Roger Gambba-Jones

Now that the dark nights are fast approaching, I suspect that some of you will start noticing the road and footpath lights that aren't working.

If the lamp post has a number on it, you can report it to the council directly by filling in a form on the SHDC website.  See link below

http://www.sholland.gov.uk/doitonline/CRMServiceRequests/GatherDetails.aspx?SRID=575

Unfortunately, if the lamp post in question does not have a number on it, this means that the road or footpath that it is on has not yet been adopted by either the county council for roadway lights or the district council (but not always!) for footway lights.  Non-working lights must then be reported directly to the developer, with a description of the exact location.

From experience, it can be far from easy to actually get unmarked lights fixed.  This is mainly due to the contractor working during the daytime and therefore not be able to see for themselves that the lights aren't working!  You think you've given them the exact location, but they still go and fix the one on the other side of the road!

If you find any lights not working and they don't have a number on them, let me know the location and I will do my best to get them fixed.  Email me at myshdc@fsmail.net

As a numbers phobic, with a special disdain for bean counters (accountants and anybody who thinks that numbers are more important than people) I've been taking a somewhat fiendish pleasure in the stories about the billy wizzes of the banking and financial world being outed by the virtual collapse of capitalism and the free market.

I say outed, because this crisis has exposed them as being no more clever at counting than the rest of us - perhaps we can now stop treating all these numerate clever dicks like they were gods and the rest of us are morons that are incapable of putting two and two togeather!

As an illiterate of the numerate kind, I've always had to sit and listen to the bean counters waxing lyrical over the various spreadsheets waved under my nose as evidence of their case for cutting this or that, or as proof that the statistics mean they're right and I'm wrong! 

How many new initiatives have been introduced in recent years, based on the statistics produced by these ‘experts', but have then lead to a disastrous fall in standards? 

Bobbies on the beat, school dinners, matrons on our hospital wards, teaching kids to spell - to name but a few!

However, I've always suspected that what they were saying was actually no more than gobbledigook and they were just blinding us with their particular version of mumbojumbo science - how else would they have been able to make such a cock up of so many things and get away with it for so long?

Unfortunately, many of these bean counters will have made sure that they've made suitable arrangments, or exit stratergies to use their jargon.  So as usual, the only ones that are going to be suffering long term from all of this chaos are the little people like you and me - as per the title, ‘their chickens our roost'.  

So, when all the dust has settled and it looks like the world might be back on an even keel of sorts, don't ever believe everything the surviving bean counters are telling you again!     

Yet again, on a Saturday night I have laid (or is it lain?) in bed (having removed my carpet slippers and drunk my cocoa) listening to the youth of South Holland charge around the streets and roads of Spalding as though it were the English version of Monaco!

The rural nature of our district means that background noise is very low at almost anytime of the day - aren't we lucky!  However, the downside is that the noisy boys (and girls) of South Holland therefore make themselves very conspicuous by their antics on our streets. 

I've no doubt the same thing was happening in virtually every other town in South Holland and indeed England (I'm not bothered about Scotland and Wales anymore, now they've gone independent!).

The point I was starting to make, before I sped off in a different direction (get it?), was about the supposed public concern over the impact of rising fuel prices on the motorists of this country. 

Whilst the boy and girl racers are wasting fuel and tyres like there's no tomorrow (or possibly at least no day after tomorrow thanks to global warming!) other older drivers, who should know better, are still tearing around as though petrol and diesel were still 50p a gallon!

So where's the fuel price crisis and why do the media continue to publish stories telling us how people aren't using their cars so much, how drivers are slowing down, how there's less traffic on the roads and how people are finding it hard to run their cars - I have yet to see or hear it myself.

Just a little play on the phrase ‘Anyone for tennis', get it?  Although I suppose if I have to explain it, it's not very clever to use it, but never mind I'm not very clever anyway! 

So on to today's subject:  Given all the bad press being generated around the subject of community action, I'm almost afraid to raise this subject.

At the last Spalding Towm Forum meeting, we discussed the possiblity of employing a street cleaner in the same way that some other towns and villages in South Holland do.  It quickly became apparent that spending £17k plus a year would not a good use of the Spalding taxpayers money, especially as the problem we were trying to deal with was in the non-town centre areas of the town.

I therefore proposed that we look at how we might be able to deal with the issue of local grot spots and general littering by recruiting volunteers that live in each ward and that of course brings me back to the issue of the recent bad press such volunteers have been given.

At what point does a community spirited volunteer, who is will ing to give up some of their personal time for the good of their community, become a snooper in the employ of the ‘system'?

As far as I'm concerned, if something is wrong, a mess is being made, or damage is being done, then it doesn't matter who reports it, as long as it get reported and fixed!

The town forum will need to decide if we are actually going to offer a small annual payment to those who volunteer, or if we are just going to provide the equipment required to do the job. 

I hope we are able to organise this, as looking after the place we live is not just about the council emptying the bins and sweeping the streets, it's much more about the people themselves playing an active role in looking after their community.