David Cameron gave a speech today in which he claimed that, while reducing the budget deficit was his duty, his so-called Big Society was his “passion” and that one part of this would be a “Big Society bank” to fund charitable projects. However, charity representatives are saying that his government’s spending cuts are forcing the reduction of existing voluntary activities, with charities making some workers redundant. The new “bank” will use £100m from dormant bank accounts and £200m from the Project Merlin deal to “support working capital projects approved by the government”.

What isn’t being discussed here is the matter of infrastructure. Voluntary means two things: work being done for nothing, and work being funded by people’s donations rather than from taxes. Given that the government is raising taxes, particularly VAT and fuel, while cutting public spending, which is likely to mean people being made redundant, the amount of money charities will be able to raise from people (other than the already very wealthy) is going to be more limited, and this will be more true for small, local projects.

As there will be more people out of work, there are likely to be more people available for voluntary activities. However, if the government cuts grants to local councils, and local councils can raise less money because there are fewer workers, the infrastructure the voluntary work relies on is not going to be there. Here in Kingston, for example, the council proposes to “cut £250,000 from its care budget by targeting services it has no legal duty to run”, which will mean closing four centres which provide services to the elderly and disabled, including two here in New Malden. If the council no longer provides these services, perhaps it will be left to volunteers or a charity — but where are they going to operate if the buildings have been sold off to property developers, as has been proposed for the centre here in New Malden? Once these buildings are sold and very likely demolished, they will not be coming back.

I’ve worked out of one of these centres, driving mentally disabled adults from their homes and care homes to that building and out to various leisure activities around south-west London. Now, work may be free, but vehicles aren’t (unless donated) and maintenance isn’t, and fuel certainly isn’t in the present climate, something the government is making worse by staging three duty increases in a few months at a time when the price of fuel has climbed to a record high, after a poor Christmas retail period when the country is just struggling to come out of a recession.

In short, voluntary work costs money, and if the government wants to take money out of our pockets and the general economy then there will be a whole lot less of it. It looks to me like nothing more than an empty slogan, intended to soften us up to the fact that we will have to pay the state more yet expect less of it, particularly if we very much need the services it provides.

Image source: ICTeachers.

I was just about to leave just after 2pm, when I saw two of the centre’s uniformed staff bolt towards the down escalator, nearly knocking an old lady flying. I thought “I hope whatever they are running after is worth it”. I went to near the escalator so I could see over into the basement, and could see someone sitting or lying (I wasn’t sure as it was too far away) near the bottom of the lifts with someone standing over them. I then left the centre, but then heard more sirens and a message saying that “circumstances have made it necessary to evacuate the building”. As crowds gathered outside, police and ambulance cars arrived, and I heard rumours that something — part of the building — had fallen on top of a woman. I sent out a few tweets saying what I thought I knew, then went round the corner as a proper ambulance arrived at the side entrance. I asked some Bentall’s staff if they were going to be opening again any time soon, and they said no, and don’t wait around for it.

So, I went into Waitrose and did some shopping, and came out and the place was still closed. I waited outside the side entrance for a while and heard the doors of the ambulance shut. Outside the entrance, a woman told me that the actual incident consisted of a girl (she said it was a teenager, although press reports are saying early 20s) had jumped from outside the gym on the 3rd floor. I later met a reporter from the Surrey Comet who told me that his paper had a report on its website that a woman had jumped to her death. The guy asked me a few questions, among them what I thought of the incident. Well, what could I say? It’s not as if I knew her or saw it happen; I just happened to be in the centre when it happened. Obviously, it’s very sad that someone jumped to her death but …

Anyway, I got home and had a look for the news reports on the Surrey Comet website. I found this report, which has since been updated with this one. The first report read:

A woman who plunged three floors in the Bentall Centre has died.

London Ambulance Service were called to the Kingston shopping centre just before 2pm today to reports of a fall from a height.

They were unable to save the woman and their investigations are ongoing at the centre, which is currently closed.

The centre was evacuated and a police cordon has been placed around the scene.

On its website, the centre claims its atrium is higher than the nave of Westminster Abbey.

Did you see anything? Do you know the woman? Get in touch with the newsroom on 0208 744 4255.

Like, what on earth has this comparison to Westminster Abbey got to do with the fact that a young woman jumped to her death? Why did they need to put that bit of local trivia into a report on someone’s tragic death? Presumably it was because they had to pad it out somehow, but how about some other details of the centre or a few details of its history, rather than this detail? It’s so out of place and, in the context, makes the centre sound like a good place to kill yourself. Whoever wrote and edited this, wise up!

Kingston is right on the edge of the areas that got hit by snow the past couple of days — Sutton, Croydon and Bromley were badly hit and roads were gridlocked, with people having to abandon cars after spending hours on journeys of a few miles. There was less snow here, but the council does not seem to see the importance of keeping the pavements clear and safe. Walking on the main road is not all that safe, particularly at bends in the road and particularly after dark — I had a cyclist come very close to me this evening. The icy pavements are not that safe as it is, but are even less so for someone who is less sure on their feet, such as the elderly and some disabled people. It needs to be a priority every time there is snow and ice.

What’s changed? The price has gone up by 20p for a cup of coffee to drink in, something I’ve been told has not happened at any Pret where there has been no re-fit. The place looks like an industrial kitchen, with lots of shiny metal surfaces and a half-complete ceiling (what is quite so stylish about clearly visible ventilators and pipes?). And the seats! They are now a mixture of hard wooden seats of the sort you might find in a school classroom that become rickety and unstable, if they aren’t already, hard plastic seats, and armchair-effect plastic seats with a thin padding. There is also a big open area, the better for people to stand and queue, although it seems that the place is much emptier than it used to be.

The old place was, as I said before, comfortable and you could often get a degree of privacy if you came at the right time, with a big round table and an armchair; the dark colours of the upholstery — black, brown and red — contributed to this. If you didn’t, you were lucky to get a seat. It seems that the management are more interested in promoting their take-away offerings and not letting the customers get their feet under the table, hence the take-away prices are the same while the drink-in prices have gone up; meanwhile, Costa charges 15p less for roughly the same size, and 15p more for a cup that’s nearly double their regular size, and the dark, cosy interior still seems to work for them. And I get the impression that the coffee cups are now smaller, while the tendency to make you a “caffe latte” of which a quarter is froth has remained the same.

I could fill in a complaint form, but they are hardly going to put all the old decor back in just to suit me. Looks like I will just have to vote with my feet and put them under someone else’s table.

Well, as anyone who has experience of the planning system knows, it is not democratic at all; it is simply bureaucratic. Recently, we opposed a development near us which involved building three extra dwellings on a plot of land which currently holds one small house and a large garden, which widens towards the back as its side boundary is next to an alleyway which runs at an angle from the road. The local planning department refused the development, but the developers appealed to the planning ombudsman, who approved it.

If there is one bitter aspect of Charles’s intervention in the Chelsea affair, it is that he only intervenes to oppose high-profile ugly buildings; there is nobody to save ordinary people from having unsuitable housing developments foisted upon their neighbourhoods by a central government bureaucrat. None of those who make planning decisions are elected; it’s all done by appointed staff, and while there is eventually political responsibility for it, it’s usually a long way down the list of issues at every general election.

In any case, the argument that Charles is “unelected” is not valid, since we have a Parliament which could choose to get rid of the monarchy, or replace the Windsors with another family, and has never seen fit to do so. The intervention did not consist of striding into the planning department and throwing his weight around, but having a word in the ear of one of the major investors, something he is quite entitled to do. Elected or not, and regardless of his bias towards Neoclassicism, his views on concrete and glass buildings are shared by many ordinary people; quite apart from the fact that many of them are ugly, this kind of architecture dates very quickly and will be passé — in favour of a different kind of ugly modernism, of course — within much less than a generation.

So, we’ve had the biggest snow fall in southern England since 1991 (which I remember fairly well; I was away at school), and the whole city has ground to a halt with all of the buses cancelled. Really, this is pathetic - if this happened in Canada, it would be business as usual. Much less snow than this two years ago caused chaos as well. Why don’t we take their advice on how to deal with it?

Anyway, perhaps one day of it gave people an excuse to take the day off work, and lots of people were playing out in it, building snowmen and throwing snowballs at each other. I went out to Kingston for the afternoon (the first time the snow has actually lasted long enough to still be there when I’m ready to go out), trudging through it (well, not where I didn’t have to, but for most of the route I did) for some two miles there and back. Fun. I ended up spending about an hour in Kingston as I had to get back before the sun went down, but I managed to get my coffee, read the paper and take a few pictures of people snowfighting before starting my walk back just after 4pm. In most of the town centre, there wasn’t much snow, but a lot of ice, and most of the shops (including the entire Bentall centre - in fact pretty much everything except the cafés and Sainsbury’s) were shut.

I discovered when I downloaded my pictures that the camera had darkened all of my JPEG images - luckily, my camera shoots raw as well, so I used Bibble to construct decent JPEGs out of the raw files and have uploaded a few to Flickr, which you can see above, insha Allah.

Some of my family were still in bed, and the other just went back to bed. Not me. I went downstairs to find a number for the electricity company, EDF. The only numbers turned out to be 0800 numbers, which are supposed to be free, but if you’re calling from a mobile, they’re not. In fact, they’re not only not free on my tariff, but they are not even included in my allowance. Why, you might ask, didn’t I just call from the house phone? Because it’s a cordless, and this particular type of phone needs the mains to work.

So, I start off by calling the London area number (New Malden is, after all, in a London borough and has an 020 number), and when I tapped my home phone number into their system (to identify which house I was calling from), it just cut me off. So I called the “south-eastern area” number, tap my number in, and I’m asked if I’d like a ring-back or if I’d like to wait. I push the number for ring-back, listen halfway through a slowly-delivered recorded lecture, and hang up.

When they fail to call me back after some time, I try the “call and hang on” method. They played the same snippet of an electric piano instrumental over and over again, periodically interrupting it to tell me I was being held in a queue and should hold on. They did not tell me, as certain other computerised answering systems do, where I actually was in the queue. Eventually, I just hung up, because I had no idea how much all this was costing me. My sister eventually did get through (after half an hour of trying), and it was explained to her that there were problems at (or near) a nearby sub-station and that engineers were onto it.

I myself got my call-back three hours after I placed the request and was given a more advanced explanation - that they were going to try to rectify it by putting a fuse back in, and if the power failed again after a short while, they would investigate trouble with the cables. Power eventually came back around mid-day, but went out again about 5pm, but by the time I got back home (about 8:30pm) it was back on, although it has flickered once or twice as I’ve been writing this, strangely never taking out my computer, or even dimming my monitor, although it has cut my internet link a couple of times.

Of course, power cuts are unavoidable from time to time, particularly in severe weather (not that what we’ve had the last three days - just a lot of rain - really counts as severe) and when people sabotage or steal the equipment. The problem is simply that the means of contacting them should be simpler, and that it should be possible to report a power-cut with a standard-rate phone call, if not a free one. I might add that the company’s website address is not exactly obvious: edfenergy.com. It should be edf.co.uk, which at the moment doesn’t point to any website, although it’s registered by EDF Energy’s parent group, Electricité de France. I intend to fax or write them and raise this point, and will probably write to the Surrey Comet as well.

This is a fantastic article which sums up most of the reasons why I hate dogs, and in particular, stupid dog owners:

In the country, where I now live, they bag it, but then sling the whole unpleasant package into a hedge where it hangs, immune from the process of natural decay, as an emblem of our disrespect for public space. Children are bowled over by glossy but feckless golden retrievers, which explode out of the back of Range Rovers like furry Exocets, inserting themselves ‘playfully’ into ball games or equally ‘playfully’ jumping up at people who want nothing to do with them.

In my old London haunts, stocky, pit bull-type creatures were towed along by their tracksuited owners as symbols of street credibility. More often than not, the Peckham and Lewisham animals had Class A drugs [i.e. heroin, cocaine etc] secreted under their collars where only the most foolhardy and desperate user, or the bravest police officer, would dare to look. And, years after the introduction of the Dangerous Dogs Act, banned breeds such as pit bulls still run free in our cities. Last week, a man was charged under the act after his dog killed a five-year-old Merseyside girl.

But for most dog haters, the animals are far more of a nuisance than a danger. ‘Don’t worry, he’s very friendly,’ is the refrain from owners who watch indulgently as Fido thrusts his snout for the fifth time into your crotch. And does anyone else share my revulsion at the sight of an animal that spends large parts of the day with its face buried in its own or other dogs’ nether regions licking the faces of children?

Where I live, the easiest route (if not the shortest) is through a local open space, which is not a park and where there are no “no cycling” signs, but the dog owners apparently think they own the place, letting their stupid animals off leash and, more to the point, out of their sight. This means I often find myself approaching a large or muscular-looking dog and seeing that the owner is several yards ahead with no idea whatsoever off what their stupid pets are doing.

I’ve even had a couple of incidents in which off-leash dogs ran after me - the most recent of those being a couple of weeks ago in that same local open space. On the most recent occasion, I had to fend the wretched thing off by kicking back in its face while trying to pedal fast enough to outrun it. Eventually, its owner managed to call it back. On another occasion, I saw a dog trot up behind a blind woman who was walking along behind her guide dog and poke its nose up her behind.

However, some owners seem to have no clue that their animals are wild and that people have the right to go about their business without being harrassed by out-of-control wild animals - and it’s not just in parks that this happens; I’ve even had to make deliveries to offices where people have let nasty little dogs run around. On one recent occasion, after fending off one such animal, the owner (or, at least, one of the group which was accompanying this and several other dogs) told me, “it’s your reaction, mate”. Uh, no, it’s your dog, mate. It chases after people. It’s out of control and cannot control itself. Why don’t you get yourself an animal you can control?

A few weeks ago, Camden borough council announced that they were going to ban off-leash dog walking except for within certain designated, enclosed areas, and I thought, “great idea - they should do it in Kingston too”. This caused outrage, however, with the TV news featuring an old lady complaining about how she would have to travel a mile or two to the nearest such place. Eventually, and sadly for those of us hoping it would extend elsewhere, Camden backed down.

Why can’t people understand that some of us do not want to be bothered by their dogs? Do they not understand that some people, and particularly children, are actually scared of dogs, particularly those which are much bigger than they are? Why do some people not understand that some of us don’t want them sniffing around us, or licking us or our clothes? These same idiots who let their dogs run around in my area also let them crap on the pathways, and do not bother to clean up after them. I agree with bringing back dog licences, along with laws stating that dogs seen off-leash and out of sight or hassling passers-by are taken away - no ifs or buts.

Trouble is, the staff at the Med have a funny idea of what constitutes service. The Med used to be owned by Algerians, but then the owner sold out to a Ghanaian called, I think, Michael, who has told one of the Algerian staff that he may start selling alcohol in the near future, which will mean goodbye to that staff member and at least one other. I’ve written about this here in the past, but there are two things I hate which have happened to me recently in that place.

One is being asked to move in the middle of my meal. Now, I’ve always thought that asking a paying customer to do this is not good service, ever since seeing the bit in Fawlty Towers wherre Sybil Fawlty tells Basil off for asking a family to move so that “Lord Melbury” could sit where he wanted. Perhaps I falsely drew the conclusion from seeing this. But I’ve been asked this by staff at the Med.

Second, I hate being told that something I have complained about does not bother anyone else. This happened to me today, when I was sitting in the side bit reading my paper and trying unsuccessfully to stop the pages being blown over by the wind, which was blowing straight through the front of the shop because both the door and the folding window were open. And it was windy, and cold. When I asked Michael to shut the door because it was blowing my paper over, he first left me to wait while he finished his phone call, then came over and had me repeat my request. When I did, he went over and asked the two ladies who were sitting (and not reading) by the open folding window if the wind was bothering them. Because they were not reading newspapers but rather talking, it was not. Michael then came over to me and told me that having the front open was good for business and that if I wanted to read my paper, I should move to the back of the café.

Sorry Michael, but telling your customer that his complaint is not valid because “nobody else has complained” and that he should move all his stuff to the back in the middle of his lunch is not good customer service. For one thing, he might tell all his friends that your “service” is crap. I’d advise anyone looking for service with a smile in Kingston to avoid the Meditteranean, because the service is crap. (For that matter, I’d advise anyone looking for halal food to avoid Kingston, because halal food is very thin on the ground here.)

Then they allowed other companies to bid for LT routes, which is when that colour scheme broke down a bit. Then there was something called deregulation, and the National Bus Company was split up, and the dull green London Country buses became colourful stripey bright green London & Country with stripes and funky modern lettering, and other parts of the country similarly erupted in a riot of colour. Then the holding companies wanted their corporate image everywhere, so the riot of colour disappeared into Arriva’s uniform purple and First similarly put its stamp on all its buses. But one thing that also changed was that the green buses became London Transport routes as well, the bus pass became valid and travel became that much easier, and eventually this was extended into the outer suburbanised towns and villages of Surrey, like Caterham, Ewell and Epsom, even Redhill and Leatherhead, as well.

Kingston, like Croydon, used to be Surrey until the 1960s. Kingston town centre lies pretty much on the edge of Greater London. West of Kingston lies Elmbridge district, with yet more suburbanised towns, like Walton, Esher and Weybridge, but for one reason or another - it was necessary for the rump Surrey county to be viable, the middle-class residents were likely to vote Tory, and might have tipped the balance of power in the old Greater London Council - they were kept out of Greater London despite being every bit as suburban as Kingston. But they are Kingston’s back yard.

If you’re wondering what the point of all this is, today I went into Kingston to see what the cost would be of getting a bus to Walton on Thames, where I have a job lined up for tomorrow. There are quite a few buses going out in that general direction, all of them run on behalf of Surrey County Council - not what is now Transport for London - and none of them take bus passes or Oyster once out of Kingston borough and into Surrey. The bus fare for a return to Walton was over a fiver. It is slightly less than the cost of the train fare. Compare this with the cost of a bus pass on Oyster - £3, which entitles you to unlimited travel on buses anywhere in Greater London, and out to those bits of Surrey served by the red buses.

The problem is that there is plenty of industry in those parts of Surrey, and I recently contacted my employment agency in Croydon, which has recommended that I sign on with their Kingston branch (actually not in Kingston but in Molesey, another Elmbridge suburb) as getting to Croydon at short notice (it’s 12 miles away) has been a problem. It seems that a lot of their jobs, like the agency itself, are in places served by the infrequent and expensive Surrey County buses. They are not reasonably accessible unless you have a car, which I don’t. Which means signing on at Kingston is a less viable option than it might seem.

Given that Transport for London have been able to facilitate London rate travel to some parts of Surrey (and other surrounding counties), why on earth can’t they provide buses to the suburbia of Elmbridge? Kingston is a part of London, and Elmbridge is Kingston’s back yard. A look at an old London bus map demonstrates that once upon a time, red London buses (the 131, which presently runs only from Wimbledon to Kingston) did indeed run to Walton. If it can’t be reinstated (and it probably could), why can they not provide an equivalent service? The situation is not helped, of course, by the fuel taxes which artificially inflate bus fares (any talk of subsidy needs to take this into account). It’s ridiculous that a bus fare down the road and back costs as much as a full day’s travel in London.