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?