Panto is a hit, oh yes it is!

THE last time I went to a panto at the Playhouse, Robin Hood - who happened to be lodging with mates of mine - got his nose broken in a fracas after a visit to a local hostelry. Can you guess which one?
Wiltshire Creative refused to confirm or deny it but I know it for a fact.
Both these things, to me, say a lot about Salisbury which we simply shouldn’t gloss over, even though we might wish we could do so.
We’ve waited through some depressing times since then for the return of the Christmas highlight that our theatre always does so well.
And they didn’t disappoint. Cinderella was a triumph of traditional daftness over the grimness of today’s world.

The sense of anticipation in the audience was palpable. They really wanted this wacky alternative reality – which is in fact so much a part of our national identity – to succeed in taking them to a happier place.
I thought the jokes were more adult than previously. Sometimes I found myself looking at children’s faces in the audience to see what they made of references to things they really shouldn’t have known about. I know double-entendres are a staple ingredient of panto, but looking back on the days when my boys were small, I wouldn’t have wanted to field the inevitable questions. 
In fact, the whole setting was more modern, with the Ugly Sisters as social media influencers and Cinders, while still being a put-upon maid of all work, having a sideline as an  inventor of improbable machines just to show a bit of female empowerment.
Having said which, this was a cracking show. The solo singers all had really strong voices, the costumes were as fantasmagorical as a box of Liquorice Allsorts, the hardworking musicians were great, and it would be wrong to pick out any individual members of such a talented ensemble cast.
I hope it’s the commercial success it deserves to be.
What my Ukrainian guests will make of this stylised lunacy I don’t know, but I’m buying them tickets for Christmas. And telling them that this is what they need to see to understand the English, haha!

Pictures by The Other Richard

Good Luck, Playhouse, with this great new comedy

DAFT, hilarious, a terrific cheerer-upper. That’s Good Luck Studio, on at the Playhouse till November 5. And who doesn’t need to lose themselves in laughter right now amid the encircling gloom?

The set is a children’s TV programme, featuring a singing dragon, a frog puppet and a princess dressed as a pineapple, plus a Brian Blessed-style over-the-top wicked king bellowing atop a castle turret, and there’s plenty of panto-style slapstick. 

But it’s not for the kiddies. There’s a darker side to this farce, involving a rejected actor with a gun. And a lot of the jokes are definitely for adult ears.

It’s from the team behind those ‘Play That Goes Wrong’ comedies – described in the Telegraph as “the funniest theatre troupe in Britain”.

The opening few minutes were a bit slow with the necessary scene-setting but soon calamity started piling on calamity, and it got so silly that the audience were quite carried away with it, and many were on their feet applauding at the end.

I was surprised to find one of my favourite comedians, Tom Walker – better known by millions for his spoof news reports as ranting political correspondent Jonathan Pie – playing the absolutely horrible director, Andy, to perfection. Having loved a couple of his live solo shows, I’d never have expected to see him in an ensemble like this, but this was a real team effort, and it worked brilliantly.

A special mention also for Greg Tannahill as first aider Kevin, and an inspired scene in which he superglues his trousers. Doesn’t sound much when you put it like that, but you have to have been there.

Picture by Pamela Raith

Another little gem from Salisbury playwright Barney Norris

IT’S hard to categorise The Wellspring, and maybe that’s why there was a disappointingly small audience for the beginning of its brief run at the Playhouse yesterday.

Mass entertainment it most certainly isn’t, but this latest offering from Salisbury playwright Barney Norris – described by him as a ‘memory cycle’ - is moving, entertaining and thought-provoking. 
It’s very brave to reveal the vulnerability that Barney in particular shares as he and his dad, pianist and composer David Owen Norris, in turn look back on events either humorous or traumatic from their early lives, revealing how after a family break-up they have managed to create a bond that works for them, and what brought them individually to where they are now. This particular onlooker was completely drawn in.
As always with Barney, there’s a lot about home, the continuing search for it and what it means. His dad seems altogether more comfortable with where he’s at.
The beautiful piano interludes and haunting folk songs, absorbing in their own right, are finely judged to both underline and lighten the intensity of the spoken words, which is just as well or there are points where you might feel close to tears.
Having said which, there are plenty of the self-deprecating, rueful, smiley moments that Barney does so well, and his dad’s a born raconteur.
Cleverly set against a backdrop of ancient family cine film, this was a little gem.

All we need is a person on the end of a phone - is it too much to ask?

WHEN it comes to public services, it seems to me this Conservative government will do absolutely anything except employ people and reward them properly for their work.
We see it with the refusal to train enough doctors, with the devastating shortages of nurses, midwives, teachers, police, with the current bout of nastiness directed at ‘91,000 unnecessary civil servants’ who can’t answer back …
To which I’d reply: “If you think you can do without 91,000 of your staff, why have you done nothing about it in your last 12 years in power?”
It suggests to me that this is softening up the population for more and more privatisation, enabling ministers to argue that our current systems ‘aren’t working’ and could be ‘more efficiently run by the private sector’ when actually the problems are political incompetence and interference, the creation of unnecessary layers of complex management and regulatory structures, and too little trust in professionals.  
We also see it in the nigh-impossibility of actually speaking to an adviser on any of our so-called ‘help lines’.
I’ve been trying (not for the first time) to get through to the Child Benefit number to inform them that the Ukrainian refugee and her young daughter who lived with us for three months or so have now gone back home. Basically because she could see no prospect of them being able to afford to live here independently.
Our former guest is supposed to let them know about her departure, but her computer’s broken (not easy to sort out in wartime) and she can’t get through to a human being on the phone line for callers from abroad. It’s very expensive to spend hours at a time on her mobile in the vain hope of getting an answer.
All she wants to do is stop them paying her money she’s no longer entitled to. UK taxpayers’ money.
She’s increasingly worried that she will be in trouble for not informing them about her change in circumstances. So she asked me to help.
But I can’t get through on the phone either, and I’m not sure ‘data protection’ will allow them to speak to me even if I eventually succeed.
Wiltshire Council’s refugee advisers tell they can’t do anything and she’ll have to contact Child Benefit herself. 
The website does give a postal address, so I’ve advised her to write a letter and hope that will do the trick. She’s been told it could take at least a fortnight to arrive.
A few words with an actual person might have saved all this. 
‘Just because we can’ isn’t a justification for doing anything and that includes removing the human element from essential public services.

A sad farewell to our new Ukrainian friends

OUR Ukrainian guests have gone home. Or at least, my husband’s driving them to Luton airport.  I waved them off an hour ago, biting my lip until they were out of sight. “Don’t cry,” said Mary, “or you’ll make me cry, too.”
So I’ve been walking aimlessly round the house, stumbling across discarded things. A pair of slippers and another of winter boots in the utility room. Kids’ travel sickness pills and an assembled Lego funfair with a big wheel, a reminder of an outing to the London Eye, ready to pass on to some other child, in the dining room. Shampoo and conditioner by the sink in the bathroom, the bottles too bulky for travel.
In the spare room wardrobe, neatly folded clothes – too many to pack without exceeding the baggage allowance, some of them kindly donated by wellwishers, along with Anna’s school uniform. I ought to return it to be used by some other needy family, but I’ll hang on to it for a while, just in case the war takes a turn for the worse and they have to come back. If not, I’ll return it to the school in a term or two. 
Hoping they’ll come back. Hoping they won’t.
I’m going to miss them terribly. We all are, even the dog, who loved her new nine-year-old playmate and is now just lying quietly at my feet, sensing that something’s changed and life won’t revert to the way it was yesterday. 
We’ve told them they’ll always be welcome to come back. But if they do, it’ll mean things in Ukraine have got even worse. It’ll mean failure, not least the failure of world leaders to deal with Vladimir Putin once and for all.
We in Salisbury understood already how little he cares for the suffering of ordinary people. How he feels free to subject innocent civilians to terrifyingly random acts of cruelty. We still can’t make sense of it. And now he’s doing the same thing on a global scale. 
Meanwhile, our would-be leaders faff about pretending to their party members that they have the ability to make everyday British lives better. They don’t actually have the faintest notion of how to deal with a monster holding the Western world to ransom. They don’t even know how to deal with the people who have fled here, seeking sanctuary. Not in the longer term. Housing, jobs – jobs that pay enough for single parents to live independently, I mean – childcare …. Not a clue.
I barely knew, before all this, anything about Ukraine. I’d never needed to know. And as a result I didn’t question the oversimplified way foreign news can be reported to us.
Now I’ve begun to grasp a little about this complicated, divided country. Mary is a native Ukrainian speaker, though she speaks Russian, too. She told us that many Ukrainians actually supported Russia – even some of those who have found their way here, their homes flattened by the dictator they so admire. 
So among her fellow countrymen here in Salisbury she never completely relaxed, never really knew who to trust. 
She trusted us, but there were so many ways in which we couldn’t help. 
For 12 years she taught English in a school in Lviv to children across the primary and secondary age range. But schools here don’t need people, however highly qualified, to teach English as she did, as a foreign language. 
And she didn’t have the right pieces of paper to work in a language school. You have to pay to study for a Celta certificate in Britain. She didn’t have the money. 
She couldn’t even get an interview as a classroom assistant. Mostly, the vacancies were for supermarket cleaners and shelf-stackers, care assistants …. Shiftwork impossible to fit round childcare or school holidays for a lone mother, which is what so many of our Ukrainian guests are, with their other halves forbidden to leave their country.
She’d say: “How will I ever earn enough money for a deposit and rent on a flat?” I had no answer.
I asked Wiltshire Council leader Richard Clewer. Not unreasonably, he told me: “What do you think the people who’ve been on our waiting list for years would say if they saw refugees jumping the housing queue?”
Then came the decider. Her headteacher in Ukraine said she could not hold her job open any longer. 
We’d offered her a home for a year. We couldn’t commit to longer. She stayed for 14 weeks.

NB I wrote this a month ago but waited to post it till I was sure they weren't planning on coming back.

How saving nature can save money for councils too

WHEN I volunteered to attend the Wiltshire Council Environment Summit on Friday I feared that a lot of what was said might go over my head. 
But I wanted to represent our city council, and I’m glad I did. Listening to Dr Phil Sterling – now of Butterfly Conservation, previously of Dorset Council – was inspiring. 
I hadn’t heard of him before, but on regular family visits to Dorset I’ve seen the results of this ecologist’s work. The household recycling centre at Bridport is a revelation. Yes, a tip can be a revelation! 
In summer its central reservation and the perimeter planting are a mass of wildflowers, seeded several years ago as part of a roadside verge trial. They always make me smile. (Not to mention the fact that you can leave your unwanted goods there and anyone can help themselves for a token sum. I got an ironing board for £1. Proper recycling. NB Wiltshire Council!)
Dr Sterling is also the man behind the lovely chalk wildflower banks that line the Weymouth relief road. Thirty species of butterfly have been recorded there. Yes. 30! On the side of a busy road!
And you don’t get to that point just by chucking a few packs of seeds about.
First, as he explained, we’ve got to forget our ideas about the desirability of neatly-mown lush green grass everywhere and persuade our communities to trust us on this journey and not moan about short-term ‘untidiness’. So, work with schools, with wildlife groups, put up explanatory signs …
Because the best grasslands for bees, butterflies and wildflowers develop on the poorest soils.
You cut back on mowing. And use ‘cut and collect’ machines that pick up the mown grass, which you take away for composting. Don’t leave it lying there to enrich the soil.
Do these things and coarse grasses won’t thrive and choke out everything else. So, you will need to mow less. Think of the savings in manpower and fuel!
Sow a wildflower seed mix including things like kidney vetch and yellow rattle, bird’s foot trefoil, field scabious, bee orchid ….. not just poppies and cornflowers! And start counting the creatures that visit these food-rich sites. 
Dr Sterling showed us how under this regime the money spent on highway verge management in Dorset reduced from £927,000 in 2014/15 to £650,000 in 2018/19 – and it’s even lower now.
I could see the enthusiasm shining on Wiltshire faces at the prospect of savings like that. So maybe the prospect of healthier finances will speed the unitary juggernaut’s conversion to a healthier environment.
And as someone muttered … Stonehenge tunnel, new road cuttings! I’m not getting into the rights and wrongs of that project here, but if ever it does go ahead – and that’s a big if - let’s take our lead from Dorset and make it as beautiful and as wildlife-friendly as we can.
PS Our city council recently sent one of our officers on a wildflower training course to give us in-house expertise, and we are working hard on our tree and eco strategy for Salisbury, which you will hear more about in September.

The Salisbury lesson: Fight for local democracy

IT’S easy once you’re elected as a councillor to get bogged down in detail.
Whether that’s discussing how quickly we can afford to switch our grounds team to electric vehicles, or poring over planning applications to do what little we can to protect our environment. Debating how to spend the public art budget, whether or not we spend people’s taxes lighting a Jubilee beacon, refurbishing public toilets … whatever. 
I’m not saying these details aren’t important. They are. They affect all our day-to-day lives. And I get heavily involved.
Let’s face it, Salisbury’s is only a parish council, not a strategic authority. What did I expect? To be changing the world?
Well, of course not. I didn’t expect anything other than what I’ve got, and I am exceptionally lucky to have been given a leadership role in working for the benefit of our lovely city.
BUT. And there is a big BUT. It’s also easy amid all this detail to lose sight of what persuaded me to put myself up for this job in the first place, and to do it the hard way, as an Independent, rather than joining a party and sharing the load.
And this was it. Salisbury gets a crap deal out of the current local government setup.
It has lost so much since the creation of the unitary authority at Trowbridge. Nobody in their right mind could argue otherwise.
Demotion, crucially, has cost us our role as a planning authority with a say over how our area will develop in future. We are struggling to finalise a Neighbourhood Plan that will give us a very limited input into the process. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do that. We should.
But we need to take a long, hard look at where we stand. What we shouldn’t have to do is to put up with this third-class status. Why aren’t people up in arms?
I was driven to these reflections by an article headlined The Salisbury Lesson, which I’m attaching to this post. Its theme? “Protect Democracy: Keep It Local”.
It was written by Richard Pavitt, an Independent councillor in Uttlesford, Essex – a community that’s threatened with a similar fate to ours by government bean-counters who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
He draws on the invaluable experience of our former MP Rob Key to warn Essex voters not to take it lying down.
For anyone interested in the future of democracy, and concerned about the drift towards ever more centralised decision-making, it’s a thought-provoking read, pointing out that as the organisations running our lives get larger and larger, people are more and more inclined to vote for a party rather than an individual, because they don’t know the candidates.
And that means we get candidates whose loyalty is to voting along party lines regardless of what might be best for us peasants. Independents get squeezed out.
I’m not directing this at any elected individuals in particular. And I suspect that those who can be bothered to read it will be the ones who already share my views.
But hey ho, I feel obliged to keep telling people: “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Get involved.

Maybe Boris should pop along to the Playhouse

WITH uncanny timing given the state of international affairs at present, Salisbury Playhouse’s latest production, The Children, is set in the wake of a nuclear disaster.
This is due, not to war, but to a tidal wave swamping a poorly-designed power station on the coast and causing some kind of meltdown. 
You can tell from the lack of detail in this description that I’m not a scientist! Unlike the three characters in this unsettling but absorbing play, who are all scientists, of the retired nuclear variety.
I do recommend it. No need to give away the plot, but it operates on several levels – about sexual relationships, about parenting, about our failure to live up to our global responsibilities, about what kind of world we are leaving to future generations. 
It’s often funny, which might seem weird given the seriousness of the subject matter, but it’s a slow burner building to a distinctly unfunny climax. Very clever.
Anyway, you hardly need me to draw the link between potential nuclear catastrophe, the recent Russian occupation of Chernobyl, and the terrifying carelessness of those invading forces.
But it’s not unreasonable to also look at Britain’s response to the current situation. How do we reduce our reliance on oil and gas to protect ourselves against future disruption to supply systems? Why, sure, with more wind and solar farms, but also, according to Boris Johnson, with eight more nuclear power stations dotted around our coastline.
“This is the home of nuclear energy,” boasted our Prime Minister. “We’re bringing nuclear home!” 
He made it all sound so simple. So safe. Not quite a quick-fix solution, but a great soundbite to quieten current anxiety. Another of his three-word mantras – Bring Nuclear Home. I’m sure he meant to instil confidence in his listeners. If only I could share it.
Perhaps he should pop along to the Playhouse. 

Picture by Simon Aanand

                         

The old and the new - why some retirement flats are sticking on the market

WHEN my late mother went into a care home in 2019 we had to sell her flat.
She lived in a purpose-built ‘retirement development’ in Salisbury.
She had bought it five years previously, and in that time its value plummeted by £41,000 – almost 20% - in a market where other property prices have kept on rising. Why?
Because of the huge number of retirement developments going on all around Salisbury. The market was flooded, a local estate agent told me, and only the shiny brand-new ones were selling, despite their sky-high service charges.
Mum’s flat was spacious, sunny, well kitted out, not at all dilapidated, looking out on a lovely garden. But we had to pay the service charges even when it was empty, and slashing the price was the only way we could get anyone to view it, let alone buy it.
I was reminded of this episode by a chat with a fellow councillor the other day. He’s been asked to help someone in a similar situation, who cannot afford to pay the maintenance costs, along with the council tax, on an empty parental home, and has been trying to shift it for a year.
(I have to say that Wiltshire Council are generally helpful in allowing relatives to defer payment of council tax until a flat is sold.) 
Buyers are spoilt for choice. A look on Rightmove this week showed 107 retirement apartments currently on the market in Salisbury at prices up to £350,000, some of them vacant for well over a year. 
The cheapest second-hand one could be had for just £45,000. Yet many more are being built.
It seems that the glossy brochures and smooth sales patter, and the allure of the new and ‘trouble-free’ are still winning over our older generation.
It’s only when they no longer require their homes that difficulties can emerge.
Meanwhile there is a massive under-supply of affordable flats being built for young people desperate to set foot on the ladder. They deserve better than shoeboxes converted from redundant offices, like the examples we've seen in TV documentaries.
There is a campaign group called Better Retirement Housing that is pushing for reform of leasehold law to protect the interests of the elderly.
This takes place under a planning system weighted heavily in favour of developers, some of whom donate to the Conservative Party. 
That’s fact. Anyone can check it online. 
But although there is a political point to be made here, there's also a moral one that I can't imagine anyone could really disagree with.
We urgently need, as a society, to focus on the have-nots, and to provide them with decent, affordable housing close to decent jobs.
We’re talking about offering sanctuary to Ukrainian refugees - and not a moment too soon. We absolutely must. But where will they move on to in due course if they can't return home?
We still have families from Afghanistan languishing in block-booked cheap hotels with no hope of proper homes being provided for them.
We have thousands upon thousands of young adults relying on their parents for shelter at an age where they should be able to become self-sufficient. 

And we have older people who may have room to spare, living alone in family-sized homes, unable to afford luxury retirement developments.
Ramming the green fields of southern England with estates of pricey and highly profitable ‘executive’ boxes, with a grudging row or block of social housing tucked away on their least desirable plots, and luring ever more pensioners to places like Salisbury where public services - particularly medical practices - are buckling under the strain, will not solve these problems. 

They require more imaginative solutions.

I'm not being nasty. I'm a pensioner myself (my husband's not far behind!) and I can see that a day will come when one or other of us is no longer able to look after themselves in the family home.
But this is unsustainable housing policy.

City council leaders would welcome the Conservatives back on board

LAST night at Salisbury City Council’s budget meeting I made a genuine offer to the Conservative group to rejoin the shared administration of LibDems, Labour, and Independent (me).
My colleagues fully supported this gesture.
I did it because we think it is important for all of us elected members to work together in the best interests of our community. There aren’t really many issues that come up at parish council level that you could put under the heading of ‘party political’.
The Conservative leader, Cllr Charles McGrath, chose to respond dismissively in a comment to a post on Facebook, saying: “You can take this as our formal refusal of your invitation. Thanks, but no thanks.”
He then declined repeatedly to answer questions from members of the public about what the Tories would have done instead with the budget, had they been in charge, and how they would have funded it.
Cllr McGrath has made claims about what the council would and would not be spending money on. As a joint administration we have sent responses to these claims to the local media, and I have also responded to some of them on Facebook.
What I want to stress here for those who do not realise is that city councillors are all volunteers. 

Unlike Wiltshire councillors, we do not receive thousands of pounds a year. We get an expenses allowance of £750 a year – BEFORE TAX – to fund all our work. For the leaders – and I’m not complaining – it’s a full-on job at times. 
We as individuals all face the same rising costs and household bills as our fellow residents. And the council as a body faces the same cost pressures in taking care of its buildings, vehicles and staff.
It is nonsensical to claim that we would be cavalier about the way we spend council taxpayers’ money. 
Every single person who voted for us has their own priorities in terms of what they would like us to do. We can’t please them all. And often, these turn out to be things the city council has no control over, such as roads and traffic, development planning or pavements, which are Wiltshire’s responsibility.
Just so there’s no doubt, here are the priorities that your administration has chosen to focus on, as cost-effectively as possible:
Climate change and the environment – an avenue of trees for Hudson’s Field, a citywide tree planting strategy and assessment of how we can improve our open spaces for people and wildlife, more money to increase our energy efficiency and reduce our carbon footprint. Electric vehicles.
Better public engagement – more consultation meetings at the Guildhall with a PA system that actually works, and a new opt-in email system to keep people informed and ask their opinions.
Business efficiency – taking all our grounds maintenance work in-house and buying our own depot, instead of renting.
Public art – a new £10,000 fund using local talent to brighten up public spaces across the city.
Community support – money for youth activities, for work to support families. 
Maintenance – no longer putting off vital but costly repair work to the Guildhall, the Crematorium and public toilets. It’ll get dearer the longer we leave it.
Safety – we are funding the city centre security guards for another year until their contract expires, and will review the situation after we see what the Police Commissioner’s promises to improve city policing actually mean. We are meeting him soon.
The Conservatives agree with some of these things and not with others. However, they chose to walk away from our joint leadership, which means they don't have to take difficult decisions about things like this. We didn’t ask them to go. We didn’t want them to go.
Our offer to them remains open.

Police station latest: Thoughts of the Commissioner

OUR police are fed up with their current arrangement at Bourne Hill alongside Wiltshire Council.

The limitations of their facilities mean they can’t give the public the service that they would like to, and that the public want.

That’s frustrating and morale-sapping, and has led to some experienced officers quitting.

It’s not me saying that. It was the Police and Crime Commissioner, Philip Wilkinson, responding to questions on Friday at an online focus group to which I was invited.

Let me say at this point that I am much more impressed by Mr Wilkinson than I was by his predecessor Angus Macpherson. Actually, that’s not hard! But this former senior military officer and security policy adviser is clearly trying to engage with the whole community as he fine-tunes his Wiltshire & Swindon Police and Crime Plan for the next few years.

He’s been looking for a stand-alone site, preferably within the ring road, since he took office in May, and it’s proving hard to find. He’s been told categorically that he can’t have the old police station on Wilton Road.

He needs 1.5 acres, including parking, if Salisbury is to have a custody suite.

So if he can’t negotiate a better deal spacewise at Bourne Hill, he might have to look for somewhere a bit more fringe, although he hasn’t ruled out going for a new-build if he has to, and he’s got some money set aside just in case.

It was a fascinating and very open conversation. Following previous consultations he’s acknowledged that confidence in the force is not as high as it should be, and that people feel less safe than they used to. Also that 47% of people would not feel confident to contact their local Crime Prevention Team. 

He described this as “disturbing”, and accepted that better vetting and training of recruits is required.

He promised more frontline officers, but pointed out that these might not be visible ‘beat’ officers. They might be investigating cybercrime, or domestic abuse, or modern slavery.

But his top priorities are improving reporting of crimes and response to them, along with reducing violence and serious harm. Exactly as it should be.

The public’s priorities, he reported, are antisocial behaviour, speeding, drugs, rural crimes such as flytipping and hare-coursing, and violence, including knife crime.

So, a lot to tackle there.

To help do that, he’s seeking a rise in the policing element of our council tax of 4.3% - equivalent to £10 a year, or 83p a month, on a Band D property.

And I did like his parting shot: “If I don’t deliver, get rid of me.”

He’s still consulting on his Making Wiltshire Safer plans until the end of this month. If you want to read or comment on them, or ask questions at a Facebook meeting with him, copy and paste this link:

www.wiltshire-pcc.gov.uk/the-pcc-and-you/have-your-say/making-wiltshire-safer/