likely as any normal woman being able to stand up, let alone prance about, on heels the height of those sported by Tess, Claudia and Darcey.
Or Bruno managing to get through an entire show without parting company with his chair.
As they’re fond of saying on my (ex) favourite programme: It’s the moment of truth.

Behold St Nick, the saviour of Stonehenge!

SADLY, there aren’t many shepherds abiding in the fields around Stonehenge these days but if there were, they’d have been treated to two visitations from on high this week.
Nick Clegg must have thought he was bringing glad tidings of great joy with his announcement that on/off tunnel project will finally go ahead (I’ll believe it when I see it).
But the season of goodwill proved short-lived for the Deputy Prime Minister when local LibDems made it clear they wouldn’t be forming an angelic chorus of approval.
Actually, their parliamentary candidate Reeten Banerji told the media, the £1.1bn* hole in the ground wasn’t ‘just what he’d always wanted’.
Embarrassingly for his leader, he then called for a local referendum on a range of improvements to the A303 instead, thereby handing a political gift to his party’s opponents.
Running the Liberal Democrats has always looked a bit like herding cats to me, and whilst independent thinking in the politically-inclined is always to be admired, I do feel a little bit sorry on this occasion for Westminster’s would-be ‘St Nick’.
To cap it all he was upstaged within hours by the Prime Minister, who couldn’t resist ‘doing a Barack Obama’ and striding masterfully across the prehistoric landscape for a photo-opportunity whilst pronouncing impressively that the tunnel is now an “unstoppable force”.
It’s a wonder Ed Miliband wasn’t discovered lurking behind a standing stone, hoping to tiptoe into shot for a share of the glory.
He really can’t win, can he? Mr Clegg, I mean. Or do I mean Mr Miliband? Or come to that, Mr Cameron? Gosh, aren’t we voters spoilt for choice?
Our little city, on the other hand, is onto a real winner with its Christmas market.
This year more than 120 coachloads of day-trippers from as far afield as South Wales and the West Midlands are dropping by to soak up the twinkly atmosphere and gluhwein and splash out on stocking-fillers.
I don’t know how much extra cash the market attracts to the rest of Salisbury, but wouldn’t it be nice to see a few more stalls in the High Street or the Maltings to spread the benefits more widely?
Incidentally, I’d love to know whether we have posters promoting our market in Winchester, to match their cheeky ad at the Castle Road roundabout.
For me, though, what really gets that festive feeling started every year is the totally delightful St Thomas’s Church Christmas tree festival.
In the same way that we treasure the tinsel-and-glue-smudged decorations our children bring home so proudly from school, we should nurture and support this homespun charmer of an event that gives so much pleasure to the creators and admirers of the trees, and raises so much money for good causes, too.
It’s what Christmas is really all about. (Yes, clichés are acceptable at this time of year.)

*Figures courtesy of the Department of Guesswork

Parking charge review adds insult to injury

WE’VE waited years for Wiltshire Council to review its parking charges – and for what?
The £9 all-day rate, with no compensating increase in park-and-ride opening hours, may be the headline-grabber.
But don’t be too distracted by that. The real devil is in the detail of this public consultation. Shoppers, tourists and business visitors park for much shorter periods.
And instead of heeding traders’ calls for significantly cheaper one, two and three-hour stays, the council is offering a measly 10p or 20p off in the central car park. Even then the Maltings isn’t included.
Short stays at Salt Lane, College Street and Brown Street will cost the same as now.
Lush House car park – where the income goes to the city council – will become more expensive, in order to “to manage demand”.
The only real reduction will be at the perennially unpopular Culver Street stack, scene of the recent ‘Free After Three’ initiative. I’ve seen no indication whether that has proved successful, or whether it will continue.
Until now, rather than pay Wiltshire a penny more than strictly necessary, some members of the Awkward Squad, like me, have taken advantage of on-street parking at 20p for 15 minutes.
So the council’s going to get rid of it.
It says 15-minute slots are “difficult to enforce”. Presumably when the wardens’ backs are turned, some shoppers are getting away with an extra five minutes free – and that would never do, would it?
It’s also contemplating raising the half-hour meter price to 80p. I suspect the principal beneficiary of that will be Waitrose.
Meanwhile over in Trowbridge, residents will benefit from cheaper all-day parking. I think that’s called rubbing our noses in it.
It’s interesting to see John Glen calling for the park and ride to be scrapped so we don’t have to subsidise it any more.
But I’m sure I heard somewhere, aeons ago, that it would mean the council having to repay the huge set-up costs to the government. And how could Wiltshire afford that?
Besides, it needs park and ride because it’s planning to provide fewer city centre spaces.
So here’s its nod to democracy: The new charges “should be seen as one possible solution”. You are “invited to propose alternative charges” and explain how they may be funded.
I acknowledge that a lot of time and effort on the part of council staff has gone into this consultation document.
We, the public, are not accountants, by and large. We don’t have the technical expertise to assess the cumulative effect of all the different parking charges across a large county, let alone reapportion them in a politically acceptable manner.
When we don’t come up with an alternative ‘cost neutral’ package, we’ll be told we had our chance.

'Unacceptable risk' of a store on Salisbury's floodplain

LAST week my aquarobics class (average age, wrong side of 50) was taught by a young, lithe and very quirky stand-in teacher.
He was a fantastic dancer, but most of us ended up with our feet tied in knots as we tried to copy his routines.
Gangnam Style looks so effortless when you’ve mastered the moves. I’d say that would take me six months, minimum.
Not that it mattered. We were all laughing at our own efforts, and it was great fun.
I can’t say I’ve ever waded through treacle, but attempting nifty footwork in a swimming pool can’t be that different.
The water resistance, especially when making a sudden change of direction, ensures that any attempt at elegance is doomed.
But hey, not much else happens on a Thursday morning (apart from the publication of the Journal, of course) that could brighten up my day like that.
Speaking of wading through treacle, Sainsbury’s application for a supermarket and petrol station on the Southampton Road meadows (587 documents so far!) is still wending its way through our tortuous planning system.
Someone recently drew my attention to the fundamental objection lodged by the Environment Agency, that the scheme is “against national planning policy as it would be within … functional floodplain”.
Just in case national planning policy turns out not to be worth the paper it’s written on, the Agency has also explained some of its technical issues with the scheme as it stands – on stilts, that is.
Not least, there are “strong concerns” about the void intended to hold floodwater beneath the store, and “whether designing a scheme with the need for regular inspection and maintenance of such a confined space (some 16,000m2 – 18,000m2 in area with approximate void height of 1m) is a safe, sustainable or even an achievable solution”.
Verdict: The development carries “an unacceptable degree of uncertainty and risk of possible future failure”.
Sorry to bore you with the detail, but few people will see this otherwise and in my view, everybody needs to.
Despite these deep misgivings, it’s also been suggested to me that only the Highways Agency has the clout to stop this scheme dead in its tracks.
And its staff are still working with the developers on traffic modelling.
The tone of their correspondence with Wiltshire Council troubles me. They talk about matters having “not yet” reached the stage where they can impose planning conditions, as if envisaging that the scheme could eventually be acceptable to them.
It’s very definitely not a definite no.
As I write this, the rain’s pouring down outside my window.
I recall last winter’s floods only too clearly – my garden was submerged for weeks on end - and I ask myself what on earth has to happen before our society learns anything at all.

Trust the public, a Wiltshire fire merger will save lives

YOU can fool some of the people some of the time.

But it’s reassuring to see that you can’t bamboozle the Great British Public when something is patently not in its interests.
I refer to the consultation on whether our fire service should merge with Dorset’s.
Not so long ago our political leaders at Trowbridge ousted fellow-Conservative Graham Payne as Wiltshire and Swindon Fire Authority chairman because he favoured the merger.
They then had the public consultation document redrafted to try to ensure that the options on offer gave them a bigger stake in running the service.
But by an overwhelming majority, folk didn’t fall for it.
Countywide, 77 per cent backed the merger plan, which would save £4million a year and save jobs.
In Salisbury, not a single person said they would prefer to keep a Wiltshire-only service once they learned that it would mean slashing the numbers not only of firefighters, but of appliances and stations.
The degree of consensus was “remarkable”, according to a report by Opinion Research Services.
But was it really? What’s a fire service for if it’s not for giving us all the best possible chance to avoid being burned to death or choked by toxic smoke?
The dominant theme of the findings, says ORS, was that “local authorities are not the most suitable partners for emergency services because there is little synergy between their respective operations, and local government has problems of its own to deal with.”
You’d certainly have thought that last bit was true, wouldn’t you?
Some respondents worried that councils are “too political”, others that fire chiefs would find themselves competing for funding against social services or education. All of them legitimate points.
The “vast majority” of MPs in the area also said they want frontline services protected first and foremost, according to the report.
The government, meanwhile, is so convinced by the business case for the two counties teaming up that it has offered £5.54million to help make it happen.
Some of that, inevitably, is for IT harmonisation. But a big chunk is for a new SafeWise centre delivering safety education in the Salisbury area, to be combined with a ‘strategic hub’ – a meeting place for a joint fire authority and its staff.
As our MP John Glen told me: “For the people of Salisbury and south Wiltshire that can’t be anything but good news, especially with a new fire authority HQ in our patch.”
All around us are voices united in agreement - Swindon Borough Council, Dorset County Council’s cabinet, Bournemouth Borough Council …. and now Dorset Fire Authority, unanimously.
So what are we waiting for? The verdict of our own fire authority, now chaired by Winterslow’s councillor Chris Devine. It meets in Devizes on Tuesday ………

The fight for our custom as Salisbury keeps on growing

INTERESTING that such a major retail player as Dunelm Mill is moving in to Salisbury.
As a near neighbour of Matalan and Homebase, it’ll give them a run for their money in the competition for customers who fancy jazzing up their homes with the latest accessories.
Arriving, as it does, hot on the heels of the TK Maxx offshoot HomeSense, it’ll have shoppers at the bargain end of the market spoilt for choice.
Waitrose and Tesco have been busily revamping their stores to ensure that they each maintain their appeal and their market share.
With the thousands of new homes springing up around the city, all of them needing to be kitted out, Dunelm bosses have rightly spotted a golden opportunity.
And a rival for our established stores can only be a good thing when it comes to keeping prices low.
With luck, it will also mean that fewer of us feel the need to drive to Southampton and tramp miles through the horrendous maze of bizarrely named furnishings that is Ikea when all we really need is half a dozen wine glasses and a couple of candle holders.
By the time we’ve paid for our petrol and possibly a plateful of those puzzlingly popular meatballs, we’re not exactly quids in, are we?
Retail is already Salisbury’s biggest source of employment, accounting for almost one in five jobs. And the newcomer will create 65 more.
The downside is that it will lure yet more custom away from the city centre, where there’s already lots on offer for those of us eager to freshen up our décor.
Size does matter in this context, I admit. Many of our quaint old buildings are simply too small to display enough stuff to offer us the choices we demand these days.
I don’t particularly enjoy shopping in soulless retail parks full of mammoth warehouses.
But Southampton Road is what it is. It isn’t going to go away, and it looks less hideous when its buildings are bustling with life than when they’re vacant, staring at us with blank eyes as we drive past.
And for many, many people, the free parking there is understandably a major consideration.
Let’s hope Wiltshire’s Tory leaders – who, by and large, are not short of a few bob – bear that in mind in the coming weeks when they’re mulling over the level at which they’ll set the city’s new parking charges.
But don’t hold your breath. What they give with one hand, they’ll take away with the other because they insist that the final result must be ‘cost neutral’.
In other words, they seem to have already ruled out the possibility that if they reduce the costs for everyone, more people will come.

Aren't we lucky, Wiltshire's such a brilliant council?

IF Wiltshire really is the fifth best council in the country, there’s only one question to ask, isn’t there?
What on earth are the others like?
The council has been glorying in the solemn judgement of the Daily Telegraph that homeowners here enjoy “the benefit of good local service”.
Hoots of derision appear to be the taxpaying public’s response.
“A tidal wave of negativity” was how one reader accurately summed up the comments on the Salisbury Journal’s Facebook page about the Telegraph’s verdict.
Another asked whether the survey had been carried out by the Chuckle Brothers.
Actually, the Telegraph article amounted to nothing more than a couple of sentences of risible editorial providing a figleaf for high-end estate agents advertising some extremely pricey properties.
“It is a fabulous area,” gushed Rupert Sturgis of Knight Frank Chichester, according to the paper.
Chichester? Note to Telegraph editor: That’s in West Sussex. Mr Sturgis is based in Cirencester. That’s not in Wiltshire either.
“The county council has worked closely with Malmesbury (two-bedroom terraced houses in the town sell for under £160,000) council and surrounding villages to draw up a plan for future development,” Rupert burbled on in his efforts to interest us in a Grade II-listed six-bedroom farmhouse for a mere £2.25million.
Well, he should know, since his dad is based in Wiltshire, and is the cabinet member in charge of strategic planning and development management.
I don’t have space here to repeat the reasons I’ve given in previous columns for my opinion that the unitary authority hasn’t done us much good in the south.
But I will just draw to your attention the fact that Wiltshire’s about to unleash another of its so-called ‘public consultations’ on us.
What’s it about this time? New parking charges.
I wonder whether the day will ever come when parking charges are listed in a national newspaper under the heading ‘All the good things Wiltshire’s done for its taxpayers’?



OH joy! Oh bliss! This is better than Strictly!
I can barely contain my excitement. As I write, I’m also watching the first live internet broadcast of a Wiltshire Council meeting.
I shouldn’t mock. Webcams do at least offer us a way of keeping tabs on what they’re up to in Trowbridge without having to make the epic journey across the Plain.
Now the members are settling into their seats. Now Cllr Roy White is telling them that this is “history in the making” which will “help enhance the transparency” of decision-making and that if the fire alarm goes off it won’t be a practice drill, it’ll be the real thing.
Do you know, if you are unavoidably detained by urgent business and don’t want to miss an episode of this enthralling entertainment, you can watch it on catch-up for six months afterwards?
And you can shout at them from the privacy of your own home.

Why is Salisbury's tip sending useful goods to landfill?

AM I alone in finding it tricky to reverse into a parking space at the Churchfields tip – sorry, household recycling centre?
And before anyone makes any tired jokes about women drivers – don’t, because my sense of humour has been severely strained by repeated trips to this ‘facility’ during a major clearout.
I don’t know when it was built, but it wasn’t with the modern 4x4 in mind.
My car’s not one of those nippy little numbers that turns on a sixpence. When the world and his wife are emptying their garden rubbish, there’s precious little room to swing round and back into a narrow space between other vehicles.
Here’s a tip for Wiltshire from me – build a bigger one!
While we’re on the subject, we’re all supposed to ‘reduce, re-use, recycle’. So why can’t tip users take away other folk’s unwanted belongings?
Several times lately we’ve been to a tip in Dorset. It’s small.
But it has an area where people can leave surplus stuff for others to help themselves. Recipients make a token payment which I believe goes to good causes.
If things aren’t rehomed after a day or two, they’re binned.
In Salisbury I’ve seen loads of small items that someone might appreciate just chucked into the landfill skip.
The Trussell Trust has cottoned on to this, and I’m sure its shop, cannily sited on the corner of Stephenson Road, diverts lots of furniture.
It looks like there’s an arrangement in place at the tip, too, for someone to pick up the bits and pieces stacked alongside the staff hut.
But there’s still so much waste.
In summer, we sit on metal garden chairs ‘liberated’ from the tip, with a matching table, in district council days (with permission, I should add).
Painted green, after several years of benign neglect they’ve acquired that fashionable ‘distressed’ look.
Another time I picked up a wood and chrome bar stool. After a spell as a perch in a guitar-player’s bedroom, it’s used in the Harnham Handyman’s shed.
A few months ago I waylaid a lady approaching the landfill skip bearing a wicker basket with leather straps.
“Excuse me,” I said, “don’t you want that? It would make a lovely sewing basket for a girl I know who doesn’t have much money.”
She handed it over with a smile. It turned out to be a retro picnic set. “I didn’t know what else to do with it,” she told me. “I’ll be really glad if someone can use it.” And someone does.
Last week a sweet little raffia basket, containing thread, tape measure, etc, was about to be chucked into the skip by an attendant.
I asked if I could have it (for the same someone).
“People aren’t allowed to take things away,” he replied. Those are the rules. Big notices say so. Why?

YOU have until Monday to respond to the consultation on whether Wiltshire’s fire service should merge with Dorset’s, an option both fire chiefs recommend.
Ignore the ludicrous questions about sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity.
Just help save our fire service at wiltsfire.gov.uk/strengtheningourfrs.

Free-range pigs are not a blot on the Old Sarum landscape

DRIVING past Old Sarum, or walking up on the monument itself, I always enjoy seeing the pigs rooting around on the fields alongside the A345, living as free-range a life as it’s possible for farmed animals to do in our industrialised society.
I certainly don’t tut-tut and say to myself: “What unsightly agricultural activity!”
Apparently, though, some people do - among them Feilden & Mawson, the architects who have drawn up a proposed management plan for our historic airfield.
That’s how their document classifies the pig farm: “Unsightly agriculture.”
In an earlier draft they also called it “intensive”, despite the fact that free-range is exactly the opposite of the inhumane factory farming methods which are still permitted by some, otherwise civilised, European nations.
The architects say: “The visual impact of pig arks in the fields around the airfield is a major negative factor on the setting of both the airfield and the Old Sarum Scheduled Ancient Monument.”
Luckily for the pigs, and for all of us who like our free-range bacon - the kind that doesn’t turn to water the minute it hits the frying pan - the architects acknowledge that their little huts are “outside the control of the owners of the airfield”. However, they add helpfully: “They are on council controlled land which could be managed in the medium term.”
Ominous, that word “managed”. I rather thought the land was already managed – by a farmer.
Or do they mean tidied up? How do you tidy up free-range pigs, I wonder?
I also wonder why they might be proposing this course of action.
Is it simply to improve the setting of our First World War airfield?
Or is it because someone wants to build houses (470 is the figure I’ve seen mentioned) round the edges? And because buyers might turn up their noses at the prospect of porcine neighbours happily wallowing in the mud?
According to Laverstock and Ford parish council this “conservation management” scheme would destroy 65 per cent of the airfield’s surviving perimeter, one of the things that makes it so special in conservation terms.
English Heritage agrees. Both bodies regard the plan as “not fit for purpose”. The parish council says it would be more apt to call it a “development framework”.
We all recall the childhood tale of the Three Little Piggies who build their homes of straw, wood and brick respectively. Only the brick one survived the huffing and puffing of the Big Bad Wolf.
What chance have a few rows of rustic arks, do you reckon, against the ferocious wind of change that’s howling through towns, cities and green spaces the length of Britain, blowing in the diggers, the concrete mixers, and the big money?

Food festival shoppers failed to spot a free parking bargain

PRESSED for time, I paid only a flying visit to Salisbury’s Food & Drink Festival a couple of weeks ago.
It was a shame, since the event is a great favourite of mine, and eating (too much) could be classed as one of my hobbies. But the sun was shining and the stallholders seemed to be doing very well without me!
Now among the things that aren’t great favourites of mine, as regular readers may have gathered, is Wiltshire Council. Its unpalatable parking charges have provided me with fodder for many an article.
So naturally I drove to Culver Street where, it being a Sunday, parking was free thanks to an arrangement negotiated with the council by the Salisbury BID team.
Halfway through the morning, the multi-storey was still two-thirds empty.
But, I was astonished to see, Brown Street – where motorists must part with their hard-earned cash for the privilege of saving themselves a walk of perhaps 30 seconds from Culver Street – was packed.
I wondered whether this was an indication that we have turned into a nation of lardies who are too idle to use our legs, or whether people simply weren’t aware that there was somewhere close by where they didn’t need to pay.
If they’d read their local paper, of course, they would have known, as the Journal has given the initiative plenty of coverage on its news pages.
But if they hadn’t, they probably won’t be reading this column either.
So may I suggest that more effort is made by the BID to publicise the bargain?
Nobody’s going to look on websites unless they know there’s some reason to do so. So that’s not an option for reaching out to the masses.
What, then? Giant placards around the city centre, maybe? Someone dressed up in an outsize dragon costume (to reflect our historic connections with the St George legend) handing out flyers in the Market Place on a few Tuesdays and Saturdays?
I’m sure it wouldn’t take much more ingenuity than that for the word to get out – after all, everyone loves a freebie.

If only we could vote on Devo Max for Salisbury

WHY are hard-pressed traders having to pay a levy to prettify our city centre and lure in more customers?
It’s quite simple. Because our local authorities don’t have the money to do what, undeniably, needs to be done.
And because a sizeable majority of businesses that bothered to vote on the issue were in favour.
I never thought I’d be quoting Margaret Thatcher’s words with approval, but as the old battleaxe put it: “There is no alternative.”
Having said which, I’m aware that only a third of those eligible to take part in the poll did so.
You’d think an issue as important as Salisbury’s future prosperity would attract rather more interest among those who make their living here.
Maybe the people who didn’t participate run businesses that don’t rely on kerb appeal and they couldn’t perceive any benefit to themselves from forking out. That would be a short-sighted view in my opinion.
And if it’s the case, I’d politely suggest to Wiltshire Council that its vision of a ‘community led’ future with minimal public services is just that – a dream. Well, the decline of public services isn’t an illusion, of course. But the ‘community led’ bit might well be.
When people aren’t interested in exercising their democratic rights, do we have a community any longer? Discuss.
In the meantime, like the Scottish Nationalists, those who don’t like the outcome of a properly conducted poll will just have to put up with it.
At least the Scots, and our traders, were asked what they wanted.
Last month the Journal featured a letter from Wiltshire councillor Richard Britton objecting to my objection (bear with me) to his Trowbridge masters abolishing our youth service and leaving it to area boards to pick up the pieces.
He said I couldn’t “have it both ways”. I couldn’t complain about Trowbridge making decisions “remotely” and then complain about it devolving responsibility for the consequences of those decisions to local people.
Cllr Britton seems to think this was a generous gesture amounting to some kind of Devo Max for Salisbury. I don’t think he was being ironic when he called it a “brave move” by the Conservative leadership.
‘A piece of political buck-passing once you’ve made a complete dog’s breakfast of a viable service’ seems to me to come closer to the truth.
Anyone round here remember being offered a vote on how we wanted to be ruled?

Bare buttocks in Salisbury: there are worse outrages

A MAN has been jailed this week for baring his buttocks in Salisbury Cathedral Close and pretended to be talking out of his bottom.
“Outraging public decency” was his crime.
His behaviour undoubtedly shocked and embarrassed onlookers, among them parents with young children.
I wouldn’t begin to criticise the judge’s decision. I don’t have all the information available to the court.
But I do know that our society tolerates all sorts of things that offend me far more than this without anyone being punished.
From time to time in my youth it was my unhappy duty to cobble together a couple of corny pun-filled sentences to accompany the topless pictures in the Daily Star. (Not as easy as it sounds, by the way.)
My colleagues had to take their turn, too.
It felt so wrong, and many of us hated it, but this was Manchester in the mid-Eighties, the management didn’t give a damn about sexism, and there was nothing I could have said that might not have cost me my well-paid job.
Eventually I did the sensible thing, volunteered for redundancy, and moved to a more congenial office.
It was in London, at the ill-fated Today, founded by Eddy Shah. No boobs on display there.
But no unions, either, sadly. Shah had been in the frontline of the war on collective bargaining.
And as it intensified, the Thatcher government used our supposedly non-political police force to help crush the miners and the rebels at Rupert Murdoch’s Wapping.
That wasn’t fair to anyone involved, including the police. It certainly jarred with my notion of decency, and I’d go so far as to call it an outrage.
OK, some union leaders overstepped the mark. But when is it right to fight abuse of power with another abuse of power?
Another instance. Just lately the county’s youth service has been dismantled with what I consider indecent haste.
But at least tonight, councillors on the Salisbury area board have a chance to salvagesomething from the wreckage.
The Sound Emporium, a community organisation that combines commercial and charitable work, has thrown a lifeline to the music project Bass Connection.
I do hope our elected representatives will set aside party politics and grasp it.
Teenagers who wouldn’t touch a traditional youth club with a bargepole need support from people who speak their language to develop their talents.
Bass Connection nurtures creativity. It isn’t a luxury we can no longer afford. It’s a long-term investment in society’s future.
To allow it to die – well, that would be an outrage.

The right decision for Salisbury's tourist industry

WELL done to the planning inspector who turned down a scheme to convert Salisbury’s youth hostel to retirement homes.
As the county’s tourism body VisitWiltshire told her, there’s strong demand here for budget accommodation of a type that appeals to young people.
I don’t think Tesco Towers is going to fill that niche.
The Youth Hostel Association says, somewhat sniffily, that it will “review the outcome” of its appeal and “take any decision that best serves our organisation”.
That’s fine. But the decisions that best serve Salisbury’s economy are ones that encourage tourists to stay here for longer than the average coach party of Americans, to explore a bit more than just the Cathedral and Stonehenge, and to spend money in our shops and cafes.
There’s no doubt that we will also, in due course, require more purpose-built accommodation for older people in the city, given our ageing population. And sites will have to be found.
Not this one, however.
Although the YHA has claimed that its building is no longer viable, I’ve spoken to people who are convinced they can make a go of it, have experience of the industry, and are keen to be given the opportunity.
So perhaps the YHA would be better off concentrating its efforts elsewhere, and letting someone else get on with the job?
Meanwhile our traders ought to offer a vote of thanks to city councillor Margaret Willmot for her campaigning on this issue.

I’ll be seeing the sights of Salisbury and our surrounding countryside through a visitor’s eyes myself, soon, when my mother moves down from Essex.
I’m really looking forward to it – and not only because it’ll mean an end to nightmare stop-start journeys round the M25.
Taking her out and about will give me a chance to rediscover the advantages of living here.

One of the first places on the to-do list if the weather holds out will be New Forest Lavender down at Landford, a small family business it’s a pleasure to support.
Their cream tea with lavender scones and a pot of Earl Grey is the perfect way to round off a summer afternoon.

You don't need statistics to be affected by violence

SALISBURY may not be a hotbed of violent crime, statistically speaking.
But you only have to witness one shocking incident, or be on the receiving end of a random blow when you’re passing someone else’s punch-up, and it will stay with you forever.
Like the poor 92-year-old chap who had his arm broken outside a pub in Bridge Street last month.
At his age it’s not just physical recovery, but regaining confidence, that takes a long time.
Reading about him brought to mind the summer, a decade ago, when my family hosted foreign students for a language school.
Attracted by the low prices at the same pub, one group – and I’m talking Swedes in their thirties and forties, with a penchant for traditional Icelandic knitwear – would gather there after lessons for a quiet pint.
Until the day a bunch of oiks with tattoos on their shaven heads began jumping around in the bar, getting ever closer to the students, then ‘accidentally’ bumped into one of them, taunting him: “Nice jumper, mate.”
The Scandinavians beat a hasty retreat.
I thought at the time: What an impression foreigners must get of Britons and of the behaviour we tolerate in public because we’re too scared to intervene. I’d be too scared, too.
Two or three years ago, I was window-shopping in Catherine Street when a lad – still in his teens, I should say – came marching up the opposite pavement, phone glued to his ear, effing and blinding at maximum volume and threatening extreme violence towards someone who had failed to pay him for something. Illegal substances sprang to mind.
Shoppers averted their eyes and quietly parted to let him through. Nobody wanted to attract his attention.
He was fearless, certain that he would not be challenged, and there were no police in sight.
When I mentioned to a colleague that I was thinking of writing about this, she told me she had just witnessed a fight between two men in Exeter Street.
“They were pushing and shoving, shouting and swearing, and one of them pushed his bike into the other one,” she said.
“I had to go back up the road and cross over to come down the other side, and other people were doing the same thing.
“I checked that I had my phone handy, in case someone got really hurt. You want to fulfil your civil responsibilities, but you don’t want to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Most of us want nothing more than to get on with our law-abiding lives in peace.
But we share our streets with a significant minority of anti-social yobs who seem free to cause havoc whenever they feel like it.

You have to love kitchen cupboard speedcam men

HEROES of the month for me have to be the duo who created a pretend speed camera out of a kitchen cupboard.
Fed up with motorists rat-running through their village, Shrewton residents Antony Cull and Chris Fawcett used their ingenuity to build their own deterrent.
And it worked. People slowed down.
I particularly enjoyed reading Wiltshire Council’s po-faced response to this display of cost-effective individual initiative.
The council has a “robust” (that word again) system for dealing with speeding issues raised by local communities, its officers solemnly informed us.
“Issues should be referred to the local community area board, who will work with the local community to examine what speed control measures are appropriate for that particular road.”
Beseeching residents to “follow the approved procedure”, they said it was vital that any traffic control scheme was “effective and delivers the required result”.
Which, of course, the Shrewton neighbours' scheme was, and did. Overnight. Without any meetings, health and safety reports, consultations or lengthy deliberations. Job done. Who needs the nanny state?
At a time when we’re all being exhorted to run our own community services to save money, the council might at least have tried to sound a bit more grateful. No sense of humour, that’s their trouble.
I’d like to nominate the enterprising pair for one of the Journal’s Local Hero Awards, for making me smile.
And I hope that the official traffic monitoring exercise now under way in the area surrounding the A303 leads to some positive action.
I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the idea of the authorities using number plate recognition technology to track the movements of individual vehicles – mine, or anyone else’s.
But that’s happening across the country anyway under the new vehicle tax system, whether we like it or not.
Big Brother really is watching all of us. Given the choice, I’d prefer Mr Cull and Mr Fawcett with their kitchen unit.

Elsewhere in the wonderful world of Wiltshire waffle, there’s currently what Jerry Lee Lewis might have called a whole lotta shapin’ goin’ on.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but every other news item these days seems to be inviting us to “help shape” some service or other that’s about to be smashed to smithereens.
“Have your say” is another favourite.
“Have a heart” is my response. You already know what you want to do. Almost inevitably, it involves a reduced public service, and I don’t suppose anything we say is going to make much difference.

Wiltshire's youth policy drawn up on the back of a fag packet

HOW’S this for political opportunism?
Imagine you’re Trowbridge Tory Laura Mayes. Not easy, in my case, I admit.
Imagine you’ve been insisting there’s no more money for the youth service, only for your party to realise belatedly what a disaster this is turning out to be in both PR and practical terms.
It must seem like a blessed miracle when an extra £300,000 is suddenly fished out from down the back of a sofa to get you out of trouble.
Headline-wise, you don’t have to look like such a bunch of meanies after all.
Of course, trumpeting this convenient windfall is not to be construed as an acknowledgement that you might have got your initial calculations a teensy bit wrong.
And there’s no need to mention that chunks of it were raised by ‘the kids’ themselves through their youth club fees and fundraising events.
In other words, that they were helping to pay for their own fun before you stopped all that. That morally speaking, it’s their money already.
And there’s certainly no need to highlight that it won’t be spread about evenly across the county.
Or that there’ll be no more top-ups next year.
It’s just, well ………. jolly handy, and let’s all stop carping and be glad about something for once.
Onward and upward to a glorious, ‘community-led’ future.
Meanwhile, who’s left to pick up the pieces and provide constructive outlets for young people’s energies after this latest example of ‘robustly scrutinised’ back-of-a-fag-packet policy making?
Why, the bemused members of our area boards, who had no idea they were joining the salvage industry when they stood for election, aided by the few remaining Wiltshire Council professionals who have a clue about what proper youth work actually requires.
And that’s a bit more than a game of table football in the parish hall.
Last night Salisbury’s board members were meeting privately to discuss how they will cope with this unlooked-for responsibility.
I don’t envy them. Meaning no disrespect, most of them would probably admit to a pretty hazy grasp of current youth culture.
They’re not trained for the job of organising activities for teenagers, especially the stroppy ones most in need of help.
They’ll need to ensure that the volunteers who run them on a day-to-day basis are suitable.
And they can’t afford to pay someone to take the burden from their shoulders.
But they’re all we’ve got. I really do wish them the best of luck.

Forgive me if councils have made me cynical

WHEN is empire building not empire building?
It all seems to depend on whose empire you’re talking about and what you stand to gain.
I seem to recall that resentment was widespread not so many years ago when Wiltshire Council seized our district council’s assets, then set about redistributing them and ‘harmonising’ services for everyone else’s benefit except ours.
Since then I’ve asked myself many times what on earth our district councillors were doing that prevented them from seeing this disaster on the horizon.
Bickering about the cost of Bourne Hill? Distracted by the expensive repercussions of that row over whether to build a multi-storey on the central car park? Remember that?
Wondering how on earth they were going to meet the old regional assembly’s lunatic house-building targets without every hillside on the horizon disappearing under concrete?
Or simply resting their eyelids over their agenda papers?
Well, a handful of those old stalwarts are still around on the city council. And what has this emasculated body learnt from the experience?
Oh yes, let’s see if we can annexe all the little parish councils around us, whether they ask us to or not, and we’ll get lots more lovely council tax.
Wiltshire have asked us if there’s anywhere we’ve taken a fancy to, so they can’t blame us.
We won’t go bothering Wilton because they’re a) more historic and b) stroppier than us, and what’s more their mayor, town clerk and one of their councillors too all turned up at the Guildhall to keep an eye on our deliberations. No use picking a fight that we probably wouldn’t win.
But what about Laverstock & Ford? Despite all those green bits it’s got new housing going up all over the place.
With a population growing at that rate, and our higher tax precept, it’d be a nice little earner. After all, they use our crematorium, don’t they?
What’s that you say? They don’t want to be taken over? Don’t want to be charged more for the privilege? Say we never asked for their opinion?
Now where have I heard that before?

What's Richard III got to do with Wiltshire's fire service?

A WEEK or so ago you'd have found me in central London, enthralled by Martin Freeman’s blackly comic portrayal of Richard III.
In an attempt to make the plot more accessible to audiences who have no idea about the dynastic machinations of the 15th century but would quite like to see that nice man from Sherlock or The Hobbit, this production is set in the imagined aftermath of a more recent ‘winter of discontent’, in the late 1970s.
Instead of medieval castles the action takes place in a conference room, with the ruthlessly ambitious Duke of Buckingham played as a spin doctor.
It isn’t subtle. Explosions, stranglings and drownings keep things moving swiftly on, and the stage is awash with gore.
Amidst it all, Freeman is a coolly calculating little monster, mentally inspecting the pros and cons of every horror he is about to commit and concluding with a nonchalant shrug and a conspiratorial nod to the audience as if to say: “Oh well, it’s got to be done.”
Which of course is true, if you accept his initial premise that the acquisition and retention of power by any means is all that matters.
I think we know where this is going, don’t we?
I commend this production to anyone concerned that firefighters will lose their jobs (though not, in these relatively enlightened times, their heads) if Wiltshire Council’s boardroom warriors have their way.
Having deposed one brave chairman who refused to toe the party line, and dumped a public consultation document by our fire chief and his Dorset oppo, who want to combine forces, they are now, belatedly, asking us what we think.
No guarantee that they’ll take any notice, but it’s a start.
The fire chiefs say a merger will save millions, with a minimum of frontline bloodletting. They’ve drawn up a business case that shows how it’ll work.
Dorset’s voters, who are also being consulted, are being shown the details. For reasons best known to our councillors, we’re not.
Anyway, that’s Scenario 3 in the consultation.
You get there after wading through Scenarios 1 and 2, both of which save less money, give Wiltshire Council (‘critical decisions taken locally’) more to meddle in, and mean fewer boots on the ground, fewer fire stations, and slower response times.
In an emergency, I know which option I’d prefer.
If you’re in any doubt, do what the council bosses do and ask yourself: What’s in it for me?
Lives could depend on the outcome of this consultation. You can take part online at www.wiltsfire.gov.uk/strengtheningourfrs or pick up a leaflet at your library or council offices.

Putting Salisbury's pigeons on the pill is our least worst option

IF there’s ever a good time to be a pigeon, it certainly isn’t now.
For weeks they’ve suffered the unwanted attentions of the Cathedral’s breeding peregrine falcons.
The excited racket the young family make as the parents come screaming back to the spire with their latest kill carries loud and clear across the meadows to Harnham.
Natural pest control, I’d call it, and I don’t mind it at all.
Far preferable to the arsenal of toxic chemicals mankind has cooked up to wipe out unwanted neighbours on this planet, be they bugs or persecuted ethnic minorities.
The hot summer weather has taken a toll, too, and apparently the city’s pigeon population is already plummeting faster than a peregrine diving on its prey. (They can reach 200mph, according to the RSPB.)
Now the beleaguered birds face all-out war from Salisbury City Council.
I know they poo on people’s heads at Fisherton railway bridge – the pigeons, that is, not the council - and pedestrians can feel they are running the gauntlet. That’s Network Rail’s fault, for failing to install sufficient deterrents.
I know their droppings are said to carry disease. But the expert consensus is that the risk to humans is slight. The Department of Health said last year that it was “not aware of any cases of human infections” arising in this way.
On the other hand it is indisputable that these droppings, because they are acidic, damage our ancient buildings, so people who encourage pigeons to hang about the city centre by feeding them are ill-advised, however good their intentions.
What to do, though?
Since we can hardly have hunting parties stomping round the shops, picking them off one by one, it does sound to me as if the cunning plan of building nice, welcoming pigeon lofts is a good one.
There, the unsuspecting guests can be fed contraceptive seed mix, or their eggs can be taken away or unobtrusively spiked to prevent them hatching.
Labour-intensive, possibly, but undoubtedly humane.
Which pleases me, because I rather like pigeons, and their lovely soft cooing is one of the sounds that say ‘summer’ to me.
Whether this measure alone will be enough, I have no idea. But it has to be worth a try.
Now then, about those deer at the crematorium ………….

Salisbury's cemetery and crematorium shouldn't be killing fields for deer

MANY moons ago, we lived briefly in an isolated moorland cottage in the Peak District.
I remember the day we absent-mindedly left our five-bar gate open.
We came home to a garden denuded of flowering plants, including the white lacecap hydrangea I’d nurtured from one home to another, ever since my husband bought it for me on our first anniversary because it reminded me of the tiny beads on my wedding dress.
You have my permission to sigh sentimentally.
Sheep, you see, are sadly lacking in understanding when it comes to the concept of private property.
I wasn’t happy, believe me. But I didn’t actually need that plant to conjure up fond memories of our big day. They were still there – still are.
All of which brings me neatly to the vexed question of the deer nibbling their delicate way through the city’s crematorium grounds and the adjoining cemetery.
In the past I’ve had to report on vandals damaging families’ precious memorial trees in our parks, and I’ve felt the same mixture of anger and sadness as any right-thinking person would.
If the oiks responsible for this wanton destruction were ever caught, I’d like to see them paraded through the streets to face the court of public opinion. People ought to know better. There’s no excuse.
But culling - one of the options under consideration to deal with the deer - is killing, under a slightly more palatable name.
We can’t say it’s achieved its aim where the nation’s badger population is concerned.
Do we now want our places of quiet remembrance sullied with the corpses of gentle creatures, slaughtered because they eat to stay alive?
Nature poses constant challenges to our human desire to impose orderliness and the rule of law on every last corner of the wonderful wilderness that is this world. And it always will.
Despite my disappointing early experience I remain a keen (fair weather) gardener, and I’d be as upset as the next rose lover if I found Bambi and his pals chewing on my William Shakespeare or my Gertrude Jekyll, or, heaven forbid, my Great Maiden’s Blush.
But at the same time I’m enough of an urbanite to still feel thrilled and privileged when I catch a fleeting glimpse of one of these shy animals in a field alongside some roaring hell of a motorway.
Admit defeat graciously, city councillors, if you can’t afford to fork out for fences. You know it makes sense.

Nobody asked Salisbury folk where they'd like to shop

WILL it be Asda? Will it be Sainsbury’s? Will it be Aldi? Could it even be Morrisons? (Or have they gone off the boil?)
Does it actually have to be any of the above? Who asked us?
Some people, it turns out, are no more chuffed about Asda’s proposal for a London Road store than they are about Sainsbury’s Southampton Road eyesore.
Asda does seem to have considerably more support than its rival (well, it couldn’t really have less, could it?).
Then again, Aldi’s notion of transforming the derelict Autecnique site has attracted far less criticism than either of its gigantic competitors.
I confess that my first unworthy thought, when I heard of Asda’s plan, was “Whoopee, that’ll scupper Sainsbury’s!”
But there are legitimate concerns about the London Road neighbourhood’s ability to cope with the extra traffic.
They may not be game-changers but they ought to be addressed by our planners in handling this application.
After all, the objectors have to live with the inadequacies of their local infrastructure.
And here’s one problem with our local government system.
The unitary authority, i.e. the one with all the power, is run by people from the other parts of the county.
Salisbury and South Wiltshire still don’t boast a single cabinet member between them to lobby for our interests. And there is a strategic planning committee, with a huge majority of members from outside this area, to take decisions that may upset the natives.
Our city council has got much better organised in its response to planning applications over the last year or two, but it only has the power to advise Wiltshire, which doesn’t have to listen if it doesn’t want to.
So while the Salisbury Journal is deluged with protests about controversial planning applications, how do we know who’s listening Up There where it counts?
What we really should have had by now is a city-wide debate to reach a properly thought-through consensus about what facilities we need, including whether we need another supermarket at all, and if so, where it should be.
Instead, we’re playing chase-the-chain-store along our A roads, firing off responses to one application after another, forced to weigh up the relative merits of sites chosen by the big players to suit themselves.
If localism (and I suspect David Cameron is by now wishing he'd never heard that word) is to have any meaning at all, it surely means that genuine local community planning, of a kind that we have not yet been invited to take part in, should be the first priority.
P.S. I remember Amesbury people wanted an Asda on Solstice Park a few years ago. They got a Tesco on their London Road instead. And now the Co-op’s closing because everyone goes to Tesco. Be warned.

It's time to fight for Wiltshire's frontline fire services

IT’S a brave man who suggests reforms that might cost him his own job.
My instinctive reaction is to respect the integrity of someone who does that.
Take, for example, Wiltshire’s fire chief, Simon Routh-Jones, and his Dorset counterpart, Darran Gunter.
Clearly these are blokes who know what they’re doing. Lives depend on it.
And one thing they agree on is that without drastic action, their respective services will collapse in a couple of years under the weight of deficits that our government will not permit them to address by raising money through council tax.
They’ve been doing their best to economise. Under the present setup they will have little left to cut except firefighters, fire engines and fire stations.
So they’ve undertaken a great deal of work and produced a detailed consultative document that fully justifies what they see as the best possible solution – a merger producing economies of scale.
I’ve read it, and you might have done, too, if only the plug hadn’t been pulled on the public consultation.
Trouble is, there’s nothing much in the plan for Wiltshire Council, which is desperately seeking new roles for itself as the government keeps trying to slash through the layers of bureaucracy hampering our economic recovery.
Wiltshire’s already taken over some of the police force’s back office functions, and there are some who are not altogether delighted about the way that’s been working.
Now it wants the fire service’s backroom boys and girls, too.
The fire chiefs aren’t saying there’s no room for co-operation with local councils. Quite the opposite.
But first, in their combined view, there must be a merger because that’s where the big savings lie, and time is short.
Until very recently, Graham Payne was chairman of the county’s fire authority.
He said the fire chiefs were quite right, and he stuck to his guns. So he’s been got rid of by his Tory colleagues who are busy examining ‘other options’. Because of course, they know best.
They promise they will resurrect the consultation when they’ve had time to poke their noses in a bit more. It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with, and whether they show any sense of urgency about it.

Wiltshire's right to build council houses but tenants' right to buy is wrong

IT pains me to admit it, but Wiltshire Council is doing something right for once.
Investing £70million (OK, some of the funding isn’t confirmed yet, but the intention is there) in much-needed houses for hard-up young families to rent and in flats to enable the elderly to downsize is exactly what’s needed.
If it encourages the construction industry to get on and develop all that land it’s sitting on, so much the better.
A building boom on designated sites, preferably brownfield, will give the council ammunition to fight off speculative applications elsewhere and protect our countryside.
So far, then, so unusually positive.
It’s a particularly remarkable turn of events when you realise that the only council housing in the county right now is what used to belong to the old Salisbury District.
The other parts of Wiltshire handed theirs over to housing associations long ago, and as I recall from the mutterings at the time, the Trowbridge generals weren’t over-keen on becoming social landlords when they first staged their bloodless coup.
So I’d say well done, and particularly to housing portfolio holder, cllr Richard Clewer.
He’s not a cabinet member because he’s from the wrong side of the tracks, i.e. south of the Plain, but he’s doing a good job.
And as Groucho Marx more or less said, who’d want to be a member of that club anyway?
However (and there always is a however, isn’t there?) something lurking just outside the spotlight bothers me, and that’s the right to buy.
Once a family have lived in one of these new homes for five years they’ll have the right to acquire it at a discount. Then it won’t be a council house any more.
So what will be available for equally deserving young couples who come along later?
Or are we committing as a county to repeating the whole exercise, and to a long-term strategy of subsidising cheap property purchases for the lucky few?
Meanwhile those who are just as hard-up but can’t get a council house in the first place and have to rent privately won’t have a hope in hell of being able to afford to buy their home on the private market.
Or am I missing something?
We all know what Mrs Thatcher’s political reasons were for wanting to create a society of home owners, but in today’s economic climate that’s about as likely to happen as me being appointed special adviser on public relations to Jane Scott.
The right to buy isn’t Wiltshire’s fault, of course. The only people who can overturn it are our elected representatives at Westminster.

Cuts, and the Orwellian world of Wiltshire Council jargon

NOW, children, does anyone know the meaning of these commonly-used words or phrases?
‘Targeted support’, ‘building stronger and more resilient communities’, ‘efficiencies’, ‘shaping services’, ‘harmonisation’, ‘synchronisation’, ‘encouraging volunteering’, ‘restructuring’.
Yes, little Johnny, you’re right. Have a house point. The answer is ‘cuts’.
They’re all prime examples, taken from recent reports and press releases, of the jargon with which Wiltshire Council (and it’s far from alone in this) seeks to control our perception of what it’s doing.
Even though it’s fooling no-one, it persists with its cynical manipulation of language. And despite having next to no money, it pays people to do it.
We’ll soon have ‘community led’ youth services, proposals for which have been ‘robustly scrutinised’ after ‘stakeholders’ (‘key’ or otherwise) have been ‘engaged with’ in an ‘open and transparent’ fashion.
The ‘drivers for change’, are, of course, cuts again – ultimately you can blame the government or the bankers, depending on your politics.
But rest assured – after all the meat has been picked from the bones, the resulting ‘community led’ skeleton services down at the shiny new ‘community campus’ will be ‘sustainable,’ ‘fit for purpose’ and in line with the council’s ‘vision for stronger and more resilient communities’ and there’ll be a whole lot of ‘safeguarding’ going on to make sure our young people experience ‘healthy and safe life outcomes’.
Phew, and to think they had me worried there for a minute!
Now I yield to no-one in my admiration for Wiltshire’s corporate communications department. Not least for their patience when I’m constantly pestering them for answers.
They are an endlessly polite, helpful, professional bunch and I like every one of them I’ve dealt with over the years.
But one has to ask: When the council says it can’t afford to keep vulnerable people with autism, physical disabilities or learning difficulties in the places they’ve come to regard as safe havens over the years, how on earth can it justify the continuing cost of churning out propaganda like this?
I certainly wouldn’t wish any of the communications team to be ‘reconfigured’ out of a job. But maybe their talents could be redirected towards teaching other staff how to write plain English?
Last autumn at the Playhouse I was spellbound by the touring production of 1984 that is currently wowing London audiences.
I read Orwell’s novel as a teenager, in that obligatory rite-of-passage way that kids do.
But I think I got more out of the play several decades further on, because I was able to draw parallels with real-life experience.
Newspeak, here we come.

Local people must have a vote on Sainsbury plan

IT’S as clear as can be that a large number of people in Salisbury don’t want to see a Sainsbury’s superstore disfiguring the green fields that have miraculously remained undeveloped alongside Southampton Road.
How can I justify that opinion?
From reading the Journal’s postbag over the last few months, from seeing the comments on its Facebook page, and from the numbers who have sent in objections to the planners, signed teenager Hamish Mundell’s petition, or taken part in cllr Richard Clewer’s survey.
And now from the Salisbury Vision’s strongly-worded letter to planners.
But what if the decision on this planning application isn’t made by local people?
What if, instead of being considered by councillors who know and love the area and understand the sensitivity of the site, the future of this unspoilt window on the city is left to the mercy of the county’s strategic planning committee, as I understand it may well be?
There are only three councillors from South Wiltshire on this body, and only one elected by residents of the city – that’s Bill Moss, who represents St Mark’s and Bishopdown.
He’s hugely experienced and widely respected, but as I say, there’s only one of him.
Some may argue that the reason we have a strategic planning committee is precisely so that large and potentially unpopular developments aren’t held up by Nimbys, softies, hippies, tree-huggers or whatever label you choose to disparage principled objectors.
One might understand, if not necessarily accept, that argument if we were talking about a new motorway, or a hospital, or some other vital facility deemed to be for the greater good of the community.
But a supermarket? No way.
Even if it does get turned down, I’m pretty sure that this will go to appeal and end up being settled by a planning inspector, because a) Sainsbury’s has invested so heavily in it and b) that’s what big business does.
I recently asked the firm whether it had made any approaches about building at Fugglestone Red, instead, since many people have suggested it as a better site.
A spokesman would not give me a ‘yes or no’ answer, but said: “Sainsbury’s chose to become part of the Salisbury Gateway project as this area of the city was previously identified by Salisbury Vision as appropriate for a gateway development.”
What rubbish. The Vision’s objections are now in print for all to see, and just to make it crystal clear, I’m told: “The Vision does not envisage improvements to this area would require or include a new large foodstore.”
This is a local issue, and it needs to be resolved locally.

Apathy rules over plan to tighten Salisbury's licensing laws

MIDDLE age doesn’t have many advantages, as far as I can see.
Like most of my fellow baby-boomers, I haven’t stopped thinking of myself as young yet.
Maybe it’s got something to do with watching the official retirement age creeping ever further away from us towards the horizon.
But in days gone by, once we hit our fifties, women like me would have settled for a cast-iron perm and an elasticated waistband.
Nowadays we just struggle harder and harder to squeeze that expanding middle into a pair of jeans.
What does change, inevitably, is that we become largely invisible to the opposite sex. Appreciative glances from passing strangers? Just a memory.
But that very invisibility does have its upside.
I can walk home alone from the city centre after a night out without feeling in the least bit threatened.
Gangs of raucous youths who congregate to show off to each other aren’t remotely interested in bothering the likes of me, thank goodness.
These reflections were sparked by a Wiltshire Council survey on people’s perception of the crime and anti-social behaviour linked to our ‘late-night economy’ – that’s pubs, clubs and takeaways, to you and me.
It was a very well-meant exercise, but I can see two flaws in it.
Firstly, only nine of those who took part were under 34.
Yet it’s overwhelmingly young lads who are the perpetrators and the victims of late-night crime.
And if a passing lout gives a teenage boy a thump as he totters home after a few pints, he probably won’t bother reporting it, because it’s pointless. I speak from experience as the mother of sons.
So I’m not sure how much weight I’d place on recorded crime figures in this context. What I am sure of is that there are many incidents of threatening behaviour and violence that don’t get recorded.
On the whole ‘the youth’, as I have heard them called, don’t get involved in councils and policy-making and I’d be surprised if more than a handful were aware that the survey was going on.
But that brings me to my second point. The same could be said of their parents’ generation.
Only 66 individuals (plus a few special interest groups) gave their views.
We simply don’t know what the rest of the city’s population think.
Do they not go out? Do they not have a way of finding out when their opinions are being sought? Or do they just not care what happens?

So many questions over Wiltshire Council youth cuts

AUNTIE Jane Scott was on her gentlest form at the cabinet meeting.
No use frightening the children. After all, instead of hanging around street corners with nothing to do they could be hanging around street corners brandishing placards and shouting: “Down with Wiltshire Council!”
But at the end of all that consultation, as they will now have realised, they haven’t brought about any meaningful change in the council’s thinking.
This is a valuable early lesson in the way our democracy works. And they’ll be none the worse off for that, even if they will be worse off without their youth workers to pat them on the shoulder (or is that forbidden these days?) and say: “Never mind, dear.”
During much of the meeting at County Hall last Thursday, almost all the cabinet members seated on the dais (Mrs Scott excepted) appeared to be paying close attention to their laptops.
The assembled young people will have had a fine view of the tops of their heads. Let’s be charitable and assume that these councillors were assiduously taking notes.
It reminded me of those times when I’m trying to prise my husband’s or son’s attention away from a mobile phone screen for long enough to ask some petty, but to my mind essential question such as what we should have for dinner of whether anyone’s seen my glasses.
Sometimes I think I might as well be on Mars. I wonder whether the kids felt the same way?
A fully-costed alternative plan that would have minimised job losses had been drawn up by a children’s committee task group but was mysteriously missing from the paperwork. Could it have been mislaid?
Absent, too, was any certainty about how many staff will be left, how much money will be available to pay them or the area boards, or any idea how the new community youth officers are going to cope with doing 26 different things at once, and all before tea.
Nobody seemed to feel that the cabinet had really grasped the difference between providing activities for young people and targeted youth work to help and guide them.
As task group chairman cllr Jon Hubbard told the cabinet:
“I really struggle to understand how stripping the county of its trained, experienced youth workers will enhance safeguarding.
“We heard time after time from young people that what they valued most about their youth workers was that having someone to talk to who would have the time to listen. Someone they could trust and have confidence in. This trust is not instant and it’s not transferrable.
“It’s a role that cannot be replaced by having a Targeted Worker available for a 30-minute appointment once every three weeks.”
Will the new set-up be up and running seamlessly by October? I don’t think so.

On a diet, and I feel like biting someone's head off

TO any regular readers who think I’ve been sounding stroppier than usual just lately, I’ve got this to say: “How true.”
And any of them who have tried the 5:2 diet will know why, as soon as they read these words.
I’m sitting here with a rumbling stomach that feels like it’s eating itself, having skipped breakfast to save my precious 500-calorie allowance so that I can ‘enjoy’ something vaguely resembling a normal lunch: a small tin of slimmers’ soup. No bread. Nothing else.
That’ll leave me (after numerous cups of tea to fend off the hunger pangs) with 350 calories to see me through till bedtime.
I’ll heat up a ready-made slimming meal for supper because I can’t be bothered to cook. If I’m only allowed a toddler-size portion, it makes me feel like throwing a toddler-size tantrum.
And that’ll be it - an early night, because if I go to sleep I’ll stop thinking about food.
It should help that my husband has gamely agreed to diet along with me, but I just get resentful when he tucks into a slice of whatever constitutes the extra 100 daily calories permitted to a bloke.
“Is it worth the trouble?” I hear you asking.
Well, I’ve lost half a stone but it’s taken six weeks and I seem to have hit a plateau, while my husband is the one being asked by friends: “Have you lost weight?”
I suppose it’s karma - what goes around comes around.
In my younger days I was one of those infuriating people who eat like a horse and remain an enviable 36-24-36 (don’t ask me what that is in centimetres, I’m completely lacking in intellectual curiosity where numbers are concerned and I haven’t ever quite decimalised my body).
And boy was I smug. But when I hit those hormonal mid-forties and quit smoking, the pounds crept on. It was probably very silly of me to be surprised.
At 50, I recall a brief flirtation with one of those slimming clubs in a church hall where you all get weighed in every week and given a bracing pep talk, with a raffle for a box of fruit.
But I missed three weeks (life got in the way) and left in a huff when I was expected to pay for them anyway.
And after that I munched on regardless, telling myself that wearing long, loose tops over long, loose skirts was actually quite a good look in a hippyish sort of way.
Maybe I fooled some of the people some of the time.
I can’t pinpoint the moment when I realised I couldn’t kid myself any more. It was probably in a Marks & Spencer’s changing room, where the ghastly fluorescent lighting would make even Kate Moss look like a wobbly white pudding. Not the way to sell clothing, if you ask me.
Anyway, I’ve set myself a target and I do intend to stick to it. Another stone to go.
I promise I will try to be cheery in the meantime and to see the best in everyone. As long as they don’t annoy me.

Time for a little chat about the birds and the bees

EVERY time I grumble, will someone please pinch me and remind me how lucky I am?
On Saturday morning we were sitting on the patio with a visiting friend, appreciating the sunshine.
Like my husband, his pal is a birdwatcher, and as usual, they had a telescope scanning the meadows towards the cathedral.
And what did they spy on the spire? A peregrine falcon perched on a pinnacle, plucking a pigeon for his lunch.
He obligingly turned this way and that to give us all-round views, while keeping his prey firmly under foot.
We could even see the unfortunate pigeon’s white feathers drifting upwards in the breeze against the dark stone backdrop.
It was an amazing sight. It’s marvellous that the cathedral authorities have not only welcomed back these magnificent birds and given them a nesting box so that they are breeding here for the first time since 1953, but have also taken precautions to prevent tower tour parties scaring them away.
Thirty years ago, peregrines they were so endangered that my husband volunteered to join an all-night guard over a nest on a crag in the Peak District to protect it from egg thieves.
Now, thanks to bans on the pesticides that were affecting their breeding, they are thriving again, right here.

And speaking of the need to nurture nature, some people are once again complaining about the long grass and wild flowers alongside our main roads, where the Highways Agency is economising on maintenance.
But we know that those flowers provide sustenance for our struggling bee population (and without enough bees pollinating enough plants, we’re all doomed) while those long wavy stems provide cover for small creatures.
As long as sight lines are maintained at junctions - and couldn’t Wiltshire Council and its contractors Balfour Beatty negotiate some payment from the Agency to take on that simple task? - I say let the grass grow.

Sticking to the subject of leaving nature well alone, I’d like to remind you that the consultation on Sainsbury’s amended plans for a Southampton Road superstore and underwater wildlife reserve ends soon. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you don’t need to respond because you objected last time around. That doesn’t count. You need to do it again.
And don’t think you can’t make a difference.
Our weekend visitor lives in the London borough of Hillingdon, where the Save Our Northwood group (check out their website) has just forced Transport for London to rethink hugely unpopular plans for a development including a Sainsbury’s supermarket and 167 homes around the railway station.

Arresting sight of police chiefs falling out over Salisbury

‘ELLO ’ello ’ello (forgive the cliché, it’s irresistible in this context), what’s going on ’ere then?
Yep, it’s that old custody suite saga again.
Do you think all is proceeding in a harmonious direction between Police Commissioner Angus ‘Nine Jobs’ Macpherson and his chief constable Patrick Geenty? I’m darn sure it isn’t.
The chief constable has let slip that he threatened to resign if the city doesn’t get a new custody suite to replace the cells it will lose when the police station is turned into a fancy new school. Good for him.
He issued his ultimatum, he said, despite a custody suite “not making sense in business terms”.
Whose business terms would those be, then?
Certainly not those of our local solicitors, faced with trekking to and from Melksham to see their clients.
Or those of the unfortunate souls released from custody there, who will have to make their way home via what passes for a public transport system.
Could they be the business terms dreamed up by Commissioner Macpherson and his cronies in Trowbridge, none of whom will be troubled by actually having to make the journey across the Plain?
Probably. They treated our police station as a costly and unnecessary perk and don’t seem to grasp Salisbury’s role as a centre for the southern half of the county.
Why, by the way, did Mr Geenty bring up the subject of whether it made business sense to have a basic cell block here for the forces of law and order?
It makes common sense, to all but the most blinkered bean-counters. Anyway, I thought that all the savings the force will make from getting rid of the police station were meant to pay for it?
The official line has always been that there would be a custody suite here but that they didn’t quite know where….
So was there still a battle raging privately about whether to have one at all? I’d say yes, on the basis that chief constables don’t go publicly threatening to throw their toys out of the pram for nothing.
The old engine sheds (owners – you guessed it, Wiltshire Council) seem to be the site that’s flavour of the month. That’s where the Vision team’s been talking about creating some much-needed extra parking for commuters.
And to think the County Hall Commissariat (www.ifiruledtheworld.gov.uk) were hatching other plans all the time!
Still, maybe there’ll be room for everyone (before 7am).
Speaking of which, there used to be a saying: If you want to know the time, ask a policeman. I’m not sure I’d trouble one at the moment. Poor devils don’t seem to know whether they’re coming or going.

Trussell Trust foodbank feeding 5,000 in Salisbury

HAVING returned to work (temporarily) as a reporter, I’ve found myself mulling over two apparently contradictory sets of figures this week.
First came the good news.
The number of people out of work in the Salisbury area was down by a third last month compared with March last year.
Only 619 were registered as unemployed and claiming benefit in our Parliamentary constituency.
On the face of it, this is a remarkable achievement for a community centred on a smallish market town that appears to have precious little to offer the unskilled by way of opportunity.
So now the bad news. The very, very bad news.
The number of local people who needed emergency help by way of a three-day supply of groceries from the Trussell Trust’s foodbank over the last year topped 5,000. They included 1,885 hungry children.
Three cheers for the foodbank, obviously. I’m not a religious person, but the Trust really does put its Christian principles into practice, and you have to admire that.
But then what? I don’t want to oversimplify a complex subject but I can’t help asking: If more than 3,000 of these individuals were adults, and only 600 or so were out of work, then why weren’t the majority of them, who were employed, taking home enough to keep the wolf from the door?
How many of them were part-timers, perhaps working in shops or fast food restaurants, who don’t earn enough to keep a family? How many of them were people who through some misfortune have got into debt and can’t pay it off?
I’m sure there are as many answers as there are individuals, and I’m equally sure the solution’s not as straightforward as blaming the government.
However, Trussell Trust chairman Chris Mould has said that despite the recovering economy, things are getting worse, rather than better, for people on low incomes and for those facing an increasingly harsh, and apparently arbitrary benefits regime.
On Saturday the NASUWT teaching union reported that all over the country children are turning up for school cold, hungry, and wearing unwashed clothes because their parents are facing financial problems.
And for families who get into debt, things tend to go downhill.
I can’t understand why the government isn’t shouting from the rooftops about the fantastic service that credit unions offer to people on limited incomes to help them avoid doorstep lenders and get themselves out of trouble.
We’ve got one in Salisbury. To find out more, look up Wiltshire Community Bank online, email swcu@hotmail.co.uk or phone 01722 421881.

How will Salisbury cope with a changing climate?

SALISBURY being a deeply conservative place (and I’m not just talking about party politics here), I’m not sure whether it’s ready to become a Transition City.
I do hope I’m wrong, though.
The concept has a lot to recommend it, not least that it could become a real, cross-generational unifying force within our community in an era when we spend more and more of our time glued to the telly, the computer or (in the case of certain young people I could mention) fighting World War Three extremely noisily on the Xbox.
In Totnes, Devon, which became Britain’s first Transition Town back in 2006 – when the Big Society wasn’t even a twinkle in David Cameron’s eye - more than 3,000 folk, almost half the population, have been involved in some way.
A movement that grew out of concern about how our society would cope in the future with declining oil reserves and climate change has taken off worldwide.
The Totnes pioneers developed theme groups to focus on topics such as health and wellbeing, building and housing, business and livelihoods, food, transport and energy, breaking what looks like one big insurmountable problem down into bits that we can do something about.
From these groups sprang schemes involving anything from garden sharing and collective planting of nut trees to clothing swaps.
There are projects helping people to make their homes more energy efficient, to teach them about eco-friendly building techniques, and to support local food production.
There are free skill sharing sessions where people can learn about cooking, carpentry, upcycling, sewing … just about anything that someone can find time to teach them.
And of course there’s the famous Totnes Pound – a local currency to be spent supporting local businesses.
Apart from bringing extra revenue to the town from visitors eager to learn more about how Transition works, residents say it’s had a huge effect in making everyone more neighbourly, to use an old-fashioned word.
Since drastic public spending cuts are here to stay (and Wiltshire Council has made it quite clear that we’ll all have to become more self-reliant) it’s an idea whose time has well and truly come.
How fortunate, then, that Rob Hopkins, one of the founders of the Transition movement, is coming to the Guildhall for a public meeting next month, aiming to get us to join in. I gather he’s an inspirational speaker. See you there?

Asda opens up a new front in city's supermarket wars

FOR reasons I won’t bore you with, I've needed something to smile about lately. And the news that Asda is piling into Salisbury’s supermarket scrum was it.
For if anything might shake Sainsbury’s determination to build what one wag recently called an ‘ark’ on our water meadows, this could be it.
I really admire the public-spirited teenager Hamish Mundell, who, aided by councillor Richard Clewer, has got off his backside and started co-ordinating opposition to the Sainsbury scheme, while most of us simply grumbled about it.
And I do urge everyone who cares about our city’s environment to log on to www.change.org, type the words Sainsbury Salisbury into the search box, and sign up to the pair’s petition.
But actually, I suspect that Sainsbury’s bosses are likely to find the arrival of another fearsome competitor more of a deterrent, if Asda can get its act together quickly. After all, Salisbury surely can’t support more than one extra superstore? Can it?
Asda, foiled by Tesco when it tried to open in Amesbury, says it’s looking at a range of site options, among them one off the London Road, close to the Bishopdown Farm and Hampton Park estates. This seems quite a popular choice, and would have the huge advantage of not dragging further traffic into the jam-on-wheels that is Southampton Road.
Not quite sure how a constant stream of humungous delivery lorries would cope with the railway bridge, though.
But then I’m not saying that it necessarily asda be Asda (oh, those excruciatingly coy, bottom-tapping TV ads!) in that location. It could be Morrison’s at the Old Manor, or Sainsbury’s somewhere else - just about anyone, anywhere (except another Tesco) but please, please, please, not Southampton Road.



ANOTHER, infinitely more weary smile crossed my face on reading that Wiltshire Council is considering ‘video streaming’ its meetings, so that serfs all over its far-flung fiefdom can follow every word issuing from their leaders’ mouths in real time.
If there’s anything more guaranteed to sap your spirit and destroy your faith in our democracy than sitting through a Wiltshire Council meeting, especially a budget meeting, then I have yet to experience it.
I tell you, at their baying, tribal, self-important, long-winded best (naming no names), some councillors make Prime Minister’s Question Time look positively grown-up.

Salisbury needs more parking at the railway station

SO where do you park if you want to catch a train from Salisbury after 7am?
On weekdays, my husband tells me, the station car park is full at an hour when I’m still in the Land of Nod.
In the days when his work required frequent rail trips to London, he took to cycling across Town Path from Harnham.
It may be commendably green but it’s not very comfortable when you’re wearing a business suit, lugging a laptop and briefcase, it’s still dark and it’s pouring with rain.
And it’s not an option open to those who live outside the city.
Quite a few use the long-stay spaces in the Central Car Park, but these will disappear under the current redevelopment plans.
According to Alistair Cunningham, Wiltshire Council’s head of economic development, “It has long been the policy that we don’t want car parks in the centre of Salisbury to be filled up with people going to London.”
He has a point. It shouldn’t be up to the council to do the rail industry’s job for it.
However, the policy is only any good if the city’s needs are being met in some other way. Until railway parking is sorted out, people will have to leave their cars somewhere.
The inclusion of a bus interchange in the regeneration scheme as a result of the recent public consultation is welcome, and with luck it will have an impact on the problem.
But I’ve long wondered why owners South West Trains don’t boost the capacity of the station car park. Can’t the council give them a shunt in the right direction?
In my opinion a well-designed extra storey needn’t be any more of an eyesore than the concrete wasteland that’s there already, and there’s no doubt that it would be well used.
Does the fragmented ownership of our rail system these days perhaps discourage investment in such essential infrastructure?
Or maybe the answer is that commuter trains are already so jam-packed they don’t really want any more passengers, thank you very much.
What will happen when all the new estates are built at Fugglestone Red, Wilton, Bishopdown and Old Sarum, attracting thousands more families to the area? There’ll be even more demand then.
Shouldn’t we be planning ahead (and building ahead) for that day?

Cruising for a bruising in the stormy North Sea

SOMETIMES I wonder whether the best justification for taking holidays is that they make us appreciate our everday lives so much more.
I’m going to tell you about the cruise I’ve just been on, and you’ll see what I mean.
To me, the word ‘cruise’ has connotations of a smooth, effortless ride, as in the phrase ‘cruise control’. I now know better.
We were aboard the Marco Polo – that’s right, the ship that hit the headlines when a window blew in, killing a passenger, a few weeks ago. Freak wave, they said. We weren’t worried.
She was sailing to Norway on a voyage billed as ‘Land of the Northern Lights’ – the very same lights that were seen all over Britain (though not by us) during the week before we set off. The lights that are said to be giving their best display for a decade.
We set off full of optimism. But stubborn grey clouds hung over us like the prospect of a televised debate between David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband.
Gales, sleet and the odd snowstorm compounded the misery.
There I was at 1.30am in the Arctic port of Tromso, in flimsy evening wear with only a pashmina and a Grand Marnier to keep me warm, among hundreds of passengers who had dashed out on deck to peer into the murk for our single glimpse of faint green haze. If you blinked, you missed it.
There are some great memories – riding through pine woods on a sled drawn by eager, friendly huskies; drinking vodka and blue curacao from glasses made of ice at an igloo hotel, admiring its intricate sculptures, knowing the whole thing will melt away with the spring sunshine; train rides past frozen waterfalls through pristine, snow-covered mountain scenery. No litter, and (how do they do it?) no potholes.
But conditions at sea were so rough that one couple got off at Bergen to find a plane rather than face the Force Ten storm that escorted us back across the North Sea.
A lot of people were missing at mealtimes, and my husband, a keen sailor, developed a comedy walk, mimicking the rest of us landlubbers as we staggered through the lounges and bounced off the walls. I told him it wasn’t funny.
Sleep proved elusive as we were bucketed about.
I’d bought some seasickness pills. The packet advised “Avoid alcohol – may cause drowsiness.”
“That’ll do me,” I thought, and took to downing them two at a time with red wine. At least I wasn’t ill. 

When I got home I found a quote from the writer/comedian Tim Vine that sums it up for me. "I've just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I'll tell you what, never again."

No question about it, the whole world's gone mad

QUESTIONS, questions …..
Why is Wiltshire Council co-funding an anti-smoking campaign that includes costly TV ads at the same time as it cuts funding for just about every disabled member of our community?
Please don’t tell me the money comes from a separate ring-fenced budget. That’s the usual justification for official lunacy.
If it does, then there’s no excuse for such a state of affairs in these straitened times and it’s up to those who enjoy bossing us all about to sort it out.
Everyone knows that smoking’s bad for them, for goodness sake. Even a hermit in a Himalayan monastery could scarcely have failed to pick up the hint over the last 40 years.
If addicts choose to carry on and risk their health (and I speak as a reformed smoker who only quit after many failed attempts) then why should our public servants spend our hard-earned taxes trying to stop them?
In an ideal world, it might be nice to try. But not while there are people suffering frightening upheaval in lives that are already dauntingly difficult through no fault of their own.
I speak, of course, of those who will suffer through the cuts to facilities such as the Douglas Arter Centre, Hillcote respite care centre, the Bridging Project and the John McNeill Opportunity Centre.
Another question. Why has our Police Commissioner, Angus Macpherson, launched a survey of 2,000 Wiltshire residents to find out what we want from our police force? OK, we know the answer to that one. The law says he has to do it.
Mr Macpherson says the information will help him to “to commission services from Wiltshire Police” and will help senior police officers “to understand the needs and priorities of the people they protect”.
Oh really? What if the most common responses to the survey are along the lines of “We don’t need money wasted on a commissioner” or “We want our police station back”?
One final question. If Sainsbury’s bosses are so desperate to build their unwanted Southampton Road supermarket that they’re ready to dig an extra hole big enough to hold five-and-a-half Olympic swimming pools’ worth of floodwater, have they considered inviting Mark Spitz to perform the opening ceremony?