top tips for Tuesday

At this vital time in the General Election timetable I've returned from holiday to find that my computer has chosen to go wobbly - I'm sure it was made by a sicialist - and I can't launch Photoshop. My daughter, who - like many children - is the resident computer expert is visiting Granny on the other side of the Fens; so, apart from pics I already have on Photobucket, I'll have to leave you to the tender mercy of Blogger's in-house image hosting program...

Suddenly blogging as the General Election approaches looks much more interesting...and dangerous. In the wake of a report by Iain Dale on a judgement against a Labour blogger sued regarding a comment he left on his site, barrister James Tumbridge (right) posts a gust blog on Ellie Seymour's site on What bloggers need to know about defamation. Watch out for the most thought-provoking conclusion to a blog that I've seen for a long time.

Nick Hillman, Conservative PPC for Cambridge, posts on the meeting to save the city's Strawberry Fair, which has been opposed this year by police on drug-taking and disorder grounds. As a historian he shares his views on the prospect of losing this festival, which began in the early 1970s.

Richard Normington profiles the launch of the Conservative Manifesto, with links to the appropriate parts so you can make up your own mind.

If a picture speaks a thousand words, then this snap taken by Phil Salway of the Coleridge Conservative team in Cambridge, of the Green Party's electoral campaign headquarters in the Alternative Bookshop on the city's Mill Road, speaks volumes about what the Green Party really thinks about the commitments it wants us to take on energy conservation. Be sure to click the link or the pic to go to Andrew Bower's (Cambridge City Council Conservative Candidate) to have a look and read an analysis.

In the US, commentator Michelle Malkin posts on First Lady Michelle Obama's initiative on "youth engagement" in Mexico City, contrasting this with the plight of farmers in Texas (which shares a border with Mexico) "besieged by border violence".

Canadian newspaper website The Gazette looks at the Vatican reaction to Richard Dawkins' and Christopher Hitchins' histrionic plan to have the Pope arrested on his forthcoming State visit to Great Britain in September.

David Appletree of the Jewish Internet Defence Force reproduces a letter from Rabbi Dov Coder complaining to YouTube about hate material posted by David Dukes, notorious antisemite, racist and Ku Klux Klan member...

...while There is nothing British about the BNP looks at a racist group joined by BNP vice-chairman Simon Darby that's hosted by Facebook, a site Appletree warns about repeatedly.

And finally, here's a treat: Open Music Archive, "a collaborative project, initiated by artists Eileen Simpson & Ben White, to source, digitise and distribute out-of-copyright sound recordings. The archive is open for anyone to use and contribute to.".

coast: natural history of a man-made environment

I once wisited The Wash. I was staying with a friend who worked in a hotel in Holbeach, in the South Lincolnshire area of Little Holland, and we drove up to see this seemingly unspoilt area of the Fens.

I say "seemingly" because the Fens compete with the Netherlands as constituting arguably one of the most modified areas in the world. Mostly below sea level, they were once a vast flooded area with bits of land poking up, on which settlements were built: Ely Cathedral in its various forms has been called "the ship of the Fens" for over a thousand years, and it's not a metaphor.

On last night's episode of the BBC2 10-minute documentary season Coast, focussing on The Wash, local archaeologist Maisie Taylor summed up how the Fens have been seen in Britain in the past: "they were wonderful for people who lived here, but for outsiders it was an evil place". Former Professor of History and Head of Trinity College at Cambridge University (and head of the British Red Cross during World War I) G.M. Trevelyan provides a case in point in his 1944 masterpiece English Social History by quoting Elizabethan historian William Camden:

The upper and north part of Cambridgeshire is all over divided into river isles, which all summer long afford a most delightful green prospect, but in winter are almost all laid under water, and in some sort resembling the sea itself. The inhabitants of this and the rest of the fenny country (which reaches 68 miles from the borders of Suffolk to Wainfleet in Lincolnshire) are a sort of people (much like the place) of brutish, uncivilized tempers, envious of all others, whom they call Upland men; and usually walking aloft upon a sort of stilts they all keep the business of grazing, fishing and fowling.

Isolation, however, can have its advantages: I don't know if it's an urban myth that many churchyards dating from medieval times have mounds owing to mass graves dug to inter victims of the Black Death, but most churchyards in the Fens are flat, because they were cut off from the rest of England and often only reachable by boat.

As Trevelyan notes, there had been plans to drain the Fens and make them more widely habitable since Elizabeth (I)'s time, with jealous eyes cast across the North Sea to Holland, whose modern name, Nederland, means "the lowland". It was eventually achieved by Dutchman Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, who was commissioned by King Charles I on the basis of his work in reclaiming parts of Essex from the sea. He oversaw the creation of artificial waterways - from ditches (one runs outside our house) to rivers - to channel water to the Wash, into which water was pumped through a series of windmills, although the job is now done electronically.

One principle Vermuyden insisted on was that large areas of land should not be built on; they might be cultivated (Taylor refers to the Fens in Coast as "a huge growbag"), but they needed to be free from buildings so that they could absorb precipitation, so it's disturbing to learn that politicians who either dont know, or don't care about, this country's history demanding that Cambridgeshire greenbelt land be built on. Some of this land is next to us, and higher than us - even with the fields there, we sometimes get floods: should the soil and grass be replaced by concrete, we'd better buy life-jackets! We were all relieved to hear the Conservatives' plans to scrap national plans and promote local decision-making in the area of house-building, as reported by Richard Normington - not due to party-political considerations, merely because not all of us can swim!

I'm a birdwatcher - albeit not a twitcher, I'm not into ticking boxes - so it was gratifying to see Coast deal with the half-million feathered friends who use The Wash as a stopping-off place each year during long migrations; I was surprised that oystercatchers, one of my favourite birds, sometimes travel from the Arctic to Africa. It was interesting to see how placid the birds were when caught by a cannon-net for purposes of ringing, with ornitholigist Miranda Krestovnikoff explaining that this made the job of the Wash Wader Ringing Group so much easier.

Presenter Mark Horton finished the show by saying that, due to rising sea levels, a decision would have to be made regarding whether to fight for the land around The Wash, or give it up to the sea. Businessman Peter Dawe proposed a controversial Wash tidal barrier in 2008 but it seems to have sunk without trace, although I wouldn't be surprised if it were refloated given that we now have near-idle windfarms that are killing bats and eagles.

If any of you reading this can access the BBC, I thoroughly recommend Coast as a compelling and informative series on the natural history of these islands, which at the moment do not have borders but rather coasts.

top tips for tuesday

The Burke's Corner blogger, in his theological blog More than a Via Media, gives us his reflections on Jesus' last words from the Cross.

Nick Hillman, PPC (Prospective Parliamentary Candidate) for Cambridge, writes about a night spent with Cambridge Street Pastors.

And while we read about the various pronunciations of Ceotibus in Fr Hunwicke's Liturgical Notes...

...Richard Normington, who was lucky enough to attend a comprehensive school in the days when some were allowed to speak Latin, reflects upon a phrase from Tacitus in the imminent General Election.

Two for the price of one from Fr TF's The Hermeneutic of Continuity: click here to read about Richard Dawkins' hate-material about the Pope, comparing Dawkins to another villain who wished to eradicate another religion; quite disturbing given that the Pope will soon visit as a head of state. Alternatively, click the pic to read his blog about an article by an atheist who warns his peers against "Catholic-bashing".

Former British Ambassador Charles Crawford wonders if fans really want to feel like they're entering a boardroom when they go to watch the football...

While finally, on a slightly less urban note: a proposal for a city-farm in the south of Cambridge, from the Coleridge Conservative Action Team blog.

so why was she in court?

"If you have a body...then it has to be tested in court."

That's what Anne Widdecombe said on TV earlier this week on another subject, but it provides a perfect answer to the question Caroline Gammell posed in the Telegraph: Why was Kay Gilderdale in court charged with attempted murder?

A month after the Director of Public Prosecutions issued guidelines on assisted suicide that SPUC said "legally downgrade the right to life of disabled or terminally-ill people", Kay Gilderdale's daughter Lynn - who had chronic myalgic encepalopathy (ME or chronic fatigue syndrome - took an overdose of her prescribed morphine, at which point Gilderdale mater then fed her sleeping-pills and antidepressants and injected air into her veins. She was cleared by a jury on Monday 25 January.

My first reaction to the headline was to wonder why the woman might not be in court for attempted murder at least, but it was interesting to read on and find out that a spokesman for another mother who had killed her child shortly beforehand commented: "Frances’s conviction and sentence were wrong and for this lady it seems they have got it right".

The lady in question is Frances Inglis, who is also referenced in the Guardian's treatment of the Mrs Gilderdale, where we learn that Mrs Inglis bought two grams of heroin from dealers and injected her son with it.

The Disability Matters blog, however, fleshes out some details about what happened after Inglis' son, became brain-damaged after either falling out of or jumping from the ambulance that had come for him after he'd been in a fight:

Frances Inglis...immediately became obsessed with ending his life, repeatedly making the case to anyone who would listen that she did not think any treatment was in her son's best interest. She visited her son almost constantly and was described by Thomas’ brother, Alexander, as "obsessive and negative."

Only 10 days after the accident, Inglis decided that she had to “put her son out of his misery.” So she injected him with a lethal dose of morphine. While Thomas was successfully resuscitated, he had been without oxygen long enough that his brain damage was much worse...Out on bail, a condition of which was that she go nowhere near Thomas, she disguised herself as Thomas' aunt, fooled the nurses, and injected Thomas with a fatal dose of heroin.

Two grams of heroin is a prodigious amount but, even if only a quarter-pure, it would be a massive overdose. One only hopes that the material with which the heroin was "cut" - and cut it certainly was, as she bought it from dealers - wasn't medically active and didn't cause any seizures as the boy passed away.


Pro-euthanasia campaigners would reply that if physician-assisted suicide were legal, Thomas would have been given pharmaceutical diamorphine (heroin), but, given the material above, it's by no means certain that a doctor would have considered Thomas eligible - although in a chilling caveat, Richard Normington quotes Dr Regina Dwyer's conclusion to a New York Times article on doctors who kill:

In the end, we doctors are no different than the rest of you. We probably turn killer less often than most other occupations. But our ranks have and will always include the deeply flawed, the greedy, the delusional, bunglers, rationalizers and just plain sociopaths - like every other population.

But the issue isn't doctor-assisted suicide, as opposed as I am to that. It's how we prevent, in some cases, abuse of the effective power that members of the above categories have to kill the sick relative of their choice, and in others - given assisted-suicide supporter Jamie Dettmer's assertion that Mrs. Gilderdale had sought to dissuade her bedridden daughter, Lynn, from wanting to end [her] life - people wracked by pain and despair and in crisis from unintentionally applying emotional blackmail upon their loved ones to act with lethal effect upon them.

I'm sure Kay Gilderdale and Frances Inglis are, possibly in different ways, occupying somewhere resembling hell right now. Cecil B De Mille, for example, in his 1952 The Greatest Show on Earth, presented a visual interpretation of a self-assumed mark of Cain in Buttons the Clown's smiley face perpetually masking the lugubrious demeanour of somebody who has "killed the thing he loved".

That's why killing sick or disabled people, although it has always happened, has always been fenced in by a taboo which the Establishment is dismantling to all of our peril.

And, for all the guidelines revolving around assisted suicide and living wills, that's why Kay Gilderdale was in court charged with attempted murder.

thank you!

Thank you for putting Tales from a Draughty Old Fen at Number 77 in Total Politics' Political Blogs' Poll 2009-2010! This is down a bit from last year, but there was so much high-quality competition that I feel very lucky to have supporters enough to keep me there at all.

The icing on the cake was seeing Richard Normington's blog make it into the top 100. Richard's the Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for the Conservative Party for Cambridge City, and I hope the increased awareness of what he's doing translates into increased votes for the Conservative Party in Cambridge in the next General Election, which must be held before next June!

Tesco: single-issue activists in tatters

The Tesco Express (small store) has only been in Cambridge's Mill Road for three days, yet it's starting to feel as if it's been there forever. It's bright, airy and affordable, and the staff are friendly.

So what was all the trouble about?


Although resistance to Tesco's planning application for the store first came onto my radar last March, the cause of the confusion manipulated by a disaffected minority was summed up recently by Cambridge Conservative parliamentary candidate Richard Normington, who recently attended a planning meeting in the city convened to determine whether should the council enforce its own planning guidelines.

Why bother with rules if you do not plan on enforcing them? However, the City Council has overruled its own guidelines to the point that the council is treated with ridicule by many of those putting in applications. Did you know that two in every five appeals against the city are successful?

Indeed, in the planning meeting last March, "The recommendations from council officers and consultants in every case was that the Council should approve the proposed changes, usually with conditions. Arguments were backed up with reference to Central Government advice, history and the context of the Mill Road area in a 153-page agenda." All but one were refused.


The anti-Tesco cmpaign has been backed up by the city's Liberal Democrat MP David Howarth, who was a witness to an assault on a 66-year-old woman collecting signatures for a petition in favour of Tesco's. To his merit he offered himself to the police as a witness; but although I realise MPs must immerse themselves in all aspects of life in their constituencies, I wonder why he was concentrating on keeping Tesco away from Mill Road while on the same thoroughfare you can buy cannabis seeds, second-hand firearms and hard core pornography, while elsewhere in the city there are problems with drug-taking, prostitution, benefit-ghettoes and drink-fuelled violence at chucking-out time. Tesco's, it seems, should be the least of his problems, and the whole situation reflects the risks of mixing with single-issue activists to the exclusion of people who are on the other side of that issue.

There are those who say that Tesco's opening will herald shop closures and job losses. They will, of course, be proven right, because shops have been closing and jobs been lost for some time now - it's called a recession.

Something that may militate in Tesco's favour is the lack of an alcohol licence, in the context of accusations that the outlet - in reality a small shop among small shops - will become another source of cheap booze in an area plagued by problems related to the stuff. A dry Tesco's, I believe, will throw light onto the true source of inexpensive strong lagers and ciders whose brewers are well aware of their target market. They are sold in some of the very independent traders whom the No Mill Road Tesco Campaign affects to protect.

The campaign is, of course, in tatters, a fact recognised by judge Lord Carlisle of Berriew when he threw out Campaign member Richard Rippin's attempt to force a judicial review of the Council's decision-making process: "This application is in reality an attempt to revive the No Mill Road Tesco Campaign under the guise of a Judicial Review claim. It is a misuse of Judicial Review".

On Wednesday morning, Minora phoned me from outside Mill Road Tesco's to report that there were a few Campaign members outside the entrance, flanked by watchful police officers. While Campaign supporters had been quite vociferous when protesting in the Cambridge Folk Festival, these would only give a terse "I can't comment", presumably having been well-warned. It's a sign of the times that pragmatism has won out over ideologically-based censorship, and anybody who doesn't like Tesco's will be free to use any of the meny other shops in Mill Road. That's how free choice works.

Harriet potters with Cambridgeshire car fees

There was an interesting article in the Telegraph yesterday, stating that Harriet Harman MP, whose hagiography lists her as "Deputy Leader of the Labour Party...Chair of the Labour Party, Leader of the House of Commons, Secretary of State for Equalities, Minister for Women and Lord Privy Seal", wishes to "move bus routes from affluent suburbs to poorer areas".

The piece caught my eye because a congestion-charge scheme is being pushed for Cambridge, whereby anybody driving into the city would have to pay a toll. In yesterday's Cambridge News, John Morgan reported that a Liberal Democrat councillor from South Cambridgeshire District Council (SCDC), covering the mainly rural area that surrounds Cambridge like a doughnut - effectively forming, with the rest of Cambridgeshire, much of its suburbs - has urged his fellow councillors to accept the measures because it would result in "vastly improved public transport for the majority of [the area's] residents".

Public transport is a major concern regarding congestion charging, on the part of the inhabitants of all the old fens as well as the people of Cambridge. Last May, the Cambridge News reported that 61% of people across Cambridgeshire opposed the introduction of a charge, although many would change their view if "attractive alternatives" for travelling into the city were presented. But if "the suburbs" are going to lose public transport in favour of areas the Labour government classifies as poorer...

I'm not on a country-versus-city kick here: I lived exclusively in cities and towns until I found the Draughty Old Fen. I merely agree with the Telegraph's political editor Patrick Hennessy, in the article linked to in the first paragraph of this post, that Ms Harman is "'positioning' herself to the left of the Labour Party in an attempt to win support for a future leadership contest" so that she can add the title of head chef to her menu of responsibilities.

Head for head, I'd say there's as much financial poverty in villages as there is in urban areas, but possibly less of the more damaging types of poverty that scar the soul. Villages are not as vulnerable to ideologues whose idea of social responsibility is herding poorer populations into vast ghettoes - as happened, for example, when Glasgow's Labour-dominated council transported people out of slums adjacent to the city to shiny new slums in places with names like Drumchapel and Easterhouse.

And that, I think, is the nub of the thing. Limit public transport to the villages outlying a town, and you limit options for people without cars to move out of the town and arguably out of a demographic which is seen as Labour-friendly. A similar thing has already happened, as Andrew Marr notes in A History of Modern Britain. Architects like Erno Goldfinger intended their "cities in the sky" to be built in the countryside so that workers could be free of the environments they laboured in, but corporatist minds saw an opportunity to concentrate as many votes as possible in a relatively small urban area. So the tower-blocks ended up as prisons in the sky - especially when the lifts were broken, as my Mum found out when we lived in one - and Goldfinger was immortalised as a camp übervillain in a mysogynistic spy-fantasy.

It's a shame that Lib-Dem Councillor Stephen Harangozo has chosen to swallow the Government line on congestion charging, down to the suggestion that by adopting the scheme Cambridge can bid for £500m ($725m) of government money. Not only does this money originate from taxpayers in the first place, but, as Cambridge Prospective Parliamentary Candidate Richard Normington reveals in his blog, at least 10% of this will have to be raised by local taxpayers, who could find themselves with even higher taxes to shore up the scheme should it stay in the red. What's also sad is that parish (village) councillors of most political hues co-operated to force Cambridge City Council to hold workshops for residents of the "necklace" of villages around Cambridge who would have to pay to go to work or to visit the city, and outside whose houses rat-runs of cars and lorries would race to avoid crossing the charge boundary. Richard has also pointed out that, since one of the members of the committee exploring traffic-management issues has proposed introducing a congestion charge elsewhere in England, the process runs the risk of being a stitch-up.

There is, of course, hope. Conservative councillors Tom Bygott and Peter Topping of SCDC have tabled a motion showing how bad the congestion charge will be for rural residents. With Richard Norminton showing how bad the charge would be for people living in the city of Cambridge, one can see how ironically successful the Government is at uniting groups it is trying its best to put at one another's throats. You could say that it's a situation Harriet Harman would find taxing.

Congestion Charging: coming to your place soon

There's a problem with traffic, at times, in Cambridge. When I take the bus to work because my bike's in the shop, it can take up to fifteen minutes to get from one side of the Hills Road railway bridge to the other - half the time it takes to cycle to work in the first place.

I picked up the Cambridge News today to see that Richard Normington, Cambridge's parliamentary spokesman for the Conservatives, speaking on a local issue which may be replayed widely over Great Britain and spread to other countries like the US. He's claimed that an investigation into whether Cambridge should have a congestion charge (like London) will be a "stitch-up", on the grounds that the Cambridgeshire Transport Commission's chairman, Sir Brian Briscoe, had previously come down in favour of a congestion charge for Reading, a town to the west of London.

Part of Richard's statement, reported in the News, was:

Sir Brian has a credibility problem. As part of a transport commission looking into the future of Reading, he proposed introducing a congestion charge and signing up to the Government's Transport Innovation Fund - which makes charging compulsory for local authorities. His previous support for Labour's flagship policy puts his neutrality on the subject into question...now, more than ever, is not the time to impose greater financial burdens on Cambridge businesses and residents.

Sir Brian has responded that what he suggested was "a package of measures...with the possibility of a congestion charge in the long term". However, what the Independent Transport Commission Report for Reading Borough Council, co-authored by him, says is,

We think the Council should, with its sub-regional neighbours, urgently examine the case for managing demand by road pricing to influence driver behaviour...We are satisfied that the technical means exist to introduce more sophisticated charging regimes and we recommend that the Council examine how it might devise a scheme with the object of maximising economic use of road space [italics and bold in the original]

Another member of Reading's Transport Commission, Professor Tony Travers, published an essay in 2004 in the left-wing New Statesman in which he breathlessly and rather embarrassingly pours praise on the then Mayor of London Ken Livingstone (known as "Red Ken") for putting Congestion Charging in place.

I don't know whether Travers still believes in socialism or not - obviously people change and we have to allow them to. But the fact remains that transport charging is highly politicised, as it is in effect a form of taxation on a group of people - drivers - who are already taxed up to the hilt with road tax and duty on petrol. For example, back in Reading, prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate Alok Sharma has been accused of "lying" by opining that town dwellers would have to pay the charge (this has always been on the table in Cambridge); and the present Mayor of London, Boris Johnston, has been accused of "turning his back on carbon emission reductions and turning 'petrol blue'" (blue being the colour of the Conservative Party in the UK) by announcing that he would scrap an extension to the capital's Congestion Charge.

But to be tough on congestion requires us to be tough on the causes of congestion. A study commissioned by Cambridgeshire County Council states that 56,000 new dwellings will be required in this largely rural county by 2016. We just don't have the roads to support this, no more than the market towns and villages who are being pressured to accept new housing have the facilities and infrastructure. Not to mention that most rural areas are rural for a reason - the fens are very low-lying, and floods are common.

Travers makes a very interesting point in his essay: "no other city in Britain has anything like London's extensive public transport system. Less than 15 per cent of people working in central London commute by car. The political and economic risk would be far greater in a city where 65 or 75 per cent of workers travel by car." Stagecoach, which has a virtual monopoly on providing buses in and around Cambridge, must be congratulated for bringing in more and better stock. But to drive them they're hiring a lot of drivers for whom English is not a first language. If a prospective passenger doesn't speak good English either, it's a sight to behold.

If you live in or around Cambridge, please give your views online on this vital issue.

If you're from elsewhere, watch this space, because there's a very good chance that Congestion Charging and its ideological fellow-travellers are coming to a town near you soon.

How to run a country: start with emptying bins

The first summer that I spent in the Draughty Old Fen was rather hot - especially so for a Glasgow boy. Once, I forgot to leave the rubbish-bag out for the weekly collection. So I left it in the shed and, when it was time to put it out for the next week, went to fetch it in the dark. At first it slipped out of my grasp, so I put the light on - and to my horror saw the source of the slime: a line of maggots (some newly deceased) emerging from a small hole near the top.

Now we have twice-weekly collections, alternately of household rubbish and paper, tins, glass etc. There's a lot of houses in Cambridge city that are terraced with tiny gardens that are having trouble storing rubbish; so yesterday, Cambridge Conservative Party's Parliamentary Spokesman, Richard Normington, proposed a commonsense solution: go back to weekly collections.

I last saw Richard last Saturday at an Autumn lunch party held in St Edmund's College, in the Okinaga Room, which is the highest point in Cambridge. I didn't notice this at first, as I was too busy being annoyed by the pain from my twisted ankle. Then Richard gestured towards the panoramic window occupying six walls of the octagonal room, and the view took my breath away. All of Cambridge between the Room and the Gog Magog hills was laid out below me, and I realised what a beautiful city it was.

After drinks we had some shepherd's pie, following which Eric Pickles MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Local Government spoke. In a broad Yorkshire accent he iterated the point David Cameron has made, that we're not Ukip-lite, although the country, he said, needs our unique view on Europe.

Pickles' profile came to national prominence during the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, where Labour Party activists presented the Conservatives as "toffs" - a strategy which backfired spectacularly, to such an extent that Pickles later commented that he thought the Labour activists were working to get the Tories elected!

There are now 9,900 Conservative Councillors in Great Britain, and Eric stated it was time to move the left-of-centre consensus which served the purpose of getting some officers promoted just a little rightwards. He also took a question from a teenage girl concerned about standards of spelling in school, and in his answer referred (delicately) to a recent English exam where a pupil was awarded marks for answering a question merely with an expletive


Following on from that, academic, businessman and author Dr Simon Mitton spoke about the necessity for universities not to be "dumbed down"; they need to produce graduates who can cut it in the world of work, and they need to maintain their own reputation. I suppose that if schools were relieved of the burden of having to teach to the test, then quality graduates would not be the only benefit; we'd also get shop-assistants who can count, office-workers who can write letters, and people who can come back from work and enjoy a good book.

Richard Normington wrapped the thing up by echoing Eric Pickles' point that in local government we can show the country that a Conservative Government can be trusted, then went to be with his wife Stacey, who's just over nine months pregnant.

One of the many things I think you can trust the Conservatives to do is to come up with a commonsense solution to problems. Take the twice-weekly bin collections I referred to at the start. Liberal Democrat Councillor Colin Rosentiel, who heads the collection services, says that the option of weekly services is not an option. I don't doubt his liberal credentials, but his democratic ones are a bit dodgy - the recent Cambridge survey on collections didn't even have an option for weekly collections.

The start of a strategy might be gotten by, say, looking at the page on flies and bluebottles on the website of the Labour-dominated Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council which says: in hot conditions the time taken for eggs of the fly to become maggots and then a fly could be as little as 7 days, then continues: the source of the infestation should be removed. In other words, get your heads together and make the necessary financial adjustments to restore weekly bin collections.

All the best of luck to Richard and Stacey.

time to normalise strawberry fair

This Saturdaygone - 7 June - I went to Midsomer Common in the morning, where sound-stages, exhibitions and stalls were being set up for Strawberry Fair.

I met with Richard Normington (right) of Freedom-1215: the number refers to the date the Magna Carta was signed, ensuring key freedoms such as protection from the then Crown's omnipotence, judicial rights, and a full pint of beer.

As we went round the ground looking for some friends, I was struck by the number of stalls advertising legal herbal highs and/or cannabis-taking paraphernalia such as bongs, which are used to provide a concentrated cannabis-smoking experience without having to mess about with cigarette papers or tobacco. I remarked that anecdotal evidence showed that as little as one gram of skunk was enough to maintain a psychopathological state such as depression or paranoia, something which is increasingly recognised.

After Richard left, as we hadn't found my friends, I noticed a hunt saboteurs' tent. I had to supress a smile - this is a cause close to Minora's heart, she who has never seen a fox in her life. I, on the other hand, have seen plenty: the city of Glasgow has the highest concentration of foxes in Great Britain. If I thought for one moment they gave a fig about the damn fox I would have went over; so I walked on.

It gave me heart, however, to see a stall run by NO2ID. I said to the lady minding it, I used to be vaguely in favour of ID cards in the context of national security - then all this information started to go missing. There was a time when, for example, Soviet spies would have to work hard to get hold of such a wealth of statistics. Now, the Government can't even be bothered to expend the energy involved in giving it away - it just loses the stuff. I liked the flier (bottom) - a mock ID card with a picture of George Orwell, in the name of Winston Smith, the hero of Orwell's dystopic political thriller 1984.

Strawberry Fair's organisers had mounted a campaign to clean up the fair's image. In the end, unfortunately, the antisocial element won out, and now local residents are asking for a "gap year", largely due to drug-related antisocial behaviour.

I had a pint before going home, and heard some folk complaining that pubs which admitted under-18's could no longer host cigarette-machines. It appears that Westminister may be following Scotland's plan to "denormalise" - a word it has borrowed, ironically, from database management - smoking.

Perhaps its priority should be to "denormalise" consumption of illegal drugs in city-centre festivals, starting with forcing the sale of paraphernalia back into head-shops which could then be monitored.

But what can you say about governmental efforts to change our behaviour by altering our language...double-plus ungood?