OPINION: Letters to the editor of the Newbury Weekly News
Please slow down when passing horses
I should like to thank the refuse collectors for their politeness and excellent manners that they display daily to us horse riders.
I was riding today in Cold Ash and carefully managed my pony behind a refuse lorry on a bend which would not have been safe to overtake.
My pony was very good and behaved well for me, waiting patiently behind our refuse lorry, but unfortunately a car driver could not wait and overtook us all… which sadly could have resulted in an accident.
Most drivers are considerate, but a minority are not and continue to exceed the speed limits plus abuse with which I have encountered.
I keep my pony down at Ashmore Green, an extremely well-run yard with riders of different ages and abilities.
We know our Highway Code and have to ride quite a distance before reaching open countryside, which involves a lot of road work.
As a member of BHSAI I am well aware of the Highway Code and our rights to use the highway.
Horses were our first means of transportation before the motorcar arrived.
So please motorists, slow down when you are passing horses.
Thank you for your patience and please understand that we are losing our countryside and bridlepaths due to overdevelopment of roads and housing estates in the West Berks area.
With every blessing to the lovely, polite refuse collectors in the Cold Ash and Ashmore Green area.
Linda C Davies
Hermitage
Why it is important to treasure Paddington
What a shame Chris Clancy felt it necessary to trivialise vandalism in Newbury (Newbury Weekly News, March 13).
It is a serious offence wherever it happens and to whatever items vandals choose to destroy.
If we can’t visibly care for, and value, positive things in our environment what message are we giving to emerging generations of children?
If children are not treated with respect they may not learn to show respect as they grow up.
The Paddington statue appealed to all generations.
Michael Bond’s stories deliver, and reinforce, an important moral message for our children, who need to develop an understanding between right and wrong, and why it is important to care for each other.
Children’s books underpin social and moral education, therefore it is quite right that adults should display their disgust when criminals attempt to destabilise the make-believe world of the child.
I expect we have all learnt much responsible behaviour from good role models in the literature we read as children.
Characters like Paddington also provide comfort and stability for children when negotiating our confusing, frightening and unpredictable world.
Some things are more treasured than money.
Maybe Chris should reflect on his own childhood heroes?
B Stephenson
Speen
The football pitch saga is not over yet
Councillor Paul Dick (ex-super headteacher) must have felt at home when he was appointed to be a part of a task and finish group by the overview and scrutiny committee.
The OSCM marks the council’s homework and is a mechanism for councils to hold the executive and council officers to account, ensuring decisions are transparent and in the best interests of residents.
The particular bit of homework they were marking was the failed decision to replace the Faraday Road football pitch with a multi-million-pound pitch with stands and an additional clubhouse at the rugby club in Monks Lane.
The report drafted by the task and finish group was damning, but to cut a long story short the interesting section for me was an objective to determine if reliable and consistent advice was given to members about the project to assist them in their decision-making progress.
Of course, nothing was consistent with the process.
The number one priority of the Pitch Playing Strategy was to find a replacement for Faraday Road, but Monks Lane didn’t quite cut the mustard as a replacement and the western area planning committee deferred the decision to the district planning committee; exactly the same plans but this time as just a stand-alone pitch with no link to Faraday Road.
I believe that if it had been built it would have been used as an inferior replacement, otherwise why have a second clubhouse and stands?
Would it be fair for the taxpayer to pay over £3m for just another pitch?
The report states: “Either the council misled the High Court or the executive misled councillors and the public when making their justification for the sports hub.”
One of the recommendations was: “The council must refer itself to the Local Government Ombudsman and ask them to consider the contents of this report.”
The task and finish group’s report has ruffled a few feathers.
Councillor Ross Mackinnon claimed he had been libelled despite not even being mentioned in the report.
He claimed it was libel because he was part of the executive at the time.
In Yes Minister fashion they decided to delay any action on the report to another meeting where I suspect attempts will be made to water it down.
Will the council refer itself to the Ombudsman?
I doubt it, but technically the scrutiny committee can or maybe a member of the public will.
The saga of football in Newbury is not over yet.
John Gotelee
London Road, Newbury
I hope the Monks Lane report is not delayed
I understand that people in WBC want the now written report from the Scrutiny Commission on the Monks Lane debacle to be delayed, so the Scrutiny Commission document can be scrutinised.
It would be a great shame if those that want it delayed were in some way implicated in the findings ?
In some places there would be another word for this, but with WBC we all know that it is purely coincidence.
Ian Hall
Ashampstead
Thank you to Tesco for improving your pastry
May I through your paper say a big thank you to Tesco for improving the pastry on your Bramley apple pies.
One no longer has to pick it up from the plate in bits as, like others, they just fell to bits.
As we are no longer in the EU let’s get back to how good it was.
We now need someone to make jam and marmalade like the old people used to make as it’s like jelly in a jar.
Those who don’t like eggs and fat in the pastry and cakes are not forced to get it.
Thank you Tesco as I like those pies.
Keith Haines
Poplar Place, Newbury
Digital death? Or lazy folk passing the buck?
As I sit here, filling out various stuff after the death of my father, Joe Quinn (98) in Ireland recently, I look down at all the various trail of paper stuff that followed on from his death and I am in awe of the millions of families that have had to have followed this trail over many years!
It is truly awesome what relatives have had to do to obtain the access to the monies they have always been entitled to and to which they are now struggling to obtain!
It is not helped by the Civil Service working from home or from a beach in Grenada with a six-hour time difference or indeed from talking to a BOT (whatever that is?) asking you to press various buttons before you can get near a real person, who may be actually on the beach in Spain.
I swear I heard waves when I finally got through to the Inland Revenue about their (note ‘their’) error on my seriously easy retired tax concerns.
Three margaritas and a tequila had doubtless flummoxed him as he sat there in his swim trunks!
Rachel Reeves of course has complicated matters beyond belief and if you have more than a handful of savings after striving for 40 years, she and her team of beachcombers from around the world, working three hours a day, will take 15 months to strip you of your inheritance by taxing the dead for a second time.
Meanwhile, the relatives are sat there unable to pay their bills, bless ‘em!
Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately for me and mine, my dad had savings under a truly meagre amount that the politicians had decided that it wasn’t worth the time on the beach to investigate or bother with.
“Another Pina Colada please, Manuel, and put it on The Speakers Tab”.
(Have you seen what the Speaker of the House of Commons has spent travelling around on the taxpayer with his wife?)
Anyway, back to the point of the title.
I have 27 pages of forms, documents, certificates, certified stuff that says that I am who I think I am (or at least the certifiers do!), bank statements and a whole host of other stuff that has never previously seen the light of day and I just wondered one thing:
Surely everything is linked up somewhere in the system.
Is it too much to think that if 10 per cent of the guys and gals getting their tans and tattoos could drag themselves back to Whitehall for a mere few weeks, they could link a birth certificate with a death certificate?
And maybe if their tax colleagues could drag themselves off the beach at the same time, they could tell them if they owed any money?
And press a button or a BOT to send a bill and they could go back to their beachside resort and claim the internet was down?
Digital is death because lazy people are involved making things really tough to deal with.
Tony Quinn
Greenham
