Feeling young, or just middle-aged? Then read the Adver to make yourself feel like you’re just days away from drawing a pension.
Project aims to get people cycling
A PROJECT aimed at teaching the elderly to cycle has been hailed a success…. So far eight people, ranging in age from 40 to 85, have taken up the challenge at the athletics track at the County Ground.
Eighty five I accept can reasonably be described as ‘elderly’, but forty too? Perhaps the staff at the Adver are very young… or, in their own terms, rather old.
I’m not sure who’s in charge at the Adver but just a day after Mr Brownlaunched the red nest’s local election campaign emphasising increases in community policing, the Adver has chosen to highlight the very same thing. However, much though the red nest like to crow about how much of our money they poor into various activities and gimmicks, what matters are results. The evidence at the moment is that all the extra money spent on Police Community Support Officers has had no tangible benefit.
Spending our money and getting nothing as a result is something I would hope no local politician would be proud of. I fully expect to be disappointed over the coming month.
Always ones to make a crisis out of a drama, the Adver have excelled themselves, allowing one woman’s imagination to turn a minor accident (one wheel of a bus going off the road) into a near tragedy.
Melody Lyall, the landlady at the Red Lion Pub, in Castle Eaton, said it was a very near miss. “The only thing that kept that bus upright was a small wall that it wedged itself against, otherwise it would have tipped over into a flooded field. Because both the front doors were on that side things could have turned very bad very quickly. It was quite dramatic. I was in my conservatory drinking my morning coffee and I witnessed the whole thing. The field on the other side is flooded at the moment – it is under several feet of water. You can imagine the outcome if it had toppled over…. I would have said they were pretty lucky as it would have been tough to get them all out of that bus without it going over on its side.”
Wow! Children safely alight from a bus with one wheel in a ditch. Whatever next? I dropped a slice of bread on the floor recently. Perhaps I should ask the Adver round to see how close I came to starvation in the time it took me to cut another slice….
I’m sure that if a late demand for payment of a fine had been sent to anyone else and had then been dropped, the Adver would be complaining about people being let-off. When it’s themselves on the receiving end of a demand for payment, the story is rather different.
This ability to chase people whenever they like means you could have fines hanging over your head for decades.
First Great Western is being issued with a Remedial Plan Notice for exceeding the threshold on cancellations in the second half of last year….
The company is also being issued with a Breach Notice for misreporting its cancellations. This stipulates the steps First Great Western must take to rectify the problem.
In addition a £29m package of passenger benefits, fully funded by First Great Western, has been agreed….
Failure to deliver these new commitments would be a default of the franchise agreement which could lead to the Government terminating First Great Western’s franchise.
Reading the Adver’s first attempt at reporting this, at 8.50 this morning, you’d think that FGW had just chosen to splurge £29M on extra trains entirely of their own volition.
SWINDON train company First Great Western will invest £29m to improve services, it has emerged today. First will address poor performance in relation to cancellations and delays. It acknowledges its service has fallen short of its own standards and the expectations of passengers. The company says it is committed to improving performance and will take the necessary action to ensure cancellations and delays are minimised.
In the past year the company has come under fire from passenger groups and regulators for the service they provide.
A slight hint of criticism, but nothing more. The second report, twelve hours later, gets it right.
SWINDON train company First Great Western has been forced to make £29m worth of improvements. First Great Western (FGW) says it will now take action to ensure cancellations and delays are lowered for customers.
The company was ordered to make the changes by the Department for Transport.
The Beeb have done no better, hinting at nothing more than ‘discussions with the DfT’ as the prompt for this expenditure. All led astray by the railway company perhaps? Hardly. Their press release is quite clear about why they are spending the money.
The £29m plan has been put together to address poor performance, particularly in relation to cancellations and the subsequent contravention of our Franchise Agreement.
Who needs spin-doctors with reporting like this? The Beeb also give space to the group running a campaign of fares evasion.
But this is the result of passenger power, that independent groups like us and our fare strike have been responsible in a great part for these things happening, by bringing them to the attention of the government and making First lose face.
Really? I’m struggling to see anything more than penalty clauses in a contract being applied. This would have happened (and indeed has happened to other rail companies in the past) regardless of the actions of a small band of fares-dodgers.
I don’t wish to belittle the experience of a man in Nythe who was attacked when a dog broke free from its tether: the description he has given does seem quite bad. However, having the Adver headlined its story ‘Man Savaged by Rottweiler’ you’d have thought they could have illustrated the story with a photograph that shows something more serious than just a ripped jean, without a hint of the bite wounds that apparently required hospital treatment. As it is, you could walk into a high street retailer and buy jeans in a worse state than the pair in the photo.
It’s not the first time that the Swindon Advertiser has used sensational headlines to report incidents allegedly related to fast food outlets. However, today’s offering is more devoid of fact than usual. The headline:
Burger brought teenager close to death
The opening paragraphs:
ROBERT Dobie munched on a burger during a visit to Swindon… and it almost cost him his life.
A few days after eating the snack, the 13-year-old from Marlborough had a stroke and went into a coma with a rare form of e-coli.
The statement reported from the council:
The bacteria were identified as the harmful e-coli 157 strand, but we have been unable to confirm the source because of the individual’s varied eating history during the onset period. We are happy that there is no further risk to Swindon residents.
Presumably the boy ate at a variety of places just before he went ill. To single out just one of those seems a blatant attempt to whip up hysteria.
Whilst wondering just how desperate for news the Adver (and me, for that matter) must be to be publishing a story about a cat pawing paint over someone’s carpet, I also can’t help thinking that any other person, having fallen asleep with their front door open, would just be grateful that nothing worse had happened (such as a burglar walking in), rather than complaining that neither their insurers nor the council would pay for the damage. The lady should just paws for thought and consider how lucky she was that things didn’t turn out far more serious.
If the press are to bebelieved, there’s no such thing as business travel. The 12% increase in bookings reported by Holiday Inn is just from holiday makers and not business travellers…. Hmm… I guess that explains why, even for a summer booking, they charge less for a weekend booking than for a mid-week one at either of their Swindon hotels.
