Bare buttocks in Salisbury: there are worse outrages

A MAN has been jailed this week for baring his buttocks in Salisbury Cathedral Close and pretended to be talking out of his bottom.
“Outraging public decency” was his crime.
His behaviour undoubtedly shocked and embarrassed onlookers, among them parents with young children.
I wouldn’t begin to criticise the judge’s decision. I don’t have all the information available to the court.
But I do know that our society tolerates all sorts of things that offend me far more than this without anyone being punished.
From time to time in my youth it was my unhappy duty to cobble together a couple of corny pun-filled sentences to accompany the topless pictures in the Daily Star. (Not as easy as it sounds, by the way.)
My colleagues had to take their turn, too.
It felt so wrong, and many of us hated it, but this was Manchester in the mid-Eighties, the management didn’t give a damn about sexism, and there was nothing I could have said that might not have cost me my well-paid job.
Eventually I did the sensible thing, volunteered for redundancy, and moved to a more congenial office.
It was in London, at the ill-fated Today, founded by Eddy Shah. No boobs on display there.
But no unions, either, sadly. Shah had been in the frontline of the war on collective bargaining.
And as it intensified, the Thatcher government used our supposedly non-political police force to help crush the miners and the rebels at Rupert Murdoch’s Wapping.
That wasn’t fair to anyone involved, including the police. It certainly jarred with my notion of decency, and I’d go so far as to call it an outrage.
OK, some union leaders overstepped the mark. But when is it right to fight abuse of power with another abuse of power?
Another instance. Just lately the county’s youth service has been dismantled with what I consider indecent haste.
But at least tonight, councillors on the Salisbury area board have a chance to salvagesomething from the wreckage.
The Sound Emporium, a community organisation that combines commercial and charitable work, has thrown a lifeline to the music project Bass Connection.
I do hope our elected representatives will set aside party politics and grasp it.
Teenagers who wouldn’t touch a traditional youth club with a bargepole need support from people who speak their language to develop their talents.
Bass Connection nurtures creativity. It isn’t a luxury we can no longer afford. It’s a long-term investment in society’s future.
To allow it to die – well, that would be an outrage.

The right decision for Salisbury's tourist industry

WELL done to the planning inspector who turned down a scheme to convert Salisbury’s youth hostel to retirement homes.
As the county’s tourism body VisitWiltshire told her, there’s strong demand here for budget accommodation of a type that appeals to young people.
I don’t think Tesco Towers is going to fill that niche.
The Youth Hostel Association says, somewhat sniffily, that it will “review the outcome” of its appeal and “take any decision that best serves our organisation”.
That’s fine. But the decisions that best serve Salisbury’s economy are ones that encourage tourists to stay here for longer than the average coach party of Americans, to explore a bit more than just the Cathedral and Stonehenge, and to spend money in our shops and cafes.
There’s no doubt that we will also, in due course, require more purpose-built accommodation for older people in the city, given our ageing population. And sites will have to be found.
Not this one, however.
Although the YHA has claimed that its building is no longer viable, I’ve spoken to people who are convinced they can make a go of it, have experience of the industry, and are keen to be given the opportunity.
So perhaps the YHA would be better off concentrating its efforts elsewhere, and letting someone else get on with the job?
Meanwhile our traders ought to offer a vote of thanks to city councillor Margaret Willmot for her campaigning on this issue.

I’ll be seeing the sights of Salisbury and our surrounding countryside through a visitor’s eyes myself, soon, when my mother moves down from Essex.
I’m really looking forward to it – and not only because it’ll mean an end to nightmare stop-start journeys round the M25.
Taking her out and about will give me a chance to rediscover the advantages of living here.

One of the first places on the to-do list if the weather holds out will be New Forest Lavender down at Landford, a small family business it’s a pleasure to support.
Their cream tea with lavender scones and a pot of Earl Grey is the perfect way to round off a summer afternoon.

You don't need statistics to be affected by violence

SALISBURY may not be a hotbed of violent crime, statistically speaking.
But you only have to witness one shocking incident, or be on the receiving end of a random blow when you’re passing someone else’s punch-up, and it will stay with you forever.
Like the poor 92-year-old chap who had his arm broken outside a pub in Bridge Street last month.
At his age it’s not just physical recovery, but regaining confidence, that takes a long time.
Reading about him brought to mind the summer, a decade ago, when my family hosted foreign students for a language school.
Attracted by the low prices at the same pub, one group – and I’m talking Swedes in their thirties and forties, with a penchant for traditional Icelandic knitwear – would gather there after lessons for a quiet pint.
Until the day a bunch of oiks with tattoos on their shaven heads began jumping around in the bar, getting ever closer to the students, then ‘accidentally’ bumped into one of them, taunting him: “Nice jumper, mate.”
The Scandinavians beat a hasty retreat.
I thought at the time: What an impression foreigners must get of Britons and of the behaviour we tolerate in public because we’re too scared to intervene. I’d be too scared, too.
Two or three years ago, I was window-shopping in Catherine Street when a lad – still in his teens, I should say – came marching up the opposite pavement, phone glued to his ear, effing and blinding at maximum volume and threatening extreme violence towards someone who had failed to pay him for something. Illegal substances sprang to mind.
Shoppers averted their eyes and quietly parted to let him through. Nobody wanted to attract his attention.
He was fearless, certain that he would not be challenged, and there were no police in sight.
When I mentioned to a colleague that I was thinking of writing about this, she told me she had just witnessed a fight between two men in Exeter Street.
“They were pushing and shoving, shouting and swearing, and one of them pushed his bike into the other one,” she said.
“I had to go back up the road and cross over to come down the other side, and other people were doing the same thing.
“I checked that I had my phone handy, in case someone got really hurt. You want to fulfil your civil responsibilities, but you don’t want to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Most of us want nothing more than to get on with our law-abiding lives in peace.
But we share our streets with a significant minority of anti-social yobs who seem free to cause havoc whenever they feel like it.

You have to love kitchen cupboard speedcam men

HEROES of the month for me have to be the duo who created a pretend speed camera out of a kitchen cupboard.
Fed up with motorists rat-running through their village, Shrewton residents Antony Cull and Chris Fawcett used their ingenuity to build their own deterrent.
And it worked. People slowed down.
I particularly enjoyed reading Wiltshire Council’s po-faced response to this display of cost-effective individual initiative.
The council has a “robust” (that word again) system for dealing with speeding issues raised by local communities, its officers solemnly informed us.
“Issues should be referred to the local community area board, who will work with the local community to examine what speed control measures are appropriate for that particular road.”
Beseeching residents to “follow the approved procedure”, they said it was vital that any traffic control scheme was “effective and delivers the required result”.
Which, of course, the Shrewton neighbours' scheme was, and did. Overnight. Without any meetings, health and safety reports, consultations or lengthy deliberations. Job done. Who needs the nanny state?
At a time when we’re all being exhorted to run our own community services to save money, the council might at least have tried to sound a bit more grateful. No sense of humour, that’s their trouble.
I’d like to nominate the enterprising pair for one of the Journal’s Local Hero Awards, for making me smile.
And I hope that the official traffic monitoring exercise now under way in the area surrounding the A303 leads to some positive action.
I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the idea of the authorities using number plate recognition technology to track the movements of individual vehicles – mine, or anyone else’s.
But that’s happening across the country anyway under the new vehicle tax system, whether we like it or not.
Big Brother really is watching all of us. Given the choice, I’d prefer Mr Cull and Mr Fawcett with their kitchen unit.

Elsewhere in the wonderful world of Wiltshire waffle, there’s currently what Jerry Lee Lewis might have called a whole lotta shapin’ goin’ on.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but every other news item these days seems to be inviting us to “help shape” some service or other that’s about to be smashed to smithereens.
“Have your say” is another favourite.
“Have a heart” is my response. You already know what you want to do. Almost inevitably, it involves a reduced public service, and I don’t suppose anything we say is going to make much difference.

Wiltshire's youth policy drawn up on the back of a fag packet

HOW’S this for political opportunism?
Imagine you’re Trowbridge Tory Laura Mayes. Not easy, in my case, I admit.
Imagine you’ve been insisting there’s no more money for the youth service, only for your party to realise belatedly what a disaster this is turning out to be in both PR and practical terms.
It must seem like a blessed miracle when an extra £300,000 is suddenly fished out from down the back of a sofa to get you out of trouble.
Headline-wise, you don’t have to look like such a bunch of meanies after all.
Of course, trumpeting this convenient windfall is not to be construed as an acknowledgement that you might have got your initial calculations a teensy bit wrong.
And there’s no need to mention that chunks of it were raised by ‘the kids’ themselves through their youth club fees and fundraising events.
In other words, that they were helping to pay for their own fun before you stopped all that. That morally speaking, it’s their money already.
And there’s certainly no need to highlight that it won’t be spread about evenly across the county.
Or that there’ll be no more top-ups next year.
It’s just, well ………. jolly handy, and let’s all stop carping and be glad about something for once.
Onward and upward to a glorious, ‘community-led’ future.
Meanwhile, who’s left to pick up the pieces and provide constructive outlets for young people’s energies after this latest example of ‘robustly scrutinised’ back-of-a-fag-packet policy making?
Why, the bemused members of our area boards, who had no idea they were joining the salvage industry when they stood for election, aided by the few remaining Wiltshire Council professionals who have a clue about what proper youth work actually requires.
And that’s a bit more than a game of table football in the parish hall.
Last night Salisbury’s board members were meeting privately to discuss how they will cope with this unlooked-for responsibility.
I don’t envy them. Meaning no disrespect, most of them would probably admit to a pretty hazy grasp of current youth culture.
They’re not trained for the job of organising activities for teenagers, especially the stroppy ones most in need of help.
They’ll need to ensure that the volunteers who run them on a day-to-day basis are suitable.
And they can’t afford to pay someone to take the burden from their shoulders.
But they’re all we’ve got. I really do wish them the best of luck.

Forgive me if councils have made me cynical

WHEN is empire building not empire building?
It all seems to depend on whose empire you’re talking about and what you stand to gain.
I seem to recall that resentment was widespread not so many years ago when Wiltshire Council seized our district council’s assets, then set about redistributing them and ‘harmonising’ services for everyone else’s benefit except ours.
Since then I’ve asked myself many times what on earth our district councillors were doing that prevented them from seeing this disaster on the horizon.
Bickering about the cost of Bourne Hill? Distracted by the expensive repercussions of that row over whether to build a multi-storey on the central car park? Remember that?
Wondering how on earth they were going to meet the old regional assembly’s lunatic house-building targets without every hillside on the horizon disappearing under concrete?
Or simply resting their eyelids over their agenda papers?
Well, a handful of those old stalwarts are still around on the city council. And what has this emasculated body learnt from the experience?
Oh yes, let’s see if we can annexe all the little parish councils around us, whether they ask us to or not, and we’ll get lots more lovely council tax.
Wiltshire have asked us if there’s anywhere we’ve taken a fancy to, so they can’t blame us.
We won’t go bothering Wilton because they’re a) more historic and b) stroppier than us, and what’s more their mayor, town clerk and one of their councillors too all turned up at the Guildhall to keep an eye on our deliberations. No use picking a fight that we probably wouldn’t win.
But what about Laverstock & Ford? Despite all those green bits it’s got new housing going up all over the place.
With a population growing at that rate, and our higher tax precept, it’d be a nice little earner. After all, they use our crematorium, don’t they?
What’s that you say? They don’t want to be taken over? Don’t want to be charged more for the privilege? Say we never asked for their opinion?
Now where have I heard that before?

What's Richard III got to do with Wiltshire's fire service?

A WEEK or so ago you'd have found me in central London, enthralled by Martin Freeman’s blackly comic portrayal of Richard III.
In an attempt to make the plot more accessible to audiences who have no idea about the dynastic machinations of the 15th century but would quite like to see that nice man from Sherlock or The Hobbit, this production is set in the imagined aftermath of a more recent ‘winter of discontent’, in the late 1970s.
Instead of medieval castles the action takes place in a conference room, with the ruthlessly ambitious Duke of Buckingham played as a spin doctor.
It isn’t subtle. Explosions, stranglings and drownings keep things moving swiftly on, and the stage is awash with gore.
Amidst it all, Freeman is a coolly calculating little monster, mentally inspecting the pros and cons of every horror he is about to commit and concluding with a nonchalant shrug and a conspiratorial nod to the audience as if to say: “Oh well, it’s got to be done.”
Which of course is true, if you accept his initial premise that the acquisition and retention of power by any means is all that matters.
I think we know where this is going, don’t we?
I commend this production to anyone concerned that firefighters will lose their jobs (though not, in these relatively enlightened times, their heads) if Wiltshire Council’s boardroom warriors have their way.
Having deposed one brave chairman who refused to toe the party line, and dumped a public consultation document by our fire chief and his Dorset oppo, who want to combine forces, they are now, belatedly, asking us what we think.
No guarantee that they’ll take any notice, but it’s a start.
The fire chiefs say a merger will save millions, with a minimum of frontline bloodletting. They’ve drawn up a business case that shows how it’ll work.
Dorset’s voters, who are also being consulted, are being shown the details. For reasons best known to our councillors, we’re not.
Anyway, that’s Scenario 3 in the consultation.
You get there after wading through Scenarios 1 and 2, both of which save less money, give Wiltshire Council (‘critical decisions taken locally’) more to meddle in, and mean fewer boots on the ground, fewer fire stations, and slower response times.
In an emergency, I know which option I’d prefer.
If you’re in any doubt, do what the council bosses do and ask yourself: What’s in it for me?
Lives could depend on the outcome of this consultation. You can take part online at www.wiltsfire.gov.uk/strengtheningourfrs or pick up a leaflet at your library or council offices.