Stop, Look and listen

Distant bells that sing a background sonnet
To the green and pleasant land that stretches out before
The birdsong cuts its way across the shimmering fields
As cattle stand and stare their tails swishing to the beat

The sun sits in the bluest sky no feathered clouds to fear
It's warming blanket smothers every nook and cranny
Only shadows spoil her fun and leave a refuge from her charms
The hot and bothered flee to seek that shaded corner

The gentlest breeze carries heaven's very scent and teases senses
It's warmth and richness lifting up the soul with every breath
Insects sing and dance as if this day will never end
Their gentle background humming belies their manic stance

How sad it is such fayre is offered yet we choose to ignore
For further on beyond the fields that surely hold life's key
A constant stream of metal flows along the blackest stream
Like angry ants they file on through not looking left nor right

To them this show of earth's own soul is of no consequence
Their goal a lonely path that promises rewards of gold and silver
Single minded, ignorant and blinkered to real wealth,
From such shadows I appeared, I ran away and now I am richer than ever.
 
  

Ludlow Hospital Shambles..NHS Waste...Time for Change

Interesting times here in the UK as the Health service finances come under scrutiny once more with billions found wasted on a computer programme that is not even workable. I hope the instigators of this disaster are sent to The Tower as a century or two ago this would have been the case, but oh no we allow such stupidity these days. It is however all the more galling if you are a South Shropshire resident or more pointedly a Ludlow resident as the £127 million pound community hospital proposed and approved over a period of many years now seems to be sitting with it's head in the Health budget cuts noose.
Quite how so-called "experts" can justify wasting billions on one hand and then deny an already hard done by County of much needed services is quite honestly a travesty of the highest proportion. Our very fine MP Philip Dunne has said that there will be some "hard hitting questions" if this hospital is scuppered due to a 1.2 million a year deficit in its running costs, I would suggest that the people in charge ought to join our so called NHS computer experts in The Tower. Society seems to allow for such people to make such blunders and walk away as if it is "just one of those things" I often think back to Lord Archer being jailed for a few years for lying in court, it affected a newspaper and a few egos, yet he received a stiff sentence for his crime, so why should some civil servant who has miscalculated to the tune of billions to this country walk free from such a mess that clearly could cost someone their life?
Perhaps if we started locking some of these fools up for a minimum stretch of ten years they might think twice before launching into another hair-brained scheme that has no hope of working, I for one think they are a disgrace to this Country and should be kicked out of their jobs without further delay at the very least, if you were a tax payer and you owed one thousand pounds you have to pay it and rightly so if its due, but in turn that taxpayer should demand that his hard earned tax contribution isn't handed to Biffo The Bear and spent like water on some hair brained ill conceived pie-eyed illogical computer program that was never required in the first place, those billions would have built many hospitals countrywide and indeed some of that money would would have safe guarded the Ludlow Hospital Ad Infinitum. I hope those idiots who spearheaded this stupidity losing all this money at the same time don't sleep too comfortably in their beds, I am sure their grandparents would have been very proud of them...

The Sunday Roast.

I would imagine the President of the United States is not sleeping quite so well in his bed as he used to. Pushing ahead the vote to bomb Syria while his own country suffers from the affects of the world recession and parts of the USA are also still in various types of disarray from hurricanes and tornado's is a mighty big decision, in fact if I was from New Orleans I would be pretty miffed that several million pounds worth of missiles will be heading for foreign lands while the tin shack you live in drips water and is frighteningly cold and insecure. But aren't all leaders guilty of foreign intervention when in reality their own house needs to be put in order? I am not making light of the atrocities being carried out in Syria, but my guess is without the intervention from so called "allies" the Syrian uprising would have been quashed years ago and chemical weapons would never have been deployed, so in a way we are all responsible for the cruel deaths we see on the TV screens before us.
Dictators as history has all too frequently shown us have a self belief that will lead eventually to thousands and thousands dying simply because they think they are invincible, but I think seeing so much bloodshed is making the world very tired of the West removing a dictator only to have the country split into a million pieces afterwards with all the many factions vying for power. If we leave Syria to its own affairs and stop arming the rebels Assad will take control again and the world will have an uneasy peace. This is not what people want but history shows us we cannot and should not intervene as the outcome is all too common, we get dragged into a conflict that has no end. It should be with a very heavy heart and much consultation that Obama reaches for that red button, if not for the people of Syria then for the people in his own back yard who are suffering from a horrendous lack of financial aid, after all charity begins at home does it not?

The real feel of Autumn is upon us and to be fair we have had a great summer by our standards, in fact a week of sunshine would constitute a summer theses days never mind a whole month! So now we think of heating bills electricity bills becoming larger and larger as we slip towards Christmas time and of course all the energy companies will HAVE to put their prices up as they are starving and destitute. I think its long past time that the UK government took back the powers of these parasitic service companies and brought the bills more into line with other European companies, who actually own the UK supply of energy due to our own mismanagement and apathy, I mean why would a French electricity company risk losing customers at home with higher bills when it can hit the pockets of UK residents instead?  It was mooted this week that the government is looking at buying back the energy supply contracts and running them as a National company, now that would be an election winner if ever I saw one.

I am a big fan of Boris Johnson, he has done much for London and the Olympics was a shining star that will never fade in the hearts of the British people, just how much Boris had to do with it remains to be seen but his conduct during and after the games was excellent. Unusually for Boris I totally disagreed with his proposal this month to penalise trucks in Central London that do not carry a cyclist aware set of equipment while in the City. This is plainly another absurd cost and yet more overheads for an industry that has been hard hit by the recession and in my humble experience of some thirty years driving trucks/buses/cars etc is that our good friend the cyclist is getting a little too much of the cream while disobeying nearly every law in the road traffic act. Admittedly they are very vulnerable and very small compared to trucks but a truck driver cant put his feet on the ground and move his truck two feet from the road in a heartbeat.
 Make no mistake if a truck is in London it's there to work, they pay for the roads the cyclist enjoys and that's how it should be as they do the most damage, but there has to be an element of awareness and self preservation on the behalf of the cyclist, all too often we see them without lights, pedalling on pavements or in a stupid road position that the poor truck driver has to make 44 tonnes compensate for.  I am a keen cyclist, I go up into woods and forests and enjoy it immensely, I am lucky i live in the country.
 I would suggest to Boris that rather than burden the poor haulage industry with yet more legislation to deliver in the capitol that he puts the money into more cycle lanes, or even a training module where a cyclist actually gets to sit in a 44 tonne truck and see the problems they and their two wheeled self powered obstacle in the road actually cause for even the most experienced of heavy haulage driver. When all is said and done, without the services of these huge lorries and the guys that drive and run them we would have no fuel in our tanks or food on our tables and even more ironically the bike shop would have no bikes, so as my Grandad used to say, "Don't flog the willing horse" Boris.

Now on Kindle, hope you enjoy.

Nice to see the first responses are favourable to my poetry book now out on Kindle  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00DRJ3OIQ  many thanks to those who have purchased the book and even more so to those that have given it such excellent reviews. My first novel "A False Twilight" is also now out and getting good first reviews, http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00E1RHJFM  if you havent done so already please download for the bargain price of 0.99c and enjoy.

The Sunday Roast. Real Life.

Blaming governments for all our ills is pretty much the standard these days. We moan when they make decisions and we bemoan their lack of decision making.
There is no one single fix available for the huge range of things that any government may encounter yet we turn to them like a frightened congregation turns to it's God in times of trouble. This symptomatic rush to expect a magic wand from our leaders is indeed true folly, yet we still look up to them to provide the answers and when they get caught out spying on us or make decisions we don't accept it soon becomes apparent that our God may just be someone else's Satan, indeed it's a thankless task. The answer is simple, many years ago governments ran departments and national companies yet were seldom seen or heard of, but now they are in the news every minute of the day. Governments have become too involved in our day to day lives because we have cried to them so often about how terrible things are, as a result we have now "over-sensitized" our leaders allowing them to believe we actually want their intervention in everyday life, it has become in affect a "Nannie state" the answer is in our own hands, we need to start taking a little more responsibility for our own actions and hence expect less from government, in return we may gain more freedom, nice thought anyway.

The first of the month arrives and with it the ordeal of getting the kids back to school, new uniforms are all pressed and washed and the worry of new classes and new school's enters the heads of parents and children alike. It's a bitter sweet time as many of us parents will be seeing  our kids go to new schools and face new adventures, the worry never leaves you as a parent but it can be equally stressful on your off spring, something we well remember despite our own advancing years !



I guess we all have times when life is tough, but what happens when those tough times build up over a long period?. You never know just how you will react to such things until they are upon you, of late I guess I have had more than my fair share, life has thrown all its dirty washing at just one man it seems and I happen to be the only one stood up. I watch the atrocities in Syria and around the world and my sanity tells me that there are so many more people worse off, I guess it's like your Grandmothers voice from your childhood, trying in some vain way to bring reason where very little exists. I would be lying if i said I was happy at this precise moment, in fact I don't think I have personally ever felt so low, it's a difficult thing to live with and its at times like these where you need a sense of humour, a very good one, but even that has deserted me. Being a poet and a writer only compounds such issues of feeling so down as so much of a burden is carried with that thought train that rattles continuously through my head like the six a.m express, it never stops.
There is little I can do to stop any of the torment at the moment other than the obvious route out, its a well worn path by much more distinguished folk than I, so I guess for once at least I would be in good company, but I have always lived with the thought that there may be light at the end of the tunnel, though at the moment that theory is being severely tested as the future strays from dark room to darker room. I guess if you have never been in this position these will seem strange words, but to me they knit together like that scarf your favourite auntie used to knit and there lies my biggest worry. Either way I guess my thoughts and deeds will have little or indeed no impact on the world we live in, much like my life up to now, after all "There is always someone worse off" didn't Gran used to say?.

A nice walk in Ludlow...

Had a lovely walk across the top of Whitcliffe above Ludlow this afternoon with my two youngsters, thought I may share it with you, the castle was absolutely stunning as always. Its no surprise that Ludlow is so popular with tourists far and wide, but I view it with mixed emotions as it is where I went to school (Ludlow Grammar School) and where I spent most of my youth and I see it as a very different town to the one I knew back then, but I guess change is inevitable, Hope You enjoy the pictures of our afternoon out.

Happy Holidays :-)

So here we are, August bank Holiday and the annual exodus of over populated Britain heading North for under populated Britain and queueing in the process. This is all greeted with a certain amount of intrigue with the Northern half of the Country as to why anyone would want to leave long queues, bad tempers,ignorant people and being stuffed together like sardines in the big City to sit in long queues, with people with bad tempers, too ignorant to acknowledge you and stuffed like sardines on the M4 and the same when you get to the caravan park/hotel you are heading for is one of life's great mysteries but as they say it takes all sorts!.

The Fracking debate in the South east has been a joy to watch, well from up here in the North it has anyway.
I am not really sure what Fracking does apart from make you double take if someone shouts it to you on a windy day, but my guess is by the fuss being made it will affect day time TV reception in some way as most of the protesters seem fresh from Jeremy Kyle's show, so its plainly hitting a nerve with all those out of work inter-breeding bed hopping DNA tested minority who are as in touch with reality as wrestling on the World Of Sport was on a Saturday afternoon. Who knows if it's good or bad? certainly not me and there is a fair chance MP's don't know either but that seldom stopped them doing stupid things before.

There was a call this week for shoplifters who stole below £50.00 to be handled in-store with the shops own security staff. Now, excuse me for being a dumb ass here but £50.00 to me is a lot of money and if someone deliberately stole that from me I would want the Police to caution them at the very least, it would also give the Police an insight during the arrest into the local community and serve as a barometer to how the local community is being Policed. Telling a hardened drug addict to "never do it again" and if its only "fifty quid" is a ridiculous move and any form of theft is exactly that, theft. It would be more economic to let officers carry iPads and photograph the thief and send his details to an incident room where they can be checked for outstanding warrants etc and then officially cautioned and sent on their way, at least he is in the system and the Officer can go to his next crime instead of getting buried by booking petty thieves into the cells.

While we are on the subject of prisoners it came to my notice this week that many women prisoners in two specific jails are being allowed to ring the general public and ask them about their energy bills. Honestly you couldn't write it, well not unless you are a member of the Prisons authority. Not for these prisoners a bright yellow onesie and a trip to the local park to pick litter in front of everyone they know, oh no, a nice warm office and a chance to annoy the hell out of the general public by ringing them up (usually at teatime... you know the drill) and grill them about how many times they turn a light on or off during the week, so there you have it, they were a nuisance to society on the outside and now we are making them a nuisance to society on the inside... well done whoever thought that trick up!

After a spat with Vodafone this week I am glad to say common sense prevailed. I was given some discount and my phone returned to its normal status, albeit in Craven Arms no 3G. But it does beg the question why you have to jump through so many hoops to get a response from such big companies, they are well financed and have more than enough capability to have service and call centres in most major parts of the UK but refuse. In the end I spoke to customer care and my upheld complaint was adjudged and dealt with very fairly, though I think Mike the manager may be heading for a future visit to charm school when they hear the tape of his telecon with me and rightly so.

So all it leaves me to do is say enjoy your bank holiday and don't get too upset at the queues, tomorrow is another day so enjoy the drive and look at the scenery if you are bored, unless you are driving and you need to keep your eye on the vehicle doing 3 mph in front of you :-)

Happy Bank Holiday!

Vodamoan....

Sometimes, even though you think you are doing the right thing and following all the guide lines and playing by the book you can still get caught out. Those words are very prophetic for me and I am in fact slightly embarrassed even that I fell into the oldest pitfall in the travel book and that is not ensuring your mobile charges were sorted before you use your mobile abroad.
The facts are that before departing for Australia in May i contacted my service provider of some twenty years (Vodafone) and told them exactly what i was doing and for how long, I told them explicitly that i didn't want to come back to huge bills and what could they do for me?.
As I own an iPhone 5 they did seem awfully preoccupied at the time with WiFi and I duly accepted a package that limited me to 25gb and then text-ed me when I had used it at a cost of £5.00.

So off i went for six weeks to the land of plenty and three weeks in I get a text from Vodafone to tell me my bill was now £850+vat and i needed to contact them to ensure I knew about it. Considering my normal bill is 2-300 pounds one would beg to question why the company let it go £150.00 over let alone five or six hundred pounds over and the bill was not high because of Wifi usage but calls, I was getting charged £1.50 per minute for accepting calls and making them to mobiles inside OZ, but there we go you make your own mind's up over that one.
With this news i headed for a Vodafone.au shop and told them of my plight, they recommended a simple Samsung pay as you go phone for $30.00 and away I went. They also said in the shop that my treatment by Vodafone UK was a little harsh considering I had previously rung them to inform them of my whereabouts but again, you make your own minds up.
On landing in Gatwick and arriving home some four hours later I rang Vodafone to ask if they could look at the bill again which was now standing at some £1,200.00. The reception I got was like hitting a brick wall at 70 mph in a bubble car while strapped to the roof rack, definitely a no-no, but as I was reminding them about the fact I HAD been responsible and rung them beforehand the guy on the phone proceeded to then inform me that i should have had my phone unlocked and used an Au. phone Sim, rather closing the stable door after the horse has bolted I thought. Anyway the accounts side of Vodafone rang me back some minutes later and we worked out a simple plan of paying the bill over 3 months which was not ideal as there was no offer of a discount or softening of the blow it was pay up and shut up, it has never been about the ability to pay but the principal. So I agreed to pay for the outstanding over sized bill over 3 months and off we went. Well, no. It doesn't work like that. This is Vodafone.

You see, this is where you need to read the small print on your phone contract, despite paying £40+vat every month plus phone calls and texts on my contract to this greedy bunch of business people and sticking to the agreement put in place I had my phone restricted today, so it only takes incoming calls. This is because even though I had (only 3 days ago) paid this monster of a company £601.50. which was made up of the £390.00 and £210.50 in monthly call charges and contract fees they now decided that they would take up their option under "terms and conditions" and restrict my phone to incoming calls only.

So, as I have said before, make your own minds up about what you are reading. I rang Vodafone to find out why they had done this and even the guy on the other end of the phone could not believe what had happened, he said he had been with the company six years and never seen a customer be treated in this way, so rather than moan at him I requested to speak to a manger as by now even my patience was wearing thin.
I ended up getting a manger who if you cut him through the middle it said "I Love Vodafone" excellent news for this behemoth of a company but curtains for me the humble customer looking to get some sort of conclusion, I swear that if you placed this guy in a capsule and sent him to Mars he would not be lonely as he would be happy arguing with himself all the way there and back.
Despite my protests that I had stuck to my agreement and I had done what they asked Vodafone still retain the right to stop service whenever they like, despite the agreement in place. So I ended up bidding the man good day as he was quite simply a robot with a script and put the phone down, I looked at my iPhone sitting there as a lifeless lump of plastic and went out and bought another £20.00 Samsung with a pay as you go Sim, oh and its an 02 sim as the reception in Shropshire is far superior to Vodafone in any case.

My protest and my little story will make no difference to @Vodafone as they are far too big a company to miss my 2-300 a month but the moral of my story is this, if I as a businessman who takes the time to sort such things out before I go abroad can get caught out then so can anyone, I am not wet behind the ears I thought I had taken all the steps necessary to ensure I didn't get a huge bill and in the end that is exactly what I got, so my advice is to get your phone unlocked and when you get in your Country of preference buy a local Sim card. That is the advice that Vodafone will not give you here because it's handing business to their competition, (their words not mine) so make of that what you will also, the fact I will never use them again and they have lost a good loyal customer will doubtless not lose their MD a seconds sleep, but if nothing else I hope my sobering tale of corporate greed at its most efficient will stop others being quite so foolish as I.

Yesterday

The black eye is healing well and the broken toe all but forgotten about it seems life is getting back to somewhere near normal if indeed it was ever normal!
Its been a very strange month of late as I have been custodian for my two youngsters as the school holidays are amongst us and as I am writing from home it made sense for me to babysit. It's a little bit of an uneasy truce though as I seldom spent a lot of time with my offspring as I was always working and now I am with them 24/7, its something I am happy about but whether the kids are quite so enamoured is a different thing altogether as no matter how hard we try us Dad's will never be as cool as Mum.

I was at the passport office in Liverpool yesterday getting the kids passports sorted as I think its time they saw a little more of the world, I managed to get everything together and the pictures countersigned along with their forms and brought along the birth certificates as instructed. So after about an hours wait our number was called and we walked over the kiosk number six, sat down and presented our paperwork. There then followed the pulling of faces and sharp intaking of breath that you dread in such situations and sure enough I was handed back the children's birth certificates and told they were the "wrong ones"
After a brief explanation it seems we were in possession of only a certificate of birth not a birth certificate (yes you heard me right) and the full certificate has the parents names on it. So another trip ensues and another wasted day due to a technicality, I would not be so bothered if I was plainly a foreigner but I am more Anglo Saxon than Alfred The Great, surely the passport office can use the certificate to verify who the father is? oh no, I have another trip to make after ordering the full certificates on line, so be warned to check the parents names are on your certificates if you head for the passport office !.

On the way back with the kids i stopped off at McDonalds as it's the done thing surely?. I manged a chicken in breadcrumbs which was called a "Legend" and the kids had to order what they wanted as I couldnt make head nor tail of what they were talking about but we ended up with a "McFlurry" and  McChicken nuggets... please don't ask. I have to admit I don't like the food but the kids shouted out for a "BigMac" so as a good Dad i obliged but perhaps a good Dad would say no if he was thinking only of the kids future cholesterol levels!.  This last thought brought to mind a huge guy stood in front of me in a Cafe in Liverpool centre, he had obviously had a few pies before as he was stood two feet from the counter but his belly was still touching it,
"Could I have 3 bacon, 3 sausage, 3 eggs, beans, tomatoes fried bread, hash browns and black pudding please"
"Ok sir, do you want toast with that" came the eager reply,
"yes please...... could I have wholemeal bread?"

It was at this point my muffled smirk became a full on belly laugh as I couldn't hold out any longer, here was this guy as wide as he was tall having a full heart attack breakfast and pitches the wholemeal bread in at the end as if it will deliver him from evil, you could almost imagine him at the Pearly gates,

"But Peter, I did the wholemeal !"

Bless him.  Anyway we had some toast which had been at two previous cremations before it got to us and gave it the last rites before refusing to eat it, I should have been suspicious when it came to the table in an Urn.
So we skipped the mid morning snack and headed back out into the streets of Liverpool and had a walk around the docks, the kids were overjoyed to see "The Caribbean Princess was in dock so we did a photo shoot, so all in all the day wasn't a disaster but I have to do a repeat journey in a day or so, thanks Shrewsbury Registry office, I owe you one.

All Change for Buses In Shropshire.

There is hot debate this week here in Shropshire about the proposed loss of the Shropshire Link bus service, it seems that in their wisdom Councillors have decided the running costs are too high to let it continue after they were faced with a barrage of cuts from Central office. This somehow doesn't ring true for me as if it is too expensive now why was it deemed efficient when first set up? or are we seeing the same old "there's loads of money in the pot so spend it" mentality that has dogged the public service sector for years?.

Allow me to give you an example of this budget stupidity if I may, for I believe that most of the general public at large would be astonished and annoyed to hear just how these so called managers have operated over the years. I used to sell equipment many years ago to councils and public sector operations, from public owned golf courses to full blown highways departments and every year they were each given a budget for spending on machinery, that in itself was no great surprise and it meant everyone knew where they were. The stupidity of this system however was in the way the money was spent. If the chief buyer shopped around and got good deals off the suppliers and saved the council a whole heap of money and had say for instance ten thousand pounds over at the end of that financial year then instead of getting a pat on the back and a nice positive balance to go into the next year that ten thousand was actually taken off his budget for the following year, so in effect he was penalised for being frugal.
So what happened is that towards the end of the season the buyer would see what budget he had left and try and spend it, on absolutely anything, even if it wasn't needed just to ensure that his budget wasn't cut for the following year. You may wonder what I am getting at here and you have a point, but just suppose these departments actually talked to one another and instead of being penalised for saving money that season the buyer was praised for being so frugal, his budget not affected for next year and the excess money he had saved spent on much needed bus services?  Surely that would be better than seeing public money spent on machinery that was sometimes never ever used worth thousands of pounds sat as a "back up" in case one machine went down?  Because that is what happened, I have seen it time and time again and believe me it still happens.
The above is one of the idiosyncrasies that emerge only in the public sector, it would never be allowed to happen in a privately run company unless it was also too big to control it's own house in an appropriate manner.  The fact that this would solve the current travel crisis will be lost on the powers that be because like many people they are afraid of change and change is most definitely needed, because the money is slowly running out, the same applies in the health service, we no longer have bottomless pits and if the government want to put their public sector businesses in order they need do no more than use the private sector as a role model, it would save millions in the first week.