What do we expect in return when we give to charity?

NEWS that major vascular surgery is to move from Salisbury to Bournemouth has prompted understandable speculation about which other services might in future be transferred to some ‘regional hub’ miles away.
That’s a subject for another day. But here’s a related thought.
When the plot to shut down Hillcote, our respite home for handicapped children, was being hatched, did anyone take account of the input of local people into this facility?
Some £30,000 was collected for a minibus and a specially-equipped quiet room.
What happens to this stuff if the closure goes ahead? Are they planning to flog it off on ebay? Cart it all up to Devizes? Or just scrap it?
Whatever the answer, what message does it send to the fundraisers who worked so hard?
Now we are in the final throes of a huge appeal for a CT scanner. All over the area people of goodwill have been busting a gut to raise £650,000. That's brilliant.
Would they have devoted quite so much time and energy to buying a scanner based in Southampton or Basingstoke? I’m not knocking, just asking.
We pay for these things gladly, because we think they will be there to help us, our friends and our loved ones as well as the wider local community in our hour of need. And because we think our hospital is great.But these are times of upheaval for public services, and there can’t be guarantees that any piece of kit, or indeed any department, will remain here.I'm not saying we shouldn’t give to good causes. Of course we should, and to forestall criticism, I’ll tell you that I am a member of a charity committee.
But experience suggests that we should be wary of subsidising what our taxes ought to be buying.
We can’t expect the state to provide everything for us any longer, and we will all have to become more self-reliant.
But in the interests of social cohesion, the public must have a meaningful part to play in deciding what happens to publicly-owned assets.
People with power over our lives need to understand that ‘give and take’ is what makes any relationship work.
And it doesn’t just mean that we give, while they take away when they feel like it.

A festive freebie in Salisbury car parks? Not likely!

SO Wiltshire Council has very graciously consented to free use of its car parks on Sundays to encourage shoppers into Salisbury during the run-up to Christmas and the New Year sales.
Free? Wiltshire? Pull the other one, it’s got sleigh bells on!
I don’t know how you define ‘free’, but in my dictionary it doesn’t include the words ‘pay later’.
Conservative members of our city council have gone cap in hand to Trowbridge and offered to make up the £17,000 in income that Wiltshire might otherwise forfeit by accepting their proposal.
Apparently their overlords Up North were ‘receptive’ to this novel idea. I bet they were. It’s a no-brainer. Heads they win, tails they can’t lose. And ‘free parking’ has such a lovely headliney ring about it at this time of year, doesn’t it?
Chief cheerleader for the festive so-called freebie appears to be city councillor Sven Hocking, who says his group of Santa’s little helpers are “aware of the issues around parking charges” but would rather “work with” their “colleagues” than “antagonise” them.
I think that roughly translated into everyday English that means “They’ve got us right where they want us, lads, so we’ll just have to put on a brave face and make the best of it.”
Presumably, political opponents who object to this wizard wheeze will be branded ‘bah humbugs’ who don’t care about giving the city’s struggling traders a little Christmas cheer.
But hold your horses – or maybe that should be reindeer. Who will really be footing the bill?
Why, the city council, through its reserves, silly. They told you so.
The same city council that’s expected to be £160,000 overspent this year because of the cost of doing up the Market Place and crematorium and that was warned last month that it could face a £164,000 cut in funding?
Yes, but it doesn’t matter, because they’re going to recoup this little extra via your 2014-15 council tax bill and by that time you’ll have forgotten all about it.
After all, it’ll only amount to £1.30 for the average Band D muggins, whether he or she actually used the car parks or not.
See? Clever, isn’t it? It’s called bribing us with our own money.
And it’s the only wriggle room our unitary authority has left them.
Please, please, do support our city traders. Just don’t be fooled by politicians and their bogus giveaways.

Well done to Mayor for making a stand over council chiefs' pay

CONGRATULATIONS to the Mayor of Tidworth, Chris Franklin, for breaking ranks over the issue of Wiltshire Council leaders' pay.
He has left the Tory party in protest against the huge rises in allowances that Jane Scott and her cabinet members have voted through for themselves at the same time as they are axing jobs and squeezing pay for their remaining staff.

How are they managing to get away with it? By upping the salaries of a few favoured execs at the same time to keep them onside. It's the classic 'divide and rule' technique.

An excellent hospital, but medics upset by surgery plan

THIS week’s column will be short and mainly sweet.

Why short? Because I can only type with my left hand. And I’m right-handed.

Why sweet? Because it takes the form of a thank you-to all the lovely staff I encountered at Salisbury District Hospital last week.

Why only mainly sweet? Because I subsequently – and quite separately -  learned of an issue at the hospital that deserves a wider public airing.

I went in on Friday for day surgery to remove a large lump from my finger. Not a pleasant prospect, but lots of people have far worse things to contend with.

The nurses on C Ward, though extremely busy, were kind and jolly, and consultant plastic surgeon Kerstin Oestreich and her team were the perfect combination of efficiency and sensitivity.

Being a bit squeamish I couldn’t watch what they were up to, though I wanted to be told.

They put on some music – a bizarre selection ranging from Nessun Dorma to one of those silly but very catchy Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep tunes that haunt people on package holidays - and kept me chatting (not difficult, my husband would say) to distract me.

The lump turned out to be one of those that’s definitely better out than in, and with luck that will be the end of it. It certainly wasn’t a ganglion, which I’d been told previously.

So I’m glad I persevered in getting it looked at again. Pestering overworked doctors can make us feel guilty and apologetic, but we have to trust our instincts.

On the day, 10 out of 10, SDH. And thank you.

Thanks also from my husband, who went to casualty straight after dropping me off, having injured a finger playing volleyball the night before.

It’s now in a splint for eight weeks, leaving us with one undamaged left hand and one right hand between us!

Of course things sometimes go wrong, but overall we are lucky to have such a good hospital, offering such a wide range of expertise, on our doorstep.

I hope that the service received by vascular patients who will have to travel to Bournemouth for major procedures in future will be just as good.

I understand that some medical staff are deeply unhappy about the change, but don’t expect any hint of that to emerge in official statements.    

Wiltshire Council leaders' pay rockets as a fortnight of fireworks distract us

FIREWORKS were ruined for me the day we adopted our first dog.

November 5 and  New Year’s Eve reduced him to a shivering, dribbling wreck, hiding under one of the dresses hanging in my wardrobe.

Thirty-four years later we’re onto our third border collie, and things are even worse.

The poor little fellow is so terrified of the random explosions that plague our parks for a fortnight either side of November 5 that I don’t really like to go out at night and leave him. Fellow pet-owners tell me they have the same problem.

The inability of our police force to actually police our public open spaces during the hours of darkness is disappointing.

And the fact that this yobfest occurs at the same time of year as a great deal of shooting on the estates surrounding the city compounds the problem.

The pops and bangs echoing across the hillsides some days make me reluctant to walk Glen off the lead in case he bolts for home.

Unfortunately we’re in for another dose of (officially sanctioned) pyrotechnics tonight, to mark the switching on of the Christmas lights.

This is a pity, since as an avid Strictly fan I’d rather like to watch Craig Revel Horwood - what a coup for the city council - perform the ceremony.

I hope it launches a super whizz-bang festive season for our traders.

And I hope the investment of their own hard-earned cash in the Business Improvement District (BID) project, starting in the spring, will help to counter the deterrent effect of our parking charges.

Actually, I can think of somewhere I’d like to set off a rocket or two tonight, and that’s up the backsides of the Wiltshire Council leaders who are responsible for those charges and who have just awarded themselves whacking great increases in their own allowances, weeks after voting to make 252 staff redundant.

This selfless devotion to the public interest even raised eyebrows on the Conservative Home website - hardly a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment.

Its blogger Harry Phibbs quoted the Taxpayers' Alliance as saying: "Wiltshire residents have every right to feel badly let down."

If you agree, you might like to know that there's a petition calling on the Trowbridge elite to resign at www.38degrees.org.uk.

Time for a shoppers' revolt in the bagging area

PITY the poor shop assistants who have to man the tills next to those automated checkouts.

Imagine being forced to listen to the phrase “Unauthorised item in bagging area”, delivered in a robotic tone, a hundred times a day. It would drive you demented.

It can only be a matter of time before some hapless employee sues a supermarket, claiming it’s a new form of repetitive strain injury.

These maddening machines are all about the stores saving money by employing fewer people.

As is their kind offer of allowing you to pay at the pump after filling up the car, thereby saving you the huge exertion of walking a dozen steps to the kiosk where you might help keep an attendant in work.

While it might boost the big chains’ profits, this culling of cashiers is bad news for society.

With fewer jobs for unskilled workers, more people on zero-hours or rolling short-term contracts, wages frozen except for the bigwigs (Wiltshire Council, leading by example as usual), and public services such as our hospital laundry flogged off to firms that the unions say will drive down pay and conditions, who do we imagine will be earning enough money to keep our businesses in business in the future?

I try to avoid being bossed about by a machine if there’s an alternative of dealing with a human being.

But I’m aware of subtle ways in which this is being made more awkward.

For instance, the spaces allotted to ‘baskets only’ in our superstores are now so narrow that you can only just fit the basket in lengthways.

And there’s only room for one carrier bag by the till. You have to dump any others on the floor while you rummage for your purse.

Not forgetting your loyalty card, of course. So you feel you’re getting some reward for your trouble, even though you know they’re not really giving anything away, it’s all factored in to their prices.

Most of us put up with being treated like this, but one of the joys of writing this column is that I can grumble if I want to. And increasingly, I do. It must be my age.

I’d like to place an unauthorised item right in the centre of every bagging area in the land. A sledgehammer, wielded by a champion weightlifter.

anneriddle36@gmail.com

Another old-fashioned pub gets an unwanted revamp

MY husband and I rarely go out for a drink.

Without doubt, we consume more wine than is good for us, but mostly at home.

As a result, recycling day is always something of an embarrassment, listening to the clinking and smashing of bottles being tipped into the dustcart. I remember a binman asking me once: “Been having a party?” Sadly, we hadn’t.

Yet I can’t remember the last time the pair of us walked in to a pub without the primary intention of ordering a meal.

When we were younger we often popped in to our local to socialise over a glass or two, and maybe play darts. Not any more.

I think it was having a family that scuppered it. Paying a babysitter made no sense when you could stick the kids in bed and collapse on the sofa with a cheap supermarket plonk. And we didn’t have to argue about whose turn it was to drive.

Nowadays, being middle-aged and boring, we’re more likely to head out to a restaurant, and maybe take a taxi home.

The occasional girls’ night out is a different matter. We do still like to find a civilised pub where we can set up a tab and natter nonstop until they chuck us out.

Sounds like the Anchor and Hope in Winchester Street would have suited us perfectly, had we discovered it in time.

It was touching to read about how much the place meant to its regulars, and how sad they are to lose the landlord and landlady who made it the heart of their little community.

What they are mourning is one of the vanishing breed of no-frills drinkers’ pubs that didn’t mess about with hideously misspelt ‘Pub Fayre’ straight out of the cash-and-carry, but simply offered a genuine, personal welcome.

The owners, Enterprise Inns, say it will be revamped and reopened. They are looking for someone to take on the “business opportunity”.

That’s the trouble, say the regulars. The bean-counters regard it as “just another asset”, and it will lose its soul.

In our increasingly corporate world things seem to go that way, whether it’s ‘cloned’ High Streets, Tesco buying up corner shops, or the plethora of chain restaurants.

Sometimes, I confess, I’m as guilty as the next man of failing to value what we’ve got till it’s gone.