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.