Walter and Lucy Patching

Above are my maternal grandparents, Lucy and Walter. They lived in Brighton in the 1930s. Lucy was a domestic servant, originally from Cannock and so shy that when her wealthy widow employer invited her to go on a cruise with her, Lucy refused and elected to stay behind and mind the long-gone seafront mansion instead. Cue for her family to start turning up to use the bath (indoor plumbing still being a great novelty and luxury in those days) with yet other members of the family turning up to ring the bell and pretend to be her employer back early! A gentle, timid soul, Lucy married a cattleman called Walter in her mid-30s (the one who looks like an accountant!) and they had a child, my mother Margaret.

Tragedy struck when Walter contracted an illness, quite likely bovine TB, and died at only 32 in Brighton General in 1942 when my mother was only 3 years old. Further misfortune was to strike when Lucy developed crippling arthritis, possibly grief-related, at around the same time which restricted her ability to work and made her even shyer about going out and socialising. They eked out a living on her meagre widow's pension with Lucy doing light work whenever she was able and eventually being able to buy the ground floor of the terraced house which she rented. Many years later when the landlord and upstairs incumbant of the house died, she managed to buy the rest at a reduced rate as she had lived there for so long and he had stipulated she should be able to do such in his will. Resistant to all my mother's teen efforts to match Lucy up with a 'dishy' new vicar at the local church, Lucy lived a solitary life with only her good friend and fellow widow Mrs Tennant visiting regularly, and a few family around her, her one indulgence being a new silk blouse once a year.

Aside from little money, Lucy had little clue as to how to raise her daughter as she was not a natural mother and ideas or ambitions for the future were anathema to her. Luckily my mother had an uncle who paid for her to go to secretarial college so she could avoid domestic service and cousins who made sure she got to a few parties and spread her wings a little. Brighton in the 1950s was not as funky as it is now and my mother quickly moved from working in a solicitor's office to work in a travel agents so she could get subsidised travel as she had always dreamed of travelling. Eventually in the mid-60s she made it to India to study yoga for a year, much to Lucy's complete bewilderment!

Lucy lived until I was 11 and I remember her gentle, almost apologetic, sense of humour, her neat petite figure encased in her customary silk blouses and her stoic efforts to enjoy the simple things in life and pin her hair net on each morning despite the constant pain of her arthritis. I particularly remember her cute terraced worker's cottage in the almost-vertically steep Baxter Street with its sunny postage stamp back garden frequented by numerous neighbourhood cats, the unfeasibly large unconverted attic with its pile of 1930s newspapers which I loved poring over and the old-fashioned dolls house I loved playing with. Then there was her amazing teapot which also looked like a little house and the illustrated 1930s Jane Eyre which had belonged to my mother and which I read at the age of 9. She was not a demonstrative grandmother but showed she loved us through little gestures like buying us I-Spy books and sending us £2 cheques and cards for our birthdays. And of course she lived by the sea, which alone made her popular with us!

Looking through the family scrap books on a recent visit to my parents' house, I see she and Walter managed to enjoy a few holidays and day trips before he died. I am glad she managed to know a little happiness in between being a late spinster and a premature widow, not to mention the war and its losses leaving an undoubted lifelong mark, for she did not have an easy life and I was not old enough to think of asking her about it when she was alive. She was just Grandma Patching.

As a footnote to this family background, my mother's 4th birthday present was a grave to secure the family plot by her father, paid for in weekly installments to the 'funeral club'.

Confessions of a Student Housing Officer

Since the only writing I have done lately is to write up my notes from a student housing legal updates conference, I thought I may as well give you an insight into the exciting world of Student Housing and a few of the things we have to worry about!

Houses In Multiple Occupation (HMO's)

HMO's: When people hear the term 'HMO' they nearly ALWAYS think student housing. However the vast majority of HMO's are actually formed by professional sharers who cannot afford to buy their own places, which will increasingly be the case as councils focus on forcing smaller property landlords to register. This move towards extra licensing has been as a result of anti-HMO (usually residents) groups lobbying councils to see students/landlords penalised for 'studentification' of certain areas, blaming them for shops and businesses closing and schools not being built. Councils are often taking their word for it to win votes and hastily putting HMO schemes together without proper consultation, data and procedures, (or analysis as to whether these areas would go back to how the residents' groups claimed they used to be if the student population suddenly departed), leaving councils wide open to demands for a judicial review or public enquiry. Sometimes they are even refusing landlords who live abroad HMO status, although any 'most appropriate person' nominated should suffice. But as a first step the advice is not to challenge Article 4 (which empowers local authorities to remove permitted development rights in defined areas), but rather to challenge Councils to deliver on it. In addition with 1-2 enforcement officers per city, councils need to both identify HMO's which are not registering and then enforce registration/compliance amidst administering all the properties which have signed up and expect a service from their council in return. There is an argument that where Landlord Accreditation schemes exist, extending the HMO licensing as well is somewhat overkill as the first scheme should already be raising standards if raising standards is the aim. Many councils have insisted on expensive improvements to new HMO's above and beyond legal requirements, though they might argue that they are the law in their own jurisdiction, this should always be challenged as there is a suspicion they are trying to reduce the number of rented properties by making it economically unviable or forcing landlords to pass on the costs in rent hikes their tenants cannot afford.
As has been stated so many times at Landlord Forums I have attended, the responsible and good landlords feel they are being penalised with one cost and piece of red tape after another, but what is happening to the truly bad or slum landlords, those that the councils should be devoting the bulk of their time and resources to tracking and enforcing improvements or ensuring they cease operating in the area?

ILLICIT TENANTS:

First check contract and ensure terms such as 'single occupancy' 'must not sublet', 'must not share occupation of' are contained within along with the limits for visitor stays.
It then becomes a 'breach of contract' if a visitor stays over the specified period for visitors and they effectively become a 'trespasser'. In addition while there, the visitor is also obliged to behave in a 'tenant-like manner' – ie not causing nuisance, harm or hazard to the other residents or the property.
Then check 'Protection From Eviction 1977' Section 3: List of excluded occupiers, to ensure you are acting properly.
Remedies: You may find you can write to tenant threatening a court injunction if visitor does not move out by specified date (will take several weeks, but often quicker if anti-social behaviour involved). You could further state that if the visitor is noted living there again the tenant themselves will be served with a Notice to Quit for breaching the terms of his/her tenancy agreement. Ensure the tenant contract contains a caveat whereby they sign permission that you can contact the guarantor in the event that breach of contract exposes the guarantor to financial risk, which can cover everything from utility bill default to court costs for eviction of illicit visitors or the tenant themselves. In this way you may be able to bring some pressure to bear by enforcing 'contractual rights and remedies.' Terms such as 'breach of your agreement', 'unfair to other occupants', 'contrary to the requirements of good faith' and 'we will go no further than necessary to protect our other tenants' may prove helpful.
If housemates complain that one of their number has moved someone else in who is using all their facilities/eating their food/not paying any rent/bills or is being anti-social, they must be prepared to jointly sign a house letter stating how long the illicit tenant has been there and how they are being affected by them or the only action which can be taken is if a Housing Officer visits the house and finds and photographs clear evidence of sharing – mattresses together on floor, two sets or sizes of clothing/shoes/possessions.
If an illicit tenant has moved into an empty room, it is permissible to change the locks as they are a 'trespasser', even if paying rent to one of the other occupants rather than to the legitimate landlord, but if they are sharing a room with a lawful tenant it would be unlawful to change the locks as that would exclude the lawful tenant as well.
If an illicit tenant is not paying rent – they are classed as not occupying for 'money or moneysworth' so it is worth using reasonable force to eject them before they become a 'residential occupier' as they have no protection from eviction although a notice of eviction still needs to go on the door.

SMOKING & DRUGS

If No Smoking signs are up, the owner/Manager of the property then has to enforce the ban as they will risk being sued by non-smoking housemates if they fail to. There is no human rights edict which says you have to allow smokers to smoke in their rooms or provide an enclosed area in the premises for them to use. Smoking materials may be confiscated where found in a non-smoking building and it is not unreasonable to ban all lighted materials from student premises on safety grounds unless they have a gas oven which will not light by any other means. Drugs: Work in pairs when looking for drugs and if you find or are made aware of drugs on the premises you then have a legal duty to act immediately. First take photographs. Then contact the Police for them to confiscate the contraband and arrest the occupant. Write incident up with all the details and be prepared to be asked to provide witness statement for the Police. Do not confiscate from room yourself as you could end up being arrested for 'possession'! It is particularly important to stamp out any drugs in Halls as this will quickly lead to dealing when a student realises what a large and captive market he/she has within the building. Sometimes dealing even happens accidentally when a student's friend sees for example that they have a joint, asks for a puff and then spreads the word that so-and-so can sell them a bit, so next thing, so-and-so is a drug dealer! CCTV footage can also help when it comes to tracking comings and goings through certain doors or corridors and unusually high footfall in certain areas. Watch out for any odd incidents such as a student being beaten up or apparently randomly attacked or robbed as this can often mean they've been annoying the local drug dealers by trespassing on their 'manor'. Aside from the legal penalties, most Universities still send students down for drug use and most certainly for dealing, as not to would be to condone (and even be an accessory to) illegal behaviour, which would then impact negatively on the University's reputation.
Educate both staff and students as to the seriousness of the penalties involved, even for cannabis.

The Sin Bin

Whilst not the most vocal human rightsist, and certainly no defender of the abhorrent Bin Laden (and not even against the death penalty where it can be proven beyond all doubt that the guilty party is guilty), I still found myself more shocked than I expected by the absence of due legal process in the dispatch of Bin Laden, and it has more or less now been admitted that it was a planned assassination rather than a response to the armed siege first reported. Nor have photographs or film footage been forthcoming.

Perhaps my queasiness lies in the fact that even Hitler would have received a trial as a war criminal had he not chosen to die by his own hand sixty six years ago. Has the Western World really regressed in its observance of civilised conduct since the Nuremberg trials, widely recognised at the time as a real advance for humanity and one of the positive outcomes of six years of horror?

As for making Bin Laden a martyr, there would have been no foolproof means of preventing this nor preventing the risk of violent retribution by what remains of his followers (vastly decimated in recent years by all accounts), whether he was dispatched by cold-blooded assassination or execution following a trial, or even lifelong imprisonment following a trial.

Granted such a trial would have been inconvenient, long-winded and ruinously expensive, but is that any reason to drive a coach and horses through the Geneva Convention and the ideals previous generations strove to leave as their legacy for a better and more civilised world?
Nor were the indecent levels of Western glee about this incident or the strange idea that burying Bin Laden at sea somehow conformed to Muslim burial law likely to appease his remaining followers.

I don't deny that it's a relief this undoubtedly evil man is no longer walking the earth and breathing the same air as me. I just think the Western World could have covered itself in more glory in its conduct and observance of due legal process in its dispatch of him. How else do we hope to set an example to the rest of the world that we in the West really do have the best ideals, the superior justice and the moral high ground generally over non-democracies?

Or perhaps the hope was that this would swiftly become yesterday's news and who cares about legacy and reputation in a fast moving Twitterati world anyway? But actions still have consequences whatever media fashion would have us believe.

A Short Story about Alcohol

The Set Aside Scheme

It's not something that happens overnight you know. It takes a lot of hard work, determination and dedication to achieve it. I would say it probably took me a good ten years from the time I left school and at first I really hated it and struggled to overcome my barriers. But over time you do. Over time you even learn to enjoy it despite yourself, and you find your tolerance builds and the world seems a better place.

It's true I wasn't much good at exams at school but the DSS put me on a youth training course in metalwork when I left. And then another one in woodwork. I tried for over twelve months to get a job in the conventional way, but an apprenticeship fell through and there just wasn't much around in Kegford. The DSS suggested I should move elsewhere with more prospects but I really didn't have it in me to leave the only place I'd ever known. It also struck me as wrong somehow that I should have to leave my home town to find a job. Then I was asked to attend a special interview with the DSS who threatened to stop my money if I didn't go.

Well this big man in a blue suit, must have been in his 50s, asked me what I planned to do with my life.
I shrugged. He asked me what I knew about politics. I shrugged again. He then asked if I'd ever heard of the European Union Set-Aside scheme?
I said no.
'Well it's a bit like this young man.' He said. 'They used to produce far too much food in the European Common Market and it all got wasted in butter mountains or wine lakes. There was just too much of the stuff, supply outstripping demand and all that. So rather than continue to waste vast quantities of milk and meat and everything else, they decided to bring in the 'Set-Aside' scheme where farmers were paid NOT to over-produce food and to leave a certain percentage of their fields fallow. Ever thought about becoming fallow?'
'You, you, mean, killing myself…?'
'No of course not lad. Mr Major may be anxious to reduce the unemployment figures, but we’re not barbarians.'
'Then what?'
'Are you willing to be set-aside?'
'Set aside…?'
'I mean paid for doing nothing. Your own pad in your home town with all your friends and family around, enhanced benefits and no signing on?'
'What's the catch?' I asked. 'There must be one.'
'Shame' he said. 'You're a smart enough lad - I'm sure you could make something of yourself. I normally reserve this offer for those I can see will be a waste of space.'
'Offer?'
'Well the catch as you're sharp enough to register is you'd have to become an alcoholic.'
'WHAT???'
'Because once you're a registered alcoholic, you can sign on the sick indefinitely and get far higher benefits than being on the dole, aside from not showing up on the jobless figures. This also means less hassle from the DSS as no one really expects an alcoholic to recover, never mind work again.'
I sat in the chair stunned. Would any of my friends believe me? A man offering me money for drinking?
'Look at it this way, girls get themselves up the duff to get a free flat, but that option isn't open to a young man with limited prospects. Look, I don't expect you to make up your mind straightaway. Sleep on it and we can meet again next week. But there is one condition of the scheme you need to be aware of.'
I looked at him in askance.
'Strict and utter confidentiality is required - in fact you must sign the Official Secrets Act to take part.'
'And if I don't?'
'I don't suppose anyone would believe you anyway. But those of our set-asiders who don't toe the line get their benefits stopped immediately. And that's just the start. They can then find themselves accused of fraud and be forced to pay all their benefits back. Lose their flat or hostel space. Prison even.'
'I see.'
'Good. I think we understand one another. I'll get the paperwork prepared.' He said, getting up and shaking my hand.

And that, dear Eileen was the start of it. I had no other notion of what to do with my life so I signed. I'd never been popular at school, never had a girlfriend, never expected my life to amount to much. What was the point? My own dad hadn't had a job since the pit closed. My mother had never worked at all. The scheme enabled me to move into my own place and eventually escape from grim reality most of the time, once I’d overcome my dislike of the stuff and swallowed what pride I had.
I never bargained on meeting you. I was 43 and scarcely been kissed. Always too self-conscious about my pigeon chest to undress in front of a girl. Those couple of kisses with Sharon Flett after the school disco all those years ago was about it. And now my teeth were starting to grey, along with my hair. I hadn’t bought any new clothes for years though I was just about still washing them and myself regularly and not yet p***ing into milk containers and leaving them on windowsills. Then one day I overdosed and landed in the rehab clinic...and met you.'

'Oh Martin.' She held him closer. 'What are you going to do?'
'I don't know Eileen. But you can do better than a bloke in the early stages of liver disease.'
'Suppose I don't want to. Anyway, you've cut down your drinking.'
'As much as I dare. If the doctor should twig any improvement though, the DSS is bound to find out and cut my benefits and no one will want me in the jobs market now.'
'I'll support us both.'
'On your salary as a rehab centre assistant?'
'Just for a while Martin. Until you can train up and do something as well.'
'I honestly don't know if they would let me, let alone if any employer would give me the time of day with a completely blank CV. Don't forget I signed the Set-Aside agreement. I am a man surplus to the nation's requirements'
'Not to my requirements.' She reassured him with a kiss. 'You've got to stop thinking so negatively.'
'If only I could. This is the first time in years that 'Countdown' hasn't been the highlight of my day.'
'I've got you tickets to be part of the studio audience for your birthday' she beamed. 'And the Jeremy Kyle Show. In fact, why don't you sell your story? You wouldn't need the rotten government's money then.'
'I daren't Eileen. I'd get done for breeching the Official Secrets Act plus I'd have to pay back every penny I've ever had. No newspaper is going to pay that sort of money for my story.'
'We'll think of something' she said. 'This evil scheme needs to be exposed. I wonder how many of our clients at the rehab clinic have also signed it.'
'You mustn't even think about it pet. I shouldn't have told you. I just couldn't help myself. I'm so happy to have you in my life. I never thought I'd find someone who didn't mind my pigeon chest. Sharon Flett was very cruel when she felt under my shirt after the school disco.'
'I hope she dies a very lonely old woman' said Eileen.
'So do I.' said Martin 'Just thinking about her makes me need another beer'.

They married two years later in the Hospice as Martin's liver disease finally turned to cancer and set about claiming him. Eileen was devastated when her first task as a new bride was to bury him and, her second, to clear out his flat to give back to the council.
Unable to face returning to work at the rehab clinic for many months, Eileen signed off with depression. One day she idly started sifting through a box of Martin's personal papers and found that he had kept a journal of his life from the day he signed up to the 'Set Aside' scheme to the final days before entering the Hospice. She began typing it up and editing it before submitting it to a publisher. Three rejections and a year later she finally received an acceptance from a Misery Memoir publisher and Martin's journal was published.

'Set Aside' quickly became a publishing sensation and while the current government blamed John Major's government, they were at a loss to explain why the Set-Aside scheme continued to this day, unquestioned and unchallenged, and apparently still accepting new recruits with the addition of an obesity box as a career option for the long-term unemployed.
Eileen found herself invited onto the talk show circuit and received more than a few funny phone calls late at night, threatening her, though whether this was from nutty members of the public or MI5, she wasn't sure and changed her number regularly. She also lost her job at the rehab clinic as a result of all the publicity and trying to counsel clients into admitting they had signed up to the Set-Aside Scheme, which apparently counted as 'political coercion' which amounted to 'gross misconduct.' She considered going to Employment Tribunal to get it back, but was doing well enough out of the book and the whole incredible story as it was. In time, she gave up her own council flat for someone who needed it more and moved to a detached Victorian house in the leafier suburbs, treating herself to a canary yellow Alfa Romeo and planting an orchard in her beloved Martin's memory in the garden.

A year later, the day before Eileen was due to discuss selling the film rights for the book with an option to play herself, she was found slumped dead on her living room settee by her housekeeper. Alcohol poisoning. A shock in more ways than one as the housekeeper had previously never observed more than an occasional bottle of wine about the place and knew Eileen's strong views about excess, having spent her working life observing its devastation every day as well as what it did to Martin.
No further word was heard about the 'Set Aside' scheme, though statisticians noted the death rate amongst alcoholics in their 40s and 50s reached an inexplicably high spike over the following 24 months. Supermarket discounting was blamed.

By L King 2011
Copyright asserted by author.

Devotion

When I was 19 I often popped into the local hospital on my way home from work to visit my dying Great Aunt Alice. She slept a great deal so it was not unusual to have to wait twenty minutes or so for her to wake up and realise I was there so I always took a book with me. She was in an open ward with about five other beds and one night I noticed there was a new addition to the ward in the bed in the corner by the window.

Almost spectral in appearance with protruding collar bones, sparse white hair stuck out in all directions, a sunken leathery complexion and no teeth, the ravages of time had evidently been particularly unkind to her. However it was her screaming fits which attracted the most attention as she would scream and flail her bony limbs around kicking all her bedclothes onto the floor revealing herself at regular intervals, at which point I had to turn away, wondering how on earth my Great Aunt could sleep through it all, though when my Great Aunt finally awoke, she complained about the new incumbent and opined she ought to be in another place, not the hospital.

One evening the noisy mad woman was up to her usual antics, with world-weary nurses attending to replace the bedclothes and tuck her in for the umpteenth time.

My Great Aunt sighed equally world-wearedly. Much to my surprise a dapper-looking elderly man then rounded the corner into the ward. Immaculately dressed in a 1940s style woolen coat and turn-ups, replete with trilby hat and well trimmed moustache, he made straight for the bed in the corner with his bunch of carnations. The mad woman stared at him without a flicker of recognition as he laid them on her bedside table, sat down beside her and took her hand. He started talking to her in a low voice as if sharing endearments. She said nothing, except to hold his gaze and lay utterly still, as if completely at peace. Eventually and reluctantly he got up and his last sentence to her after he kissed her was completely and heartbreakingly audible. 'You're all the world to me, Elsie'

Minutes after he left she reverted back into a crazed swearing wailing banshee, scarcely human.

I found myself astonished at his devotion at the time, but over the years I have come to be more and more touched by the memory.

At around the same time I remember reading a local news article where a gentleman in his 80s who had lost his wife shortly after their golden wedding anniversary was asked if he had any regrets.

'Yes', he replied. 'We weren't together for long enough.'

Chasing the Dragon

A colleague mentioned that he'd heard Dragon's Den is planning to launch a new spin-off series which sounded astonishingly like the programme idea which I had submitted to the programme, its producer and the BBC Factual Entertainment Treatments department within days about five months ago but regarding which I have never received so much as an acknowledgement from any of them in return (how ill-mannered the BBC have become towards their licence-fee paying viewers these days!).

Trusting that this idea was not the last of my 'adult prodigy' moments, I decided that I may as well publish it in the public domain here so we can all have fun watching any new DD spin-off series like hawks (and I have several hundred witnesses should I need them!)

As I told the Beeb, I have been an avid fan from series one.

However even the most avid fan can start to get restless after eight series. My idea then, was to have a new series, possibly entitled; 'Make Your Own Dragon'; where various Dragons mentor various budding entrepreneurs with bright idea from conception to inception to execution, encompassing all the stages in-between which we are never normally party to such as design, patenting, business plan, prototype, market research, tooling up, production, distribution, marketing, sales - the lot! The entertainment value would of course arise from the fact that like Property Ladder, participants could have the best free expert advice there is, they still wouldn't necessarily take it, cue for some pratfalls!

First I applied to Dragon's Den to be a participant in the current format series, to pitch the next series! Then I wrote to the producer of Dragon's Den and also the BBC Factual Entertainment Treatment Department with similar written pitches to enhance my chances and hopefully circumvent that PA on the make who is bound to lurk in at least one such office.

In return for my series idea, which I was willing to pitch in the current series as a pitch as an added twist, all I asked was that I got to be the first participant in the new series with my educational idea to revolutionise university education, being as the current format was not suitable for my purposes (for individuals with pre-existing products and businesses, rather than for concepts), and I needed a vehicle to put it in the public eye as a good idea and my idea, if nothing else, in order to get me through the doors I need to get through to take it further.

But Dragon's Den open sesame or not, I continue chipping away at other means to my ends in the hope that I can still make something of my educational idea. A decent living would be nice for starters.

Bye bye baby

It is nice to see that being child-free has become somewhat fashionable these days and we are no longer regarded as selfish freaks for not wanting to play maidservant to a demanding little emperor/princess for 20 years (up to 40 now, what with rising tuition fees and not being able to get on the housing ladder to fly the nest).

Not that child-freedom was a deliberate choice on my part. More an absence of desire and the right circumstances to even consider it (and I was never going to go it alone).

I knew from an early age that I simply didn't have the energy to work AND raise a child. It was one or the other, and challenge enough to get myself up and out the house every morning, let alone a bunch of little people. Yet today's economic situation virtually dictates that unless unusually well-off, both parents have to work full-time to pay the mortgage and run themselves ragged 24/7, too exhausted for each other at the end of the day, not least after that quality half-hour with the kiddiwinks before bedtime.

A negative experience of childhood at the mercy of warring parents, (despite my mother being lucky enough to be able to stay home in the days where one mortgage payer was just about enough), similarly left me reluctant to inflict the indignities of childhood on anyone else. I didn't take kindly to being a child myself and couldn't wait to put the ghastly experience behind me.

Notwithstanding, babies do suffer from that rather serious drawback of not being furry. Button-cute kittens I know my way around (ears, chin, chest tickle) and can love at first sight, but a pink fleshy baby is another thing. A pink fleshy baby is more akin to a mysterious little alien in my arms that I fret about holding correctly and panic about detecting leakage from, at one end or the other. I know I am always terribly relieved to hand them back anyway, and even more relieved when they turn at least two and I can actually talk to and interact with them!

How babies have convinced so many parents to have them and spend all their money on them in return for little thanks that I can see is anyone's guess, though working in further education, I suppose I should be grateful that they evidently have some great PR company somewhere working on their behalf.

But will I be lonely in my old age? Judging from the number of lovingly-neglected youngsters seeking adult mentors I seem to keep encountering, I think not. I could very well still end up as someone's beloved 'Great Aunt Agatha' if by informal adoption, rather than blood. And as I often joke, I actually think there's a layer of respect and emotional intimacy you can have with someone who's never changed your nappy. Sometimes parents are just too close for comfort.

Junkies

I know exactly how my mother is going to die. One day she is going to be found dead, prey to the suffocating fall of one of her many binbags full of unworn clothes with the tags still on.

My mother is a war baby who grew up with a single doll and about three dresses. She's been making up for it ever since! Unfortunately she has no concept of quality. Any old cut-price or sweat shop chain creation will do, preferably as long as it's her favourite colour, mauve. Nearly everything she possesses hangs badly and she hasn't a tailored item to her name. Nor has she thrown away a single garment since she married my father and whole wardrobes full of 1970s and 80s jumpers in clashing primary colours and geometric designs groan vying for space. My father has about three inches of wardrobe space for his clothes. Luckily for my mother, he'd be quite happy to wear the same three suits for bonfires, holidays and outings until he dies as he hoards other things.

Meantime, what do you buy the woman who has everything for her birthday? Even more clothes she will never wear? Even more jewellery to gather dust or books to be buried under piles of paper (even the ones I feature in and which she professed to want copies of)?

I ended up plumping for a pair of luxury fleece-lined house boot slippers with non-slip soles that she would never buy herself in a million years, but will be sure to wear until they turn to holes - in the garden too no doubt. And a glasses case with her name embossed on it in large mauve lettering (she and my father are forever putting on each others' glasses by mistake), which I also know she will use.

But every birthday and Christmas is a struggle to think of something suitable which won't end up under a mountain of clothes or newspapers (my father's perversion) or shoved at the back of a cupboard.

I am so glad the hoarding has skipped a generation as it drives me nuts every time I visit and causes my parents to be permanently at each others' throats accusing each other of losing things. One more reason to remain child-free methinks.

My Shoes Blues

Medical advice has it that homo sapiens are supposed to walk 10,000 steps a day for optimum health.

You try walking more than 100 steps in most women's shoes and feel those heel and toe blisters start forming, shortly followed by bunions, ankle spurs, aching contracted tendons and hammer toes, depending on what style of high fashion pointy-toed torture implement you have selected purporting to be in your size.

Small wonder then that even Posh Becks discards her six-inch heels to live in trainers the moment the camera bulbs cease flashing and she steps off the red carpet. Despite this, her feet are now clearly deformed with her toes trying to point inwards as unphotoshopped photographs demonstrate.

Even 'flats' are little more than 'toe covers' nowadays, providing little or no foot support, but just enough coverage to still ensure blisters.
Kitten heels are the highest I can personally tolerate, and even taking those off is akin to walking on velvet after a few hours.
Luckily I am naturally 5'10", so don't need shoes to give me height, but I do sympathise with those women who do.

My distant cousin Margaret-Doreen was similarly tall and a size 7 back in WWII. A combination of shame at being a size women weren't supposed to be in those dainty days, plus the sheer paucity of female shoes in that size led her to cram her feet into size 5's and even 4's.

In her 70s and 80s, she enjoyed near-perfect health compared to her multi-ailing contemporaries, except for her feet, which became so crippled, she could scarcely walk and she spent hundreds of pounds on both chiropodists and various orthopaedic shoes trying to find a wearable pair, preferably offering some relief.

I look at young women these days and wonder if they have a clue what trouble they are storing up for themselves by insisting on the Western equivalent of foot-binding in their determination to suffer for fashion. Or is it for the scruffy young men who wouldn't go to nearly those sartorial lengths for them?

And let's not mention the stars who have started having bits of bone shaved off their feet to fit their shoes - despite having the money to have shoes made to fit them!

Now call me strange, but I've always taken the radical view that shoes should be made to fit feet, not our feet forged to fit shoes.
The irony is that most female shoes are not even as glamorous as they used to be, lacking in both originality and wow factor and looking like a mere three designers probably design them all.

Then again, any shoes requiring the multitude of 'foot rescue' gel pad inserts which have sprung up in order to be tolerated are asking for trouble and should remain firmly on the shelf until someone comes up with the revolutionary concept of both sexy and sensible in the same shoe.
I was recently amused to see disposable 'Rollasole' shoes in pink and silver appear in my local Superdrug for that party girl, who can't walk a step further in her foot griddles, but is still far from home, and even more amused to hear they had won a Design award for coming up with a solution to a problem that shouldn’t by rights exist.

My own shoe blues continue, bar a pair of bright Red microfibre early 'footglove' Mary Janes circa 1995 M&S, which continue to attract admiring comments and glances on the rare occasions I get them out, for fear of wearing them out, (the worn through companion pairs in sensible Navy and Black having being consigned to the bin long ago).

Before fashion goes any further leaving us needing blacksmiths to shoe us rather than shoe shops, I therefore throw down the gauntlet to any shoe designers, manufacturers and orthopaedic specialists who may be reading - let's work together and come up with the perfect female shoes. I have lots of ideas and am willing to split any profits we make.

Meantime how to walk 10,000 steps a day, even in a pair of Clarks (not as sensible as they used to be), whilst musing why slippers are called 'slippers'.

The Rise of the Nihilistic Drinker

Working in universities for the last 14 years, I am no stranger to the alarming new trend, particularly among female students of 'pre-loading' - ie tanking themselves up on cheap supermarket booze, often in the form of shared 'dirty pint' cocktails containing everything except toilet cleaner before they go out in order to save money on getting paralytic in clubs. Three recently nearly ended up beneath my car wheels indeed as they drunkenly barged into the road arm-in-arm in front of me without even looking, but trashily dressed to the nines as they tottered uncertainly to whatever club they were heading for. It was 5.30pm in the evening.

This practice has become so endemic now that persuading them it is an extremely dangerous thing to do and actually they are not immortal has become a real challenge, notwithstanding the number who end up rounding the evening off with a pumped stomach in A&E or getting mugged or worse, yet still manage to shrug it off as 'a bad night' and carry on regardless. Far from having any shame attached, bragging about their drunken exploits has become de rigeur, almost a competitive sport.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is that many of these youngsters are well-brought up middle-class gals who had ponies and piano lessons and their own en-suite from early childhood with parents who still dote on them. The worst offenders do not necessarily come from underprivileged backgrounds as you might expect. In fact the harder a student has struggled to make it to university, the better-behaved they often are as they value it more and are determined to make the most of their opportunities.

The university I work for is currently running an admirably upfront poster campaign about the dangers of binge-drinking and also how bringing the University into disrepute through their behaviour will result in disciplinary penalties and their parents being informed, not to mention a devalued degree if they destroy the reputation of the establishment We are also working closely with the local Police in this initiative.

I wholeheartedly support this and only wish the government would do more to support such measures through outlawing cheap supermarket booze, banning petrol station sales (which shouldn't be allowed in any case when drinking and driving are illegal) and targeting all the unlicensed one-man bands offering home delivery of cheap booze to student homes at any time of the day or night, so students do not even need to leave their homes!

This would also lend valuable support to our struggling pubs and off-licences, where more civilised drinking can be promoted in a safer environment.

I know this would invariably lead to protestations from those of more modest alcohol consumption who ask why they should also be penalised, but then again if their intake is as modest as they claim, they will still be able to afford it. In addition it is not some proud longstanding tradition that alcohol has been so cheaply and readily available, but a recent development. Fifteen years ago, if you wanted cheap alcohol, you had to embark on a long and inconvenient 'booze cruise' to France with a long shopping list of all your friends' requirements as well before trying to convince Customs it was all for personal consumption, thus risking confiscation along the way, and supermarkets did not sell alcohol on a Sunday as their licence did not permit, let alone at much less than the local 'offy'

Another measure I would like to see which would not affect more moderate drinkers would be to fine people who ended up in A&E through pre-loading and speed drinking £500 a time as a deterrent. Being 'drunk and disorderly' is still technically an offence after all, as is 'wasting Police time' when the Police have to escort them there (it is apparently too risky to slam them in the cells overnight to sleep it off any more lest they die in custody via their own vomit or not being examined for concussion and alcohol poisoning).

Crueller commentators have suggested that nihilistic drinking is just the latest manifestation of Darwinism. I like to hope this is being disingenuous.

However it seems the following fate at least could be awaiting many young binge drinkers further down the line.

Elitism and the 9-5

The other day I heard a student say to her friend disparagingly in the Student Union shop 'I don't want to end up in some cr*ppy 9-5 job.'

I half sympathised, half thought 'Well what does she think most jobs are? Thrill-a-minute white water rafting perhaps? And that's supposing the young madam's lucky enough to find more than a 9-1 when she graduates!' It was tempting to let on I'd overheard her, but who was I to rain on her parade that not only are most jobs 9-5, but most are getting duller and more hamstrung by red tape and other people's obstructions, not to mention lack of care for colleagues and customers alike by the minute?

Most, worse still, are victims of creeping corporatisation, if not the recession.
Corporatisation, that insidious process whereby every last ounce of creativity, humanity and job satisfaction is extracted from a role to leave a paid automaton in corporate livery who undertakes the corporation's bidding without question or contribution, taking away only a pay packet and an anti-depressant prescription. Net result: poor value on both sides it seems to me, and nothing that benefits humankind one iota (which you'd be forgiven for assuming this whole work/benefit thing was for).

Not that I should complain on a personal level as my department is probably as good as it gets. We all like each other, pitch in to help, bring in cake on our birthdays, use deodorant, acknowledge each other as human beings and do a pretty darn good job even if we say so ourselves. Though of course a Sword of Damocles is seldom far away these days and our department is no exception, try as we might to answer our calls within 5 rings and reply to every e-mail within 24 hrs in compliance with our declared 'customer charter' - well harder than any other department, it seems.

One day we shall remember these halcyon days before the corporeal hand of corporatism (not to be confused with capitalism) turned us all into a faceless One-Stop shop of the living dead, twice removed from our customers and rendered too scared to print a document on the wrong branded stationary, or take a day off, lest we lose our jobs.

What I should have said to the sneering girl in the student shop is; 'So, what is your big plan for the future to bypass the 9-5 then, and can I join you?'

Exercising Democracy

On Saturday I joined several hundred of my fellow Oxford citizens in a march to save our libraries, our youth clubs, our swimming pools, our public toilets and our disabled and elderly services.

It felt like an important place to be.

Being Oxford, it was more a saunter than a march and a samba band and a jazz band kept the atmosphere light as did the presence of many teenagers, toddlers and 'mutts against the cuts'. Police presence seemed to consist of two on foot with an accompanying Police van, and apart from a bit of traffic stopping, we gave them little to do and certainly no 'kettling' to get their teeth into, though one took lots of photographs of us with a long lens camera when we reached Bonn Square. If anything they should have joined us though, being as 10,000 Police countrywide are also for the chop!

It was highly emotional, if not highly-charged. There is nothing quite like being part of a throng embodying the true sense of community and human solidarity to bring a lump to the throat. Few better examples of humanity at its best.

As we passed by the old Queens College study window of Jeremy Bentham in The High chanting 'They say cut-back, we say fight-back!', I wondered what Mr Bentham would have made of these regressive times - these times which threaten to reverse every civil and democratic advance he ever advocated and so many others subsequently fought and occasionally died for.

My thoughts were interrupted by a young Chinese tourist stopping me to put his arm round my shoulders whilst his friend took a photograph of us sharing my placard bearing the legend 'Don't Let Councillors Cook The Books!'

He disappeared again as I wondered what sort of holiday snap he had intended and what he was going to tell his folks back home about these strange Oxford people trying to save their basic services.

Perhaps they would have a good laugh that we are evidently on the road to becoming a third world country while China's economy is on the up!

Under the Bonnet of the Bonnet Drama

This year sees the 40th anniversary of the BBC's biggest international success story - The Onedin Line, the first series they sold worldwide and which is still big in the former Yugoslavia and selling as a DVD box set 40 years later.

Following the fortunes of a mid-19th century Liverpool shipping dynasty as steam ships aka 'floating kettles' begin to overtake sailing ships, this mix of pithy social commentary with riveting storyline devised by former real-life seaman Cyril Abraham kept viewers hooked for ten years from 1971 and formed the seminal Sunday night backdrop of my early childhood with its unforgettable theme tune of Khatchaturian's 'Spartacus'. Watching a couple of series again recently, it has lost none of its power to mesmerise, even if the stock storm footage and sets seem a little more obvious to the more sophisticated eye (and television set).

Prior to The Onedin Line, vicars were previously shocked when entire congregations stayed in to watch The Forsyte Saga every Sunday night in the late 60s and even altered their service patterns to fit in with it.

Since then, Poldark, Upstairs Downstairs, various Dickens, Austen and Conan Doyle adaptations and a myriad of other costume dramas, epic and not so epic, have all taken their turn to enthral us with their vanished values and worlds in our increasingly cynical and moral compassless times.

I for one have relished them all except for some appalling and highly unnecessary remakes of The Forsyte Saga, Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House and David Copperfield, among others.
In fact the one thing which annoys me most about costume dramas are the constant re-makes of the same dozen or so most popular titles when there are so many classic books out there which have never even been adapted. George Eliot for example has often been considered too challenging but when the risk was taken and 'Middlemarch' was produced, it was a triumph! Ditto Elizabeth Gaskell's 'Cranford' though perhaps Anthony Trollope is a slightly more acquired taste with his political 'The Way We Live Now' but I feel sure his work would have built a significant following had they taken a risk with more of his books.
'Lark Rise to Candleford' took the novel approach of using up the material from Flora Thompson's original book fairly quickly and then writing lots of new stories using the same characters to spin out half a dozen series. With mixed results I may say, though it still proved as addictive as crack cocaine and a runaway success commercially.

'Downton Abbey' albeit not based on a classic but written by the very much still alive, Julian Fellowes, has proven that our appetite for period drama remains as voracious as ever, critical as we may be that historical details are not as scrupulously poured over as in the past to leave the odd TV aerial in shot in 1913. We may prefer a classless society in real life, but that doesn't necessarily make for good or textural telly.

Another function such dramas undoubtedly serve is to remind us of our Britishness in a modern world where our national identity is increasingly blurred. Which is not to condone the less desirable aspects we have shed, more acknowledge that plenty was also lost which was worth retaining and celebrating such as good manners, concern for one another, community, backbone, moral turpitude and having both a love and a duty to one's country. And as the writer Julian Fellowes points out, not all Lords of the Manor were obnoxious users of the peasantry, many were good and benevolent employers who provided work for the majority of their villages and sponsored welfare and education for the children of their workers, even though this was also in their interests if they wished to run a thriving estate.

The original Upstairs Downstairs and The Onedin Line are notable for how much actual history they wove into their storylines, both social and national, so that viewers were educated as they were alternately affected and entertained by watching their favourite characters go through various difficulties of history and formed more understanding of how their society had evolved.
Studying TV costume drama from the 70s in particular, it seemed that every series had a killer theme tune, dramatic stories, wonderful costumes and memorable characters.

Pundits profess great surprise that the appetite for costume drama remains as unabated as ever But is it really so strange that as old certainties are swept away and challenged, we are more likely to cling on to any vestige of the past and familiar? The past may have been muddy, cold, smelly and often hungry with raging toothache in real life, but the costumes are still wonderful, the architecture beautiful, the moral dilemmas not a million miles from our own and we have the luxury of enjoying top notch storytelling in our cosy centrally-heated homes.

Confessions of a Failed Hippy

Every Christmas sees Oxford Town Hall host a Green Fair, an affair which is part joy, part ordeal, but always compulsive to me. Seeing the stalls on whale, planet and human saving in the smaller halls manned by those gaunt earnest atheist and Quaker faces I know so well, I feel at home and yet also a stranger.
Growing up, this was my world and yet here I am now estranged from it. I want to support all this goodness and worthiness and be a better Pedestrian or Agricprop yet feel suspicious as to how accurate and impartial the information on planetary abuses is provided by each stall, though why I should feel suspicious of small concerns who stand to make little or no money out of their views opposing the activities of (usually) global corporations making pots of the stuff perturbs me. Why should the stallholders' agenda be any more sinister? If they had no agenda, perhaps they wouldn't be there, wouldn't care. But are they there because they truly care about these things or because they need a cause?
Are there so many Atheists and Humanists into Veganism because they do not believe in God/the afterlife and therefore seek to live as long as possible through enhanced nutrition? Why are they almost messianic about wishing to convert others? Why have I never been able to contemplate dating one, despite sharing so many concerns about health, animal and planetary welfare?
Disturbing thoughts swirl around my head. Like women's rights meaning there's an unspoken edict you have to believe in the whole package including abortion-on-demand, there is an overriding sense that an alternative or 'thinking' person has to buy into the whole ideological package if they are not to compromise their moral integrity - you can't simply eat the lentils and let the Whales die or be a car owner who happens to cycle a bit. It's all or nothing. A total inner climate change.
One minute I am overwhelmed by a wave of goodness and the tie dye-clad beatniks of East Oxford out in force and the next I find myself a tad breathless and queasy. In the main hall, my impulse is to buy the rough-hewn handicrafts because I'm supporting something good, but the design snob side of my brain quickly cuts in with a 'No, those misshapen bowls are overpriced, poorly made and of no use to man or beast!', refusing to let me buy anything which is not (in William Morris's words) both 'useful and beautiful.'
I feel like a strange hybrid trapped between two worlds, the ideological and the conventional. It was a lifelong ambition to be normal and break away from the hair shirt childhood of constant ridicule where chocolate was a once-a-year Easter treat and Vegan parents sent rambling angst-ridden letters to Vegan Views asking what should they do about their son or daughter's school egg and spoon race, as REAL eggs were being proposed and the school would not countenance substitutes, but now I'm in my childhood dream position of being able to eat marshmallows (and even eggs) for breakfast, lunch and dinner, they've somehow lost their appeal.
Then again my parents were a strange mix of 50s conservatism and hippyish ideals, particularly the veganism and atheism, but minus the drugs and sleeping around, and even in my father's case - the kaftan or flares - he's always worn a suit all his life, rain, shine, and holiday alike. My mother went to India to find herself in the mid-60s and wore a Shalwar Kameez to marry my father before promptly packing all hint of exoticism in a studded blanket box.
I espy 'Spinning Jenny' on the corner stall sporting unbleached cotton harem pants and hand-beaded top selling her expensive Indian rugs for which she makes half a dozen trips a year to India, and spends the rest of her weekends driving around the country in a transit to hold stalls at various Green Fairs where her unfettered twin daughters run amok in their more-practical tumble wear patchwork outfits.
I smile in my evilly-dyed normal clothes, wondering how I would come out in an audit of who actually lived the lowest carbon-impact life, taking into account that I was raised a Vegan from birth, am child-free. inhabit low-impact housing, wear my clothes until irrepairable, seldom fly and didn't drive until 33.
Ultimately though, perhaps the moral unrest the yearly Green Fair wreaks on my soul has a simpler explanation, guilt. I could do MORE to save my fellow citizens and planet, as oppose to just finding more excuses not to, I could try harder not to betray my roots, I could try harder to like Fairtrade chocolate.

And at least idealism is more fashionable and comfortable now.

The smugness would surely be worth it.

The Body in the Library? The Body IS the Library!

In no sense does the council tax payer get the impression that 20 out of 43 Libraries are to be axed by cash-strapped Oxfordshire County Council as a LAST resort, rather than a first resort. Where is that schedule of less drastic options they have considered/rejected and why isn't it on transparent public display? Does it bear any relation to the 100 suggestions to cut council spending without cutting services in this article of two years ago, at least half of which seem eminently sensible? Nor do we see any leading councillors offering to take a pay cut, even as a public gesture to show they care/we really are 'all in this together', if times are so genuinely tough.

And more than one commentator in the local press has pointed out that these cuts will actually save very little money in real terms as our Libraries are pretty economical to run in the first place with many smaller branches already open for reduced hours. In addition they apparently cost less than 0.5% of the council's revenue budget!

How too does a 4.4% cut in funding from central government equate to an almost 50% cut in libraries and other council services? Now my maths may not be my strongest suit, but even I smell a rat here, even larger than a County Council passing heftier cuts onto their customers to make a political point/cream off some profit and blame the government.

A colleague with a longer memory than my own reminded me this week that if you think about it, we've seen nearly 30 years of public assets being stripped or sold off by councils to be privatised, so that nearly every utility, building and even road bridge is now owned by someone else, not unusually an offshore or foreign concern. This selling off of Britain has left many councils with very little left to sell off when they want to raise a bit of short-term cash. They have now centralised their own services to a large degree, flogging off any buildings/brownfield sites created, disposed of most of their council housing stock, so what do they have left?

Why those useless libraries, day centres and youth clubs cluttering up the county obviously. And you don't want too many of them in a property hotspot like Oxfordshire. Ok, so it might bring you below the legal minimum service standard you are obliged to provide in return for people's council tax, but maybe that's a risk worth taking. How many people have the resources the commitment and the time to sue after all? Especially when hit with so many outrages to protest against all at once. Most people will just mouth off for a while and then eventually accept the new status quo. Until it's time to break the news to them of the next cuts planned...

Who Do Bankers Think They Are?

'If I don't get a seven figure bonus this year, I'm emigrating' I threatened my boss.

He laughed.

So I rang Prime Minister David Cameron's Office and repeated my threat, emphasising how ruinous to the economic recovery my departure would be if this country were not prepared to renumerate the top rate to the top people.

Ok, so I didn't really phone David Cameron's office, but you get the picture.

How come bankers can hold this country to ransom, and not even over their obscene salaries, but their obscene BONUSES? And believe it or not, the actual industry term is 'compensation' (???????)

Why do the rest of we employees (most of whom do not even receive bonuses) lack this snake-like mesmerism over our government to persuade them that our workaday mediocrity is actually genius in disguise so that they live in terror of us hightailing our talents elsewhere?

If ALL banks were capped by the government at the £2,500 max per banker pledged by the LibDem government when they came to power, where are they all going to go in protest? There are only so many top banking jobs abroad paying even more, and other countries may actually follow suit if they see Britain taking a firm stand as many can no more afford it than we can in a worldwide recession. Plus countries such as Dubai are on the edge of bankruptcy in their own right, having been constructed on a house of cards known as debt. Greece has already toppled over the edge. Spain is teetering. Japan and China will soon get over the novelty of their newfound wealth and realise they don't have to pay these a-holes as much as they think.

I firmly suspect if we lost half, we wouldn't even notice, so they don't scare me with their threats to emigrate. And let's not forget they're the ones who got the banks into the mess they're in, forcing us to bail them out in the first place, so they should be incurring performance penalties and paying US compensation, not to mention actually acting in our interests!

Why would we need people at the top of the financial pyramid who regard our savings as casino chips? This was never the way banks used to behave before they watched 'Wall Street' and decided it was a documentary. They used to be solid institutions we all trusted and we were rewarded with stability and predictable steady growth in return. Old fashioned things known as 'Codes of Conduct' also kept them in check.

Hardly thrilling, but then losing your hard-earned pension or life savings is hardly thrilling to the victim, yet from the 1994 Lloyds name scandal to today, it seems not a fig has been learned. Or earned by these wondrous winged beings in charge of our piggy banks.

I remember when 9/11 happened in 2001, a financial expert on TV predicted the whole world would suffer at the loss of at least 1500 top people in the financial world. Not a word more did I ever hear on the subject, so perhaps the loss was entirely personal, to their friends and families, rather than the global economy.

Prime Minister David Cameron is giving me £2m!

According to the following e-mail found in my Junk box. Thank goodness I saw it in time, I could easily have missed out!

OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER
TREASURY AND MINISTER FOR CIVIL SERVICE,
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM.

Our ref: ATM/13470/IDR
Your ref:...Date: 3/1/2011

IMMEDIATE PAYMENT NOTIFICATION

I am Hon David Cameron PM,Prime Minister British Government. This letter is to officially inform you that (ATM Card Number 0480001017665450) has been accredited in your favor. Your Personal Identification Number is 044.The VISA Card Value is £2,000,000.00(Two Million, Great British Pounds Sterling).

This office will send to you an Visa/ATM CARD that you will use to withdraw your funds in any Automated Teller Machine (ATM) CENTER or Visa card outlet in the world with a maximum of £5000 GBP daily.Further more,You will be required to re-confirm the following information to enable Cheryl Gillan Secretary of State for Foreign and Common wealth Affairs. begin in processing of your VISA CARD.

(1)Full names: (2)Address: (3)Country: (4)Nationality: (5)Phone : (6)Age:
(7)Occupation: (8) Post Codes

Forward Reply To: directgov1@live.hk

TAKE NOTICE: That you are warned to stop further communications with any other person(s) or office(s) different from the staff of the State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs to avoid hitches in receiving your payment.

You are to choose on the Options of delivery of your ATM Card:
1) DELIVERY BY DHL COMPANY
2) BANK TRANSFER

Regards,

Rt Hon David Cameron PM
Prime Minister.

Oo-er, seems I may have broken the conditions in telling you all - I was just SO excited! He's not even asking for my bank details so it must be genuine.

His private e-mail address appears to be andressab@certel.com.br, but I suppose that's hardly surprising as he'd be inundated if he was david.cameron@number10.org or something.

Happy New Year to you too Dave! Thanks. I'll never pen a critical posting of your draconian Big Brother policies again. You've found the price for my vote.

New Year, New Inspiration

Just before Christmas I was snowed in for the weekend and with the buses into town not running I trudged three miles to my local shopping centre through the snow in search of a last Christmas present. I was looking for a book for a friend I was due to have Christmas dinner with, but with just about the worst-stocked and shabbiest WH Smith in the country to hand, specialising mainly in sports and celeb biographies, I despaired of finding anything.

Eventually I found a suitable history book amidst the half dozen titles available on the subject. Then much to my surprise I saw the shop had a whole section devoted to self-help books, among which I saw lurking an intriguing-looking title; 'The Last Lecture' with a cartoon rocket on the cover and claiming to have sold over 3 million copies.

It turned out to be by an American professor who had terminal pancreatic cancer. That doesn't sound very cheerful I thought, but picked it up and leafed through the first chapter despite myself. I was quickly hooked as one of the liveliest, most positive, entertaining and switched on characters ever to jump off a page, jumped out and assailed me with inspiration that my dreams are achievable.

Later I found he was also an internet phenomenon with over 12 million people watching his 'Last Lecture' (traditionally a good-natured conceit aimed at getting the best out of an American Professor in pretending that this is his last ever lecture and what would he share with the world)? Sadly in Professor Pausch's case, it therefore carried extra resonance.

If you have a spare hour and a quarter, I thoroughly recommend watching Randy Pausch in action - I guarantee you will be a changed person afterwards, but in the best way.

I am just hoping discovering him when I did is a good omen for my concept to revolutionise University education in the face of all the recent attacks on it. What better inspiration could I find for that very genre than this gentleman?

The Gardening Classes

When I was a child, garden centres were places where grown ups went which sold plants and perhaps a few seed packets and gardening tools. It was my great delight to be left in the car to read a book while they went in to spend hours poring over boring old plants which grew naturally in the garden anyway didn't they? Why would anyone buy them? A hellishly hot summer slaving in one as a teenager, scarcely able to breathe in the hot greenhouses, let alone work, a tyrannical dragon of a female boss constantly on my back yelling at me by way of training didn't alter my prejudices.
Below is my local garden centre.
Even vaster than it looks with an ample deli and an award-winning organic cafe as well, much of the merchandise is pricier than (and not dissimilar to) Harrods. It has now even diversified into antiques where you can buy barnacle-encrusted pots rescued from 19th century ship wrecks amidst the usual mahogany drop-leaf tables and oil paintings! Gardening has almost become an afterthought. I espied a box of my favourite mint chocolate crisps in the deli. Then I noticed they were £5.50 (twice the price of Waitrose) and promptly resisted, though the 'Traffic Jam' - a jar of jam in three flavours forming the green, orange and red of traffic lights was almost amusing enough to overcome the price tag for. After a few hours marvelling at the seductive uselessness of much of the merchandise on display on a sodden foggy day where we needed somewhere warm and dry to hang out, my friend and I left with a couple of half-price Christmas decorations, having succumbed to hot drinks and slices of exorbitant cake in the cafe.
Sometimes I feel tempted to revisit my teenage workplace to see if it has followed the fashion of putting chaise lounges before Sweet Williams, but I find if I wait long enough, the idea tends to go away again...
However I have got my eye on a rather palatial revolving summerhouse at my local garden centre if ever I win the lottery.

The Poet's Tale

Blogmate Age of Uncertainty has begun an innovative series of podcast interviews, beginning with another blogmate and real-life poet friend, Oliver Gozzard.
Oliver is just about to publish 'The Commuter's Tale', an epic ballad concerning a jaded commuter about to be made redundant from his city job who finds his destiny transformed when he encounters a latter-day Lord Byron (now a rapper) on his train one morning who persuades him to ditch the city for a life of adventure on the high seas!
My contribution was that I helped design the cover, aided by my web designer friend Daniel Hart, (since my photoshopping skills are zero.) Too many poetry books we decided had terrible jackets in the form of abstract blobs or similarly meaningless standard-menu designs, demonstrating no care or imagination on the part of either poet or publisher and virtually condemning the publication to sell no more than a handful of copies, however good.
Oliver himself did not want imagination restricted to the narrative either and has come up with an equally imaginative marketing plan, which means hopefully everyone who's ever commuted or heard of Lord Byron will get to hear about his poetic debut in due course. Watch this space...

Not that I don't retain a sneaking affection for the cheesier draft image V1.

Bonfire of the Humanities?

'Widening Participation', 'Inclusivity', 'Equality and Diversity', 'Student Experience'.

These are the terms I have to conjure with every day of my working life within a University.

Yet what when the 'student experience' we are trying to provide is undercut by a Government determined to triple tuition fees, close libraries and youth clubs and continue selling off playing fields?

What if this leads to a nation where the Arts and Humanities become a luxury as no one can afford to anticipate a degree where they do not have the highest chance of employment at the end, whilst such under-funded departments are simultaneously cut and shut owing to lack of demand?

Is this not a kind of 'apartheid' on those who can afford it least, not to mention our national cultural life and riches in the form of future historians, philosophers, latin scholars, writers, sociologists and artists? As for talk of a 'graduate tax', do graduates not already pay greater income tax by dint of winning the better-paid jobs? Besides which, why would graduates wish to pay back many more times the cost of (even an inflated) student loan until they die?

As it is, many young people cannot afford to leave home, leading to the so-called 'boomerang generation', still going back to Mum and Dad throughout their 20s and even 30s. 37 is now the average age at which an individual first gets onto the property ladder, and even then, often only because they have been subsidised by their families in order that they can stretch to it.

Small wonder we are seeing longer delays before marriage and reproduction take place to the point that some women who might have wanted children are missing the boat altogether and the middle class are being squeezed the most in trying to pay all their bills and bring in two salaries to cover the mortgage as well as afford children, childcare and pay back their tuition fees.

I believe we are coming to a stage where we have to ask ourselves if society is not for people, then who or what, is it for?

This society is increasingly pricing itself out of the market for many, without even offering us security and sufficiency of employment, yet it expects us to carry on spending as if there is no tomorrow.

This government has to date given all the appearance of two overgrown schoolboys playing with a large train set and saying to one another 'I wonder what would happen if we closed this station' or 'I wonder what would happen if we tripled the fares on this train?' with the disinterested fascination of two boys who fail to notice the figurines are real and who have every expectation of a consequence-free playtime.

Oxford's BIG idea - Let's close the libraries!

'Give us your your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.' And take away their libraries!

A beacon is being extinguished, a golden door closed.

Goodbye free literacy for the masses and one of the last public spaces available to interact in with no pressure to spend money, because hey, we've paid for it through our taxes.

The barbarians are well and truly at the gates.

And let's not mention the embarrassing detail that Oxford is simultaneously bidding to be crowned UNESCO's world book capital in 2014

I hereby reproduce the leaked plans to close several of our libraries unless we useless citizens who obviously don't need day jobs put qualified Librarians out of their day jobs by undertaking to run the threatened libraries ourselves, and in community centres and doctor's surgeries rather than the intended premises, which will doubtless be sold off to the nearest greedy developer. Not even the carrot of a discount in council tax offered for an essential public service removed or reduced.

Big Society Proposals for Oxfordshire Libraries

Oxfordshire County Council is asking local communities to come up with innovative ideas to run their local libraries as it proposes to cease funding 20 of the 43 facilities that currently operate in the county, with possible further changes to service levels in future years.

Following the Government's Spending Review and cuts in funding to local authorities, Oxfordshire County Council currently calculates that it will have to save around £155m up to 2015. These savings will need to be made across all of its services and the library service is one of the areas that will have to contribute to making that saving. The council is already on target to make £35m of savings in 2010/11 with a pay freeze and driving down the costs of contracts with suppliers contributing to this.

What is the vision for the future of libraries?

Proposals have been formulated around a clear vision of providing library hubs centred on key areas of population in Oxfordshire with a quality support network of mobile library services and an extension of the library loan service to include e-books and e-audio downloads, so people can get the books they want direct to their home PCs. Residents will continue to be able to go online and order books from an online catalogue. The books can be delivered either to the nearest library hub or to the village/town by the mobile library service for users to collect.

In formulating proposals for a new way forward there has been a strong emphasis on the comparative quality of the public transport links that enable local communities to reach libraries in individual localities and geographical spread. Usage figures have also been considered.

Are these the final proposals?

Details could yet change when more information becomes available on Local Government Settlement Day - the day when all UK councils learn in detail what their grant funding from central Government will be in future years. Oxfordshire County Council receives 65 per cent of its funding from central Government.

Similar proposals elsewhere

Changes to the delivery of library services are also being proposed by councils all over the UK - amongst others, authorities in Gloucestershire, Nottinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Buckinghamshire, Camden and Leeds have recently made proposals for chaThis would see services shaped by community needs and possibly hosted by partner organisations offering space in community buildings such as, children’s centres, community centres, schools and health centres.

Councillor Keith Mitchell, the Leader of Oxfordshire County Council, said: "We have a clear vision to have a quality, core network of libraries based on centres of population. These will still be run by the council and they will be supplemented by mobile libraries.

"In line with the Government's Big Society agenda, we are very keen to hear from local communities and organisations who may wish to take on the running of local libraries and we believe there will be enthusiasm from people who wish to get involved.

"We have agonised over these proposals and I am sure we will agonise some more as our budget position changes when more information on exact funding details is received from Whitehall. However, by announcing the thrust of what we intend at this early stage, we hope that communities have the opportunity to digest and respond to our invitation for them to get involved. I look forward to imaginative ideas coming forward from local people

"Public transport links have made up a large part of our thinking in deciding which libraries we should continue funding. Such links are far better in some areas of Oxfordshire than others - the city of Oxford being an example.

"Our current network of libraries is based entirely on historical legacy. If we were starting from scratch in setting up a brand new Oxfordshire library service, it would not look like the current structure."

Which libraries will see funding cease?

A total of 82 per cent of library visits take place to the 23 libraries that are currently proposed for continued funding by the county council.

Oxford and Banbury have excellent transport links with a high quality bus service meaning that libraries are very easy to reach. Oxford Central Library is accessible to everyone in the city and it is proposed that opening hours should be extended to include Sundays. Cowley Library is also proposed to remain as part of the county council's network of libraries.

Summertown, Headington, Littlemore, Old Marston and Blackbird Leys in Oxford would see funding discontinued as would Neithrop in Banbury.

Adderbury, Bampton, Benson, Berinsfield, Botley, Charlbury, Chinnor, Deddington, Grove, Kennington, North Leigh, Sonning Common, Stonesfield and Woodcote would also see funding cease with opportunities for the community to take over their running.

When will funding cease?

Funding will be phased out during the 2011/12 financial year although there is no exact timetable at the moment. Any further funding changes will be announed in future financial years.
nge in response to changed financial circumstances following the Government's Spending Review.

Cash to help innovative ideas

In line with the Government's Big Society agenda, Oxfordshire County Council is to set up a pot of money to which local communities can bid for funds to help them take responsibility for any library that the council is seeking to end funding.

Was the word 'vision' ever so violated? Andrew Carnegie would spin in his grave. But if this outrage (sorry, 'vision') can be considered in a world centre of academia, you can bet your bottom dollar, no library will be sacred, so guard your libraries fiercely and use them weekly rather than weakly, while you still have them.

I am sure I am not the only one who practically lived in their local house of treasures (Library) as a child and continues to value them highly as an adult. Don't let this government rob you of these jewels beyond price, these hard-won perks of enlightened democracy that YOU will continue paying for whether you still have them or not.

(quote at top misappropriated from Emma Lazarus' famous 'The New Colossus' used to welcome immigrants through the golden gate by the Statue of Liberty in New York)