Mary Reid

Here is something to do next Saturday 28th February (now corrected - I originally wrote Sunday in error).

New leaflets have been produced by the Council that you can use for self-guided walks around some of the prettier parts of the Chessington area. The first one is being launched on 28th with a guided walk along one of the routes.

It will take about an hour and will be suitable for all the family.

If you'd like to join in, then meet at 10.45am in the car park of the Bonesgate pub on Moor Lane. Debra the Zebra will be there for the children.

Please let Ross Adkins, the Community Walking Officer know if you are able to attend. Email: ross.adkins@rbk.kingston.gov.uk or telephone 020 8547 5758.

Apparently, last year over 1800 drivers in Kingston were fined for driving while using a mobile phone.

The Captain Kingston character was dreamt up by the Road Safety Student Council, which is made up of representatives from all the secondary schools in the borough.

Update - I have corrected the fgure for mobile phone fines. I've been informed that the figure of 170 that I originally gave only referred to tickets issued by Kingston Police. Far more fines were issued by the Traffic Police and Transport Police. Although it is worrying that so many people are still phoning whilst driving, I'm pleased that all the branches of the police are giving it some priority.

The androgynous fairies that opened Edward Hall's all male production of A Midsummer Night's Dream wore both. This was just one strange but captivating element in this highly inventive staging of the play at the Rose.

I loved it. It's magical and funny. Do catch it if you can before the end of the week.

The all male, colourblind casting - no, stop there. I ardently dislike the term 'colourblind' in this context, although I fully support the underlying thinking. The concept, of course,  is that the physical features of actors - height, colour, disability, age - should not be an issue when casting a play. The only exception is where such a feature is crucial to understanding the text or portraying the character.

Shakespeare makes several jokes about Helena's height, so it is essential that the actor is taller than the one playing Hermia (although this could be achieved, I suppose, by high heels). 

The reason I dislike the term 'colourblind casting' is because the audience is not blind to an actor's physicality.  It is part of what they present to us on stage.  But non-traditional casting can often add extra depth and life to an interpretation of a role, as indeed does happen with an all male cast. Hence a joke that Shakespeare did not envisage occurred as Helena broke into broad patois when pushed to extreme anger. It was a knowing acknowledgement of the actor who was bringing the character to life, not a denial of it.

There is a point in any campaign for equality when the inequalities have to be expressed rather forcefully and the strategy has to be described in anti-discriminatory terms. So at a time when black actors were only being cast in black character roles it was necessary to use the 'colourblind' term. Hopefully the theatre has moved beyond that now.

Which brings me to the talk of the theatre world this week - Lenny Henry as Othello. Now that is a part where ethnicity is central to the character. Could a white actor ever play it again?

It is a remarkably bold move for a comic actor who has never acted on stage before - but it could be quite thrilling to see a fresh interpretation which will not be overlaid by years of actorly tradition.

The Northern Broadsides production of Othello with Lenny Henry will be at the Rose from 21st to 25th April.  I've been told that it is already difficult to get tickets for some performances, so do book soon if you want to see it.

Welcome home to the GB team who have been competing in the Special Olympics Winter Games in Idaho.

Local interest was provided by Jonathan Frett (in the picture), who was awarded 5th place for skiing.

Overall the team achieved 2 gold, 7 silver and 4 bronze. Congratulations all round!!

Full details here.

The Special Olympics are for athletes with learning difficulties, whereas the Paralympics are for those with physical disabilities.

Sue Frett, Jonathan's mother, has devoted herself to launching and running the successful Special Olympics Surrey organisation, which covers Kingston as well.  Some of their athletes have already been selected to compete at the National Championships in Leicester this year.

The councillors' weekly trade magazine First has an article for Valentine's Day about councillors who are married to each other.  It seems there are far more than you might imagine.

Shared values and interests are the basis for a successful marriage, so I suppose it's not surprising if two people who are both deeply committed to their local communities and have the same fundamental political principles should find that life together works for them. It has certainly been that way for Ian and me.

We are not even the only couple who have both been Mayor. Indeed, the current Lib Dem Mayor of Stockton-on-Tees, Cllr John Fletcher, was himself the Mayor's consort to his wife Cllr Suzanne Fletcher who was Mayor a couple of years ago. Suzanne and I swapped stories as two of the first blogging mayors at the time.

In Kingston I can remember two other councillor couples. Celia Osbourne, wife of the Leader of the Council, Cllr Derek Osbourne, also served as a councillor for four years.

But probably the most surprising example was provided by the two councillors who met and wed at Kingston whilst members of opposing parties. Now that took some sorting out....

Have you got any computers, monitors or other working IT equipment that you no longer have a use for? .. would you like them to go to schoolchildren in the World's poorest areas?

That was the beginning of a letter I received today from Computers 4 Africa, which is a registered charity - you can read all about it on the website. 

They wrote to me and other local councillors because they holding an appeal in Malden Rushett on Friday and Saturday of this week. You can take your old equipment between 9am and 5pm to Unit 4, Silverglade Business Park, Malden Rushett, Chessington KT9 2QL.

They offer free collection for five or more PCs but you need to call them in advance to arrange this.

To be precise about what they can use, they are asking for working equipment, not items for scrap, as follows:

• PCs at least Pentium 111/500 MHz
• Mice
• Keyboards
• Power leads for PCs and monitors
• Laptops as for PCs as long as they include power leads

Computers 4 Africa wipe all the data from every computer they receive.

There's a meme doing the rounds of blogging Lib Dems and we've all been tagged.  The idea is that we each list 25 random facts about ourselves. Nick Clegg has done his here.

1. My first job was at C&A in Oxford Street. I worked in 'Better Dresses' but the buttons still fell off everything.

2. I haven't ridden a bike since I was a student. I fell off one day, hurt my knee, and haven't had the courage or inclination to try again.

3. I sing with a good choir, but my throat gets completely constricted when asked to sing on my own.

4. I usually eat seafood when we go out for a meal, because Ian is allergic to it and I can't cook it at home.

5. I hate beetroot.

6. My grandfather was a miner in the Aberdare Valley, but lost his job in the Great Depression and ended up as a road sweeper in Slough.

7. I learnt Welsh at primary school.

8. My favourite holiday ever was a cruise to Alaska.

9. I'm a cat person, but haven't owned one since I was 14.

10. My father was in India with the Army when I was born and he didn't see me until I was 10 months old.

11. I was born outside Slough, but for some reason it says Eton on my birth certificate.

12. I was at York University right near the beginning - there were 200 students in the year above me and 300 in my year.

13. In my 40s I went back to University and took a Masters in Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems at Imperial. 

14. I once heard Nelson Mandela speak.

15. The only sport I have been any good at was fencing.

16. I have heard wolves howling in Canada.

17. My great-great (nine times) uncle was Richard Hooker, the lawyer who developed the framework for the Church of England under Henry VIII. There's a large statue of him at Exeter Cathdral.

18. My grandmother was a Hooker - but she never got the joke.

19. When my sons were still at home we all enjoyed listening to, and singing along with, Paul Simon.

20. I love eating mangoes (same as Nick Clegg), but I get juice everywhere so I recently invested in a neat mango cutter.

21. I also own a nifty pineapple corer/slicer from Lakeland.

22. My mother taught Elocution. Don't knock it - it taught me how to speak in public and gave me a love of poetry.

23. Some years ago I experienced 24 hours of sunlight for 5 days, north of the Arctic Circle in Norway.

24. My skin reacts badly to the sun, so I have to sit in the shade.

25. I've been to three garden parties at Buckingham Palace.

Now here are some good ideas:

• Provide 20 hours of free child care for any family that needs it for children under the age of 18 months 
• Reduce infant class sizes to 15
• Provide a Pupil Premium for up to 2.5 million disadvantaged children, each payable directly to the child's state school. This could be used by the school to pay for one-to-one tution, to attract high quality teachers, to reduce class sizes, to provide holiday courses or whatever would be best for the pupils.
• Scrap the bureaucratic and stifling National Curriculum, which at present runs to 600 pages, and replace it with a pared down Minimum Curriculum Entitlement
• Cut down on SATs and return to diagnostic testing which helps the teacher to respond better to a child's needs
• Scrap tuition fees in Universities and for adults in Further Education

These are all serious proposals that the Liberal Democrats have made in the last few weeks, and they will be debated at the Spring Conference next month.  As Nick Clegg says:

"I am determined to close the gap between the private and state schools. Parents should not have to pay in order to get their children into schools and colleges with small class sizes, a rich and broad curriculum, good discipline, strong teaching and real opportunities in sports and the arts.

Education is fundamental to a free society, to social mobility and to delivering opportunities for every child and it will be one of our biggest priorities in the next General Election. "

So the big question is - how on earth can we pay for it all?

The total cost of those proposals is a cool £6.5 billion. I would have no idea how to find that much, but the policy people at the Lib Dem Federal Headquarters in Westminster have done their arithmetic.

Their first idea is to remove child tax credits from high earners. That makes sense to me - a blanket credit that gives money to people who don't need it is not very progressive.

Then they suggest scrapping the Child Trust Fund. This is the rather odd initiative of the Labour Government which gives £250 to each newborn baby that can't be touched until they are 18. It's supposed to encourage saving, but is costing £500 million a year!

Removing some of the centralised bureaucracy that supports the National Curriculum will itself produce savings, as will putting a stop to raising the school leaving age to 18. (We do value post-16 schooling, but it's not right for every single young person)

Probably the most controversial cut that has been proposed is a large reduction, of up to 90%, in the national road building programme - that's for motorways and other major roads. Although this sounds rather startling, it is coupled with other Lib Dem proposals to invest more in the greener alternative of high speed rail, and to reduce car usage.

Government advertising has gone up from £100 million in 1997 to £300 million today, so cutting that back to the real term equivalent would produce significant savings.

Finally, one proposal that is close to my heart is to save £300 million per year by switching over to open source software in Government departments. Common sense, at last!

All of these will together raise the £6.5 billion needed to fund the improvements for children. 

Actually this is just a part of an ambitious programme which would see £20 billion used to boost equality for everyone, not just children. It's one of the most radical visions for a fair society that we have seen expounded by politicians since the Welfare State was introduced. I'm proud to align myself with it.

Who are the best people to tell teenagers what it's like to have a baby when you are young? Teachers try, so do youth workers, but it seems fairly obvious that young people are more likely to believe people of their own age.

This was the premise behind Straight Talking, a charity set up by a Hilary Pannack from Hook some ten years ago. In fact, its full title is Straight Talking Peer Education.  Hilary recruited a team of teenage mothers and fathers and got them talking with their peers in local schools. The idea is to tell it like it is - not to take a particular moral stance, but to make sure that young people understand the commitment that comes with parenthood.

This programme is of enormous benefit to the young parents as well as their listeners. They learn communication skills, and gain self-confidence. These in turn help them to to find their way into further education or work.

Hilary's approach has been valued in many parts of the country and she now has projects running in four London boroughs (including Kingston), Surrey and Trafford.

But the really exciting news is that the work of Straight Talking has been recognised nationally. It won the Guardian Charity Award for 2008.

There's a great video about their work here.

I'm sorry I didn't write about this achievement earlier - but it's still worth celebrating!

We've been waiting a long time for TfL to improve the traffic lights at Malden Rushett, but the work will finally start next week.

The only problem is that traffic will inevitably be slowed down whilst temporary lights are used, so you have been warned. We've been told that the work should take four weeks.

Over the last ten months 270 Kingston residents have used Capital Call. It's a highly valued service for people with mobility problems.

Yet Transport for London has withdrawn Capital Call from Kingston without any consultation, causing all sorts of problems for some highly vulnerable people.  It didn't even bother to tell Kingston Council which subsidises it!

So what's going on?

First, Transport for London - the Mayor for London's organisation that looks after buses and major roads in London - set up a useful service several years ago called Taxicard. This offered subsidised door-to-door rides in London black cabs for people who need it, mainly those who have difficulty walking or are visually impaired. 

In some parts of Greater London, including Kingston, there are far fewer London cabs around than in inner London boroughs. This meant that people in the Borough who were registered for the Taxicard system did not get much use out of it.

So back in 2004 Transport for London introduced a welcome complementary system, Capital Call, which allows people to use their Taxicard to call for a mini-cab instead. It was offered in these boroughs: Bexley, Ealing, Enfield, Haringey, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Kingston, Lambeth, Lewisham, Merton and Southwark.

Those 270 people in the Borough who have used it in the last year made an average of nine journeys each, so it was clearly greatly valued.

Capital Call has other important advantages over the black cab Taxicard service. People can negotiate the time of the journey and arrange for a return pickup directly with the mini-cab company.

They also know before they start the journey how much it will cost, which is always a bit of a gamble in a normal taxi because the time is factored into the fare as well as the distance. Sometimes people found they had to pay out of pocket for the extra unexpected cost. With Capital Call the price and pickup times were agreed in advance.

Now Transport for London has decided to take the service away from Kingston and offer it to Greenwich instead.

It seems that the availability of more black cabs in Kingston is the sole criterion for this decision, overlooking all the other factors that made it a greatly preferable service over the standard Taxicard. Indeed, for some blind people it is the only form of service that they can use in practice.

Transport for London were supposed to consult both the Council and the people who use the service before making any changes.

And did they consult? No, they have completely bypassed anything so democratic, or humanitarian for that matter. Instead, disabled people have simply been sent a letter saying "Sorry, but .."

This is appalling. What do they think they are doing?

Update, 5/2/09

I've just heard that TfL have bowed to pressure and agreed to delay the withdrawal from April to June 'at least', to give time for further discussion and consultation. Thanks to Brian Gaff, from Kingston Talking Newspaper, who has been leading the campaign on this.

The latest information from the Guildhall is that no refuse and recycling collections were made today, and are unlikely tomorrow. 

Bins and recycling will probably be collected two days late, with crews working on Saturday and Sunday.

In the meantime, the refuse drivers have been busy helping with the extra gritting which is keeping all the through routes clear.

This is the severe weather services update on the Council website, as at 9.45am.....

=====================================================

The South East of England has been affected by unprecedented snow fall overnight and the MET Office has forecast more heavy snow during the day.

The following Councils services have been affected:

Recycling and landfill waste collections

• There will no recycling and landfill waste collections today (Monday 2 February).  
• Collections are also likely to be severely affected tomorrow (Tuesday 3 February).  
• As soon as details are available of the new collection schedule, they will be posted here.

Schools

• All primary and secondary schools in the borough are closed today except St Matthews Primary, Surbiton, which remains open. Update to follow shortly.

Car Parks

• The Cattle Market (lower levels) is open
• The Bittoms and The Rose (formerly Drapers) multi story car parks are closed for the time being but may open later today.
• The Cattle Market (surface level) is closed

Housing

• The Housing Contact Centre at Tadlow is open.  We are responding to emergency repair requests relating to heating and burst pipes.  Vulnerable residents will be prioritised.
• Sheltered Housing schemes are running as normal.

Benefits

• The Benefits office is closed today.

Adult Education

• Adult education courses have been cancelled for today

Gritting

• Main roads are being gritted but side roads.

Cemeteries and crematorium

• Open but limited staffing

Births Deaths and Marriages

• Open but limited staffing

Apologies

The Council apologises for any inconvenience caused.  We aim to get service back to normal as soon as we are able and it is safe to do so.

Further heavy snow fall is forecast for this evening.  Commuters who have driven to work are advised to make their return trip home before 3pm.

Wow! 8 inches of snow and it's still falling.

Haven't seen snow like this in London for about 30 years.