Kerr-ching! Money's no object when you've got it

I’M suffering from Wandering Mind Syndrome, I suspect. This week my mind has been wandering in all directions.

Firstly, the University Technical College, that wondrous redevelopment of our police station that will fill in the gaps in Salisbury’s educational ‘offer’ without having Any Adverse Effect on our existing schools - honest.

On Tuesday Wiltshire Council’s rulers committed £2million to this monument to political vanity – sorry, that should have read “much-needed educational facility” and “sub-regional centre of excellence”.

I love the phrase “custody suite”. It sounds like somewhere you might spend a kinky honeymoon. A night in the cells is what it means. And they still haven’t worked out where it will be once the police are relocated, although we’re assured it will be “modern and sustainable”. Thank goodness for that.

Incidentally, wasn’t it delightful to read that Wiltshire’s former £183,000-a-year chief exec Andrew Kerr was confirmed this week as Cornwall Council’s top man on a salary somewhere between £158,000 and £176,000?

I actually felt quite sorry for him when he was ousted from Planet Trowbridge two years ago because a) he came across as a pleasant chap even though he had to ‘reorganise’ so many underlings out of their jobs and b) he so clearly didn’t have a clue that his political overlords had been plotting his own demise.

A £144,000 redundancy package must have eased the blow, but it was still gratifying to see that shortly afterwards he found a new role as £140,000 chief operating officer at Cardiff Council, where he was reportedly “looking forward to driving improvement” until the lure of the laid-back surf dude paradise proved irresistible.

Surely that’s as far as he can go. Any further west and he’ll fall into the Atlantic.

I don’t blame him, by the way. Or anyone who tries to do better for themselves.

It’s just interesting how teachers and firemen who protest about the decimation of their pension plans are portrayed as not caring about the inconvenience they cause while, among the upper  echelons, the gravy train hurtles on.

What a shambolic way to run essential services in Salisbury

IF you might be about to lose your job, and the first you heard about it was via your local newspaper’s Facebook page, how would you feel?

That’s the unpleasant situation that people caring for the disabled residents of Salisbury's Douglas Arter Centre found themselves in this week.

The charity Scope announced a proposal to close it, apparently without first informing all of those most closely involved.

Staff were quick to express their dismay online, as were relatives of the residents, who have no idea what will become of their loved ones.

“My sister lives there,” said one. “What next for her?”

The charity asserts that such homes are outdated and that disabled people would rather have help to live independently.

Yet its website is currently lambasting the government for failing to provide any support for 69,000 disabled people who need it to live independent lives. So how’s that going to work, then?

The care of individual residents there is funded by Wiltshire Council and the NHS. 

Two months ago Wiltshire declared its intention of shutting down Hillcote, the city’s only respite home for the families of children with severe disabilities.

The council claimed the number of people using the centre was falling. The families said that was because the council had stopped telling people it was available.

This, of course, is the council that last week rejected requests for an independent investigation into staff morale after nodding through huge pay rises for its top brass while their subordinates face a freeze.

The same council that has for years ignored requests to plan for a transport interchange in the city and is now reduced to hurriedly digging up our streets to create new bus stops, for which it admits there is “no public support”, before the bus station closes.

Now we learn that Balfour Beatty Living Places has lost more than £1million in the first three months of its contract to carry out highway maintenance, grass cutting and litter picking for Wiltshire.

So some of the firm’s staff will be made redundant while others will be moved from roadworks to lower-paid duties.

That’ll sort out those potholes, won’t it? 

Just as well Wiltshire don’t run a brewery. Because we all know what they couldn’t organise there.

Shoplifters are stocking up early for Christmas

 AMBLING around the aisles at Waitrose in a bit of a daze, as I tend to do these days,  I pitched up at the meat counter and was mildly surprised to notice that the reduced-price leg of lamb I was contemplating had a sticker attached to the packaging, proclaiming it to be “Security Protected”.

A glance round the chiller units showed me that some cuts of pork and beef carried similar statements – though the burgers, meatballs or sausages didn’t, and neither did some of the items in the Essentials value range.

My first thought was that we must be in the grip of some new food contamination scandal.

Maybe meat products had become the latest target of urban terrorists or animal rights activists?

But no, I decided, that couldn’t be right because the free range pork was stickered, too, and even the most committed activist would be hard pushed to protest about that.

So I asked the girl behind the counter what it was all about.

“Ooh, you’d be surprised,” she said, “what people steal these days – especially in the run-up to Christmas.

“High value joints of meat – they’ll stuff them under their arm beneath their coat, or cover them with cushions or a load of bedding.  It’s not just batteries they’re after these days, or bottles of alcohol. You’d be amazed how much gets stolen.”

I thanked her for this interesting insight into the behaviour of genteel Salisbury and returned to my trolley.

I had realised, of course, that the dreaded season of goodwill was approaching.

I could hardly have missed it, since there were strategically placed offers of organic chocolate mini-bars and those boxes of scarlet-wrapped truffles, the kind I only ever buy to stuff into people’s stockings or hang off the Christmas tree, around the store and at the checkout.

But that phrase “the run-up to Christmas” really drove home the message and filled me with dismay.  It was the first week of October.

Good Lord, there I was, stocking up on boring everyday groceries when I really should have been forging ahead with my preparations for the festive frolics.

Clearly, I have been failing in my duty as a consumer. And do you know, I suspect I will continue to do so until at least mid-November  - by which time they’ll probably have run out of everything I want.

I recall only one more heart-sinking moment in the supermarket this year, and that was the sight of “Back to School” signs over racks of grey winter uniforms before the poor little kids had even broken up for the summer holidays. Talk about spoiling their fun.

•  Two days later I popped back in and the whole place was knee-deep in Christmas kitsch, with assistants busily setting up arrays of glittering baubles just past the display of lurid Halloween merchandise. Why not stick a few Easter eggs in there, too, while they're at it?

Let's try switching off Salisbury's traffic lights

TRAFFIC lights. Are they a boon or a ****** nuisance? Answers on an email, please.

Here’s my answer.  I believe they are often counter-productive and Salisbury might be better off without almost all of them.

I would like to suggest that  the highway authorities switch them all off for a trial period of two weeks, to give drivers time to get used to the change and alter their behaviour accordingly.

Then I’d like to see an assessment of the effect on traffic flow, which I suspect would be improved.

If it doesn’t work, by all means switch them on again.

If it does, just think of those plummeting energy bills.

It’ll make the savings from switching off a few street lamps at night look like small change.

And if the effect is that fewer vehicles end up filling our air with exhaust fumes while they wait for the lights to change when there’s nobody coming the other way, then that has to be a bonus.

I fell into conversation about this with an acquaintance at a car boot sale not long ago and found him in complete agreement. As was the lady whose stall we were standing by. We were soon discussing which were the most annoying and pointless sets of lights, and I imagine everyone has their own particular bête noire.

My personal favourites  for extinction are the ones as you come in to town down Fisherton Street. They take forever to change and cause pointless delays.

As do the ones at the junction of New Street and Exeter Street, holding up traffic trying to get out of the multi-storey car park and out of town.

Certainly, whenever the lights at the Harnham gyratory are out of action I get round there a lot faster.

You’d have to leave the special lights for the park and ride buses on, I suppose, to avoid slowing them down.

I’m not saying yet that we should banish the rest for ever. Just give it a try. What have we got to lose?

Airfield plan should be shot down in flames

YET again on a planning issue, we have to ask despairingly: “Why do we bother to care?”

Old Sarum airfield, beset by would-be developers, was once memorably described by Winterslow’s councillor Chris Devine as “like a wagon train being encircled by Red Indians”.

He was right, and they’re brandishing their tomahawks again.

Back in 2010 when sites for new housing in South Wiltshire were being designated under the Core Strategy, a surprise, last-minute proposal for development at the southern end of the airfield was put forward by its owners, without public consultation.

Wiltshire Council officers had identified enough sites already, and they said so to the government inspector in charge of the process.

But he had other ideas, going so far as to suggest that the runway could be realigned to ease the way for builders.

The airfield is a conservation area. Three of its hangars are listed buildings. English Heritage calls it “the best preserved flying field of the First World War” – in other words, not a collection of unrelated buildings but a complete entity, and a national treasure.

Dismayed local councillors tried to get the scheme dropped at a City Hall meeting, but were told they couldn’t tinker with the Strategy without it becoming null and void.

They had to accept the whole package or risk a development free-for-all. Those were the rules.

Still, so strong was the opposition, led by councillor Ian McLennan, that Wiltshire boss Jane Scott stepped in.

To sighs of relief all round, she suggested getting the runway listed to protect it, saying there was “more than one way to skin a cat”.

No sooner was the meeting over than her idea was shot down by planners, who told her land can’t be listed. But by then the rest of us had gone away with the impression that something was being done.

Now residents have been invited to a ‘public consultation’ by the airfield’s operators, who claim they need the profits from new homes on its perimeter to manage the conservation area and put up a visitor centre, which Wiltshire policy currently requires.

For how long do you imagine the buyers of these homes will put up with the noise of flying, literally on their doorstep?

And if flying is restricted as a result, how long before our historic airfield is closed down as uneconomic?

Wiltshire Council and the spider in the bath

THAT’S it, I said to my absent husband on the phone.  Proof that it’s autumn. There’s a giant spider in the bath.

When we first bought our house the previous occupants had thoughtfully covered it with a kind of Russian vine.

To call it an invasive plant would be an understatement.  A rampaging monster, it was constantly having to be cut back from all the front windows to avoid a blackout.

As soon as we chopped it back it seemed to put on a growth spurt. And it brought with it a wealth of insect life. It was the spider that brought it to mind. At this time of year in particular we used to be haunted by them.

They would scurry out from underneath one armchair and dive under the next, to hide. My husband, keenly interested in wildlife even at the most inopportune moments, said he thought they were wolf spiders. Then, upon reflection, he decided they were giant house spiders. I said I didn’t care what they were, with legs that huge they’d have to be caught and put outside.  It was them or me, and I couldn’t sit with my feet up off the floor all night.

“They’ll only come straight back in again,” he would say, reasonably. But I was beyond being reasoned with.

Grasshoppers used to climb up where the vine snaked through the sash windows in the boys’ bedrooms and perch on the ceilings, bemused at suddenly finding themselves in a blank, white, alien environment with no idea how to get out again, so they had to be removed, too.

What with the added peril of the annual wasps’ nests in the attic – I came to dread that dozy time of year when I’d find them crawling across my young sons’ bedclothes – it was all a bit much.

The day my husband finally decided to tackle the vine some 20 years ago was one I will never forget. I know it’s a cliché, but it really was like Jack and the Beanstalk. Its fallen remains filled the front garden twice over.

Now we still get enormous spiders, but mostly they only pop up through the plughole, and since they can’t climb the sides of the bath, if I’m on my own and I’m not feeling up to trying to catch them in a jug, I can always just have a shower instead.

Speaking of fairy tales, as I was in passing, there will certainly be a happy ending to 2013 for the top brass at Wiltshire Council who are to enjoy pay rises of up to £19,000. That’s more than many people in Salisbury earn in a year, as a quick glance at Journal Jobs will show.

Apparently the council fears it won’t be able to attract and keep executives of the right calibre because its current rates are “adrift of the market”.

I’d have thought there’d be plenty of competent candidates prepared to settle for six-figure sums and comfy public sector pensions in the current economic climate. But maybe it’s a different world up there.

Or maybe Wiltshire’s problems have as much to do with morale as with money.  Certainly among the lower orders, who can only look on enviously at their bosses while they are stuck with a below-inflation ‘rise’ of just 1 per cent.

Does leader Jane Scott know that they have their own version of the ‘Where everybody matters’ motto?

It’s ‘Where everybody mutters’.

The Alice in Wonderland world of law and order

A FRIEND has given me a garden ornament – it’s an owl with solar-powered light-up eyes.

I was relaxing in the garden one lovely warm evening last week, chatting to my husband, when I had a sudden feeling of being watched.

I turned, and found two pairs of eyes gazing unblinking at me from a flower bed.

One pair, of course, belonged to the owl, which had switched itself on as the sun sank. The other belonged to my dog, who was crouched, motionless, alongside the bird, peeping over the petals, his eyebrows raised as he willed me to notice him and throw him a ball.

They made a surreal picture, and we laughed. It’s like a scene from Alice in Wonderland, I said.

So what have my dog and Wiltshire Police’s plans for Salisbury got in common? They’re both barking, for a start.

I’d been regaling my husband that evening with tales I’ve been told about events at the increasingly crowded Melksham police station as more and more staff and functions have been transferred there from Salisbury - including the trial preparation unit, which has made it difficult to maintain day-to-day contact with the officers involved in some cases.

Apparently there have been power cuts, most people have to eat and drink at their desks because the canteen can’t seat them all, and the sewage system recently overflowed, flooding an upper floor and causing a ceiling to collapse – “not a pretty sight”, I am told.

Plus there isn’t enough parking space to cope with the influx. As a result, people are parking on the surrounding roads. So Wiltshire Council proposes to paint double yellow lines to stop them. Now that last element does sound all too believable.

Of course, as I said to my husband, my informants could be making it all up. But it’s so bizarre, so Alice in Wonderland, that I don’t think they are.

Meanwhile I’ve heard that the former Imrys Quarry on Wilton Road is the favoured site for new police facilities. Not a bad spot, I suppose, as long as any new buildings are completed before the force is turfed out of its current home.

Unfortunately, I’ve also heard that this site would be shared with Wiltshire Council, which raises questions about how the privacy of users such as victims of domestic violence or witnesses to crimes could be protected.

 A week or two back there was even a rumour that a vacant factory at High Post might be adapted for police use by having its roof taken off and a prefabricated custody unit lowered in. Was that just a joke, or a sign of desperation?

If it was true, what would happen when people were let out of the cells? Would they have to walk all the way back into town along the pavement-free A345? I suppose they could always hop on to a park and ride bus at the Beehive. That would be one way to boost passenger numbers.