Norman Duerden, FRSA, 1919 - 2013

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about Norman Duerden after discovering some of his photographic books in a Lake District bookshop. He had been my primary school teacher 50 years ago and had been instrumental in encouraging the class to understand and enjoy the natural environment. In the way that the internet works, his family found the blog a couple of months later and made contact. We exchanged several emails and Norman was said to be"genuinely delighted to hear that you had remembered him and valued his input in your life." Norman sent me a note which was very touching:

"Thankyou indeed; golden days, eh? - a mere step from 92 years to wayward cricket balls and leg-breaks over the school roof. Please remember me to the glorious hills at your very back door, won't you? I hope that my little friend the dotterel still rides the June snow-storm on Drumochter."

Later, as he was beginning to have difficulty of recall, he wrote me a poignant note in what he described as 'my terrible scribbles'.
"That peerless Victorian naturalist, Richard Jefferies was never to experience the dubious delight of old age, but he lived long enough to realize the truth - that faces fade like flowers. Neither is there any recall. I listen to music, but can no longer hear the Willow Warbler. Computers are a complete mystery, I can no longer cut my own toe nails, but enjoy fish and chips. I am 92 next month. Thank you so much for remembering me. Norman"

A few weeks ago the family contacted me to say that Norman was in a nursing home and had not long to go. I attended his funeral on 11 January 2013 and reflected that he had made a difference in the way that teachers and others can, not by supervising and controlling children, but by giving them respect and imbuing their charges with a sense of wonder. The funeral was in the Overdale crematorium near Horwich, where he had stayed during his last year to receive care and support from his family. As always with people of his vintage, his peers and friends had mainly passed away but the minister conducted a reflective and reverent service for family and friends. This included moving tributes from two of his stepsons and an old friend.

Norman was indubitably linked with the Ribble Valley. After serving in the RAF as a radio operator and photographer, he played football with Preston North End and became a teacher in that remarkable tranche of post war teachers who were trained after the war and brought real life experiences into the classroom. He lived in Ribbleton in Preston and taught at Ribbleton Hall Primary School, he went on to become vice Principal of Alston Hall College of Education, which sat on a scarp slope overlooking the River Ribble.

He lived out his years further up the Ribble Valley where he was close to the Yorkshire Dales and the Trough of Bowland. He had been celebrated as a photographer for his slide shows that were primarily about bird and wildlife but also captured the geological splendours of the limestone country around Malham and Settle. An area that captivates the spirit and detonates a yearning to return. These are areas he captured in photographs, sketches and sound recordings which became the basis for his lectures, radio broadcasts and books.

His writing had an authentic quality that is reflected in his broadcasts and books. This extract from one of his books on the Dales provides an insight into his deep appreciation as a naturalist of the limestone country of the upper Ribble valley.

'Each of its many manifestations - pavement, scarp, pothole, scree and outcrop - provides a new array of species particularly exciting to the newcomer. Half a century on, one remembers above all the initial impact of its austere beauty and its infinite photographic possibilities. Its high places were more frequented by waders _ golden plover, lapwing, and dunlin _ than by humans. Foxes infrequently seen by day were revealed by an abundance of cat like prints after overnight snow; badgers had frolicked on the fell side..'

He corroborated in the publishing of books about the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales and the Birds of Scotland. These included publications with Denis Healey and Melvin Bragg as well as other  eminent photographers. Norman was not only a notable photographer but also an artist with a large portfolio of paintings, both oil and water-colour, that are to be shown in a retrospective collection later this year. He visited Scotland frequently and as his note indicates he was inspired by some of Britain's rarer species that breed in the Cairngorm mountains. The photographs below are taken from his published books.

Dotterel at  Drumochter

Peregrine Falcon

Although he was firmly grounded in the delights of the Ribble Valley he had a wider compass and was a regular visitor to Grindelwald in the Swiss Alps, which sits adjacent to the alpine meadows below the Eiger in the Jungfrau region. He also travelled wider to South Africa and the Middle East photographing the fauna and flora.

Norman opened the minds of many of his pupils to the environment around them and was recognised as an authoritative voice and authentic recorder of natural history by his peers. He did this with a modesty and style that showed his passion for the wildlife and natural environment of the Ribble Valley and the Dales. He is survived by his wife Maureen and daughter Pam.

Snow Fish

Basking Pike

Cushioned trail

Lochan Spling

Today was in monochrome, there had been an overnight dump of snow and the light was fully stopped down. The two inches of snow provided perfect cushioning for the morning run. I had seen an otter a couple of days ago and I searched for its tracks in the snow along the river bank but without success. The deer and foxes had left their trails in the virgin snow but the real surprise was a rare visit from the golden eagle which soared over the river.

The giant pike on Lochan Spling looked as if it was dancing on ice. 

HMV

HMV has a strong resonance in my life and its disappearance will not only severely damage our shopping centres but also leave a significant gap in their offer. My father was a DJ in the 1950's and early 1960's and he kept a large collection of 78rpm records in a box in the hall. Record labels were colourful items in the drab 50's with labels like Parlophone, Columbia, Brunswick, Regal and Capitol but it was His Master's Voice that captured my attention. Why was a dog listening to Joe Loss or Perry Como? HMV may have been barking then but now they have fallen over the retail cliff.

I still have the remaining collection of 78rpm records and they provide the soundtrack of my childhood from Guy Mitchell, Petula Clarke and Alma Cogan to Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Doris Day and Eddie Calvert. Only Ella Fitzgerald still gets played. Every Saturday evening a taxi arrived to collect my father and take him to some dance hall, hospital or event. I loaded the taxi whilst he searched for his playlist and overcoat. He would set up his twin Connoisseur record turntables, wire up his speakers, microphone and decks to the amplifier and organise the dancing. It brought in about £2 per week, a 20% increase in his weekly wage although 10/- was usually set aside for new or replacement records, shellac 78s broke easily. During the Christmas party season he would run company children's parties and I was usually taken along to be the stooge demonstrating the Hoola Hoop, the Twist or whatever the latest craze was. He displayed an advert for HMV below his record decks and a generation of youngsters probably wondered why a dog was barking into a funnel.

The collapse of high street retailing is now in full flood.  The early loss in the last month of Comet, Blockbuster and Jessops came as no great surprise, although Jessops will be missed and leaves a gap in photographic retail outlets. But the loss of HMV is a different matter, I had shopped here for years, more than 50% of my CDs, DVDs and the unrecyclable pile of VHS videos came from HMV. I had bought presents from HMV the week before Christmas. This was far worse than losing Woolworths or Habitat which had outlived their time. HMV on the other hand was at the epicentre of a fast changing industry. Their shops have always been one of the anchors in any major shopping mall and they are usually crowded. I suppose that like many others I was seduced into buying CDs and DVDs online but I stopped using Amazon three years ago when they transferred their media sales to the Channel Isles to avoid paying taxes. Too late, they had eaten into HMVs margins and one of the few chain shops on the high street worth visiting for browsing and buying had closed its doors.

The accelerating decline of British retailers is damaging the vitality of our towns and cities and seriously reducing jobs. They were always going to decline when the internet became a trusted means of shopping.  Who wants to tramp round the same set of chain shops, pay for parking and waste time when you could be doing something useful. Give me some distinctive indigenous shops which help the customer and do repairs any time.  The chain stores became guilty of frisking the credit card set by importing cheap goods, marking up prices and cashing the difference. Britain may once have been a nation of shopkeepers but the internet global players have cut out the middleman (retail businesses) as well as the taxman.

An analysis of retailers going bust carried out by the British Retail Consortium reveals that the collapse is accelerating again after a recovery in 2009 and 2010. Recovery from the recession of 2008 seemed to be well underway until 2010 but with stagnant wages, rising inflation, higher unemployment and less secure and often part time jobs; people have reeled in their spending. At least one in ten shops are now empty, the Specials will soon be re-releasing 'This town is coming like a Ghost Town', although you will need to download it because almost all the record shops have been closed down.

Retailers going out of business
Year             Companies     Stores    Employees

2007            23                    2600      14083
2008            54                    5793      74579
2009            37                    6536      26688
2010            26                      944      10930
2011            31                    2469      24025
2012            54                    3951      48142

2011 was the year when the coalition government's austerity measures began to kick in and if shopping is a measure of our economic prosperity then we are in deep shit. There are more than 40,000 shops which are empty and that is not including all the charity shops and pawnbrokers that are now squatting in our town centres. Some serious thinking is required, not on how to relet the shops, but on how to redevelop our town centres so that they provide more housing, community run services and small business spaces that generate footfall and create the sense of place.

A sense of place was the last thing in the minds of the property speculators over the past decade as they bullied planning authorities to give permission for the demolition of traditional properties to create space for pumped up retail developments. They may have temporarily hiked their rental streams but in so doing they wiped out the small independent shops that gave a place its identity. Whatever happens next I hope that HMV is resurrected perhaps with a more politically correct name.

Monemanach

Glenshee hills to north

North east to Mayar and Dreish

Upper Glen Isla with Druim Mor prominent

Tuesday, 8 January, 2013

Ascent:       470 metres
Distance:    4 kilometres
Time:         1 hour 14 minutes

Monemanach        807m      42mins

I had gained a free afternoon after completing two days work in Forfar by lunchtime. Rather than returning down the A90, a road even less inviting than the A9, I figured that I had time to take in Monemanach, a lonely Corbett at the head of Glen Isla. The early morning rain had finally stopped and the odd patch of blue was infiltrating the skyline to the west. I drove through Kirriemuir in the early afternoon without seeing a single soul and then followed the road less travelled across to Glen Isla. The final 4 miles from the castle at Forter brought me to the road end at Auchaven where I parked at the foot of the track.

I had thrown a pair of boots and waterproofs into the car just in case I could manage a walk. I changed out of my suit into some old trousers and a fleece jacket before starting the walk up a land rover track which zig- zagged its way up to 600 metres. It continued further but I had spotted a faint path which followed a line of fence posts more directly to the summit. I followed it for the last couple of hundred metres of ascent through the heather and mosses on a never ending convex slope. It was a hard slog in a fresh westerly wind although it was relatively warm for January. There was very little snow remaining on the Glenshee hills that became visible to the north.

Solitude was guaranteed although several red grouse squawked at me as I invaded their territory. The summit is spectacularly disappointing, a tiny cairn at the end of the fence posts. The hills of the north rejoiced even in their sombre winter colours but in the foreground the fickle sun was reflected in the heathers to give a bright umber glow. I was able to identify the route I had once climbed from Auchaven to Mayer and Dreish and then over miles of peat hags to Druim Mor, which was my penultimate Munro top in 1997. The trek over to Druim Mor provided one of the most tedious traverses. It was not appreciated by my then 13 year old son, who declared that he would not be doing any more tops. Nevertheless the descent down Glen Isla on that occasion had produced an enjoyable finale to a long day.

The descent from Monemanach was a doddle as I found a track down from the summit and it was a lot easier than the climb up by the fence posts. I was back at the car in double quick time, it was mid afternoon. Unfortunately, this was the last Corbett or Munro that I had not climbed in this part of the Eastern Highlands, an area I have begun to enjoy for the vast open views and abundant wildlife.

By travelling back via Blairgowrie I was able to miss the A90 and get through Perth before the evening rush, if such a thing exists in Perth. As always the Broxden roundabout provided a good proxy for city traffic congestion - if ever a roundabout would benefit by traffic lights then this is it - it is like jumping into a fast turning skipping rope, something I was occasionally invited to try by the girls at my primary school in return for inviting some of them to join the boys in a mass game of Den Relievo. How they managed to do it with two ropes and going pepper made football and cricket seem like simple pursuits.

Blue Skies and Green Futures

January Skies

Grey turns to Blue horizons

Green foundations

After 2 weeks of grey, wet days to bid farewell to 2012, we were exposed to the sun as 2013 dawned. The skies were blue, the mosses and lichens, drunk on the abundant rainfall of 2012, were oases of the brightest green. The soundtrack from the burn had a soothing rhythm. My optimism was alive as each year is a venture into the unknown.

If only Danny Boyle was the prime minister; 2013 could be the year that we stop taking George's medicine and released the potential of a more savvy, green and ethical Britain.

Christmas Morning

Santas Bothy

Zip Wire to 2013

Great Chocolate Reading Granny

I was berated when the kids were young for insisting on a morning walk before any opening of presents. Today there was no complaint about a walk up the local hills by Gregor straight after breakfast. We even blagged some ghluwein from a party of festive walkers at the top of Lime Craig.

Granny stayed in bed until we returned for the present opening. She will no doubt finish the pile of books before the 2013 bells and chocolates well before that.

Craigmore, Aberfoyle

Craigmore

Loch Ard, Ben Lomond and Arrochar Alps from the summit

Looking northeast to snow-capped Ben Ledi

Ascent:              370 metres
Distance:           4 kilometres
Time:                 1 hr  5 mins
Craigmore         387m   35mins

Craigmore sits behind the village of Aberfoyle and beckons you as you arrive from Stirling or Glasgow. Its fine steep southern face was a former whinstone quarry that provides the blue-grey dolerite building stone for the traditional buildings in the village. To the north of the hill are the old slate quarries that provided the railways and much of central Scotland with their roofing material. I was told by the last manager that less than half the slate had been extracted when it closed.

There has been no attempt to reopen the quarries since 1996 when geologists from Glasgow University looked at the possibility of sourcing slate for the roof of the Great Hall at Stirling Castle. Alas, Spanish slate was chosen instead and, on the grand opening of the restored Great Hall on a blustery St Andrew's Day 1999, the flimsy Spanish slates were heard tippling down the roof to the palpable amusement of the Duke of Edinburgh as a young harpist played for the Queen and First Minister. Maybe the proximity of Tradstocks, one of Scotland's main providers of natural building stone, will prompt a re-examination of commercial extraction in the future.

The routes to the summit start from the David Marshall (DM) Lodge. The original path, which I normally follow, starts about 50 metres above the entrance to the DM Lodge on the right curve in the Duke's pass road. This path has become overgrown in recent years since the opening of the new route. The path cuts diagonally through the bracken and brambles and crosses the track leading to the old whinstone quarry. Beyond this, the path crosses an old fence and steepens. It is quite distinct as it climbs the shoulder of the hill. You pass a large boulder and a couple of fir trees before reaching the old tramway that brought slate from the slate quarry down to the village. An old stone-built section of the tramway is where the path crosses a channel and climbs steeply again. At the top of a ramp, it joins the new path which arrives from the Duke's pass. From here the path climbs and then follows a level section along a boggy ridge before dropping to a bealach and then the final ascent up a rocky path to the flattish summit. There is a small cairn overlooking Loch Ard with fine views of Ben Lomond and the Arrochar Alps beyond.

The more recent route follows the path to the waterfall from the DM car park and turns left to a path that keeps to the west of the waterfall and climbs through the birch forest to the Duke's Pass. Crossing the road here leads to a path which zigzags its way up the hillside for an ascent of 200 metres before joining the original path. The path also feeds into a short traverse parallel to the Duke's Pass and after about 400 metres the Craigmore path requires you to turn sharp left on the less travelled path that is easy to miss when the bracken is high in summer. If completing a circuit of the hill this is the better route for the ascent. The descent by the original route is far quicker and although steep gives splendid views of the village and the Forth Valley.

From the summit, the walk can be extended to Ben Venue but it is a long slog (2 hours) through bogs, tree plantations and quite undulating before it curves round to the superb summit of Ben Venue. It is better to treat Craigmore as a mini hill and an alternative to the ever-popular Ben A'an at the other end of the Duke's pass. If extending the walk, it is worth following the old tramway to the slate quarry which offers a dramatic examination of our industrial heritage. Craigmore is a good hill on a clear evening when there are views down to the hills of Arran as well as over the Campsies to Glasgow. But best of all is the arc of munros from Ben Lomond to Ben More - west to northwest. And the fact you can be down and home in 15 minutes if the weather or mood takes you and your legs are willing.

Schiehallion

Monday, 10 December 2012
Ascent:     805m
Distance:  9km
Time:       2hrs 58mins

m  Schiehallion  1083m    1hr  43mins

The pressure was rising, the temperature dropping and a cold day with a stiff northerly wind was forecast. A good day for Schiehallion with the possibility of a corbett in Glen Lyon afterwards. By the time I had assembled my winter gear, unloaded the logs from the car that I had collected the day before and filled up with diesel, it was 8:15am, about half an hour later than planned. The traffic on the A84 was light but slow in the icy conditions. Loch Tay was glorious and the slopes of Ben Lawers were amply covered with snow although the summit was in cloud. The drive through Fortingall and then over to Tummel Bridge was perfect, watched over by buzzards on telegraph poles and pheasants in the hedgerows. The final 3 miles of road to the Braes of Foss was on sheet ice and required patience and a delicate touch on the accelerator. It was 10:00am before I set out in winter boots, with ice axe and crampons strapped on my rucksack and with a walking pole to help me stay upright.

The car park was a skating rink and the path was initially an extension of this, it was like walking on Fox's glacier mints, even Peppy would have fallen over. After the flat section the path steepened and was a mixture of crunchy snow and gravel path which had been built by the John Muir Trust in 2003 on the first of their land purchases to safeguard Scotland's wild places. Before this there was an overused muddy path which had scarred the north face and made Schiehallion a must avoid hill. The reality is that it has an aura of magic, with its history of scientific discovery and the magnificent views in all directions. The long broad summit ridge is a jumble of quartzite boulders that lighten up the bleakest of days as well as testing your dancing feet.

I made good time up the path to the ridge at 700 metres where extensive snow cover meant crunching through the snow hoping that the sun kissed crust would not break. It was like walking over a meringue, or should that be a pavlova, because when it did collapse it was knee deep soft snow below. It was energy sapping as well as slow progress. A pure white ptarmigan appeared at about 800 metres and accompanied me for a few minutes, one of the simple delights of a winter walk. At 900 metres there is a cairn/ shelter and a lone walker appeared out of the mist on the descent. He was equipped for the worst of weathers although like me he had resisted the temptation to put on crampons. We chatted for a while, he had driven down from Inverness and was trying to make the best of the good winter conditions.

It was bitterly cold in the northerly wind and I regretted not having a hood on my down jacket. Although the lower slopes were blessed with low angled winter sunshine, Schiehallion was draped in cloud with visibility down to 40 metres or so. It is a long haul over the boulder strewn ridge to the summit which is a bit of a disappointment: a micro cairn on a small rock outcrop but with some good rock shelves which are south facing and sheltered from the northerly winds. I stopped for a drink and tried to capture the cold loneliness of the summit on camera.(see above) Last time I had been here I was accompanied by about 25 people and several bottles of bubbly.(see below)

The descent was tiring because of the concentration needed over the boulders at first and then the snow and ice on the path lower down. I met another walker on his ascent and he could have been dressed for one of Scott's expeditions. When I described this on returning home I was admonished for not taking sufficient clothing: an icebreaker base layer with a lambswool sweater and a lightweight down jacket was all I had. I was down by 1pm and after a coffee I had to decide whether to go up to the head of Glen Lyon to climb my last corbett in this part of the highlands. If the road was as bad as the Braes of Foss road it would take over 45 minutes before I could start walking and then 3 hours on the hill. Did I want to be out on an ice crusted hill after nightfall? For once logic prevailed and I drove home, although as I soaked in the bath at 3:30 it seemed a terrible waste of a good day.

And in more clement weather, 2008 compleation

London calling

Ice skating at the Natural History Museum   

Covent Garden

Pimlico skies

London was dressed up and gung-ho for Christmas at the start of December. Ice skating outside the Natural History Museum, carols at Covent Garden, the sky crisscrossed with jet streamers and even the  MI5 building glowing like a nuclear power station as evening sneaked in. As always the contrast between rich and poor was stridently evoked. London seems like another country and 'London calling to faraway towns' seems like an apposite invitation to a foreign city with the British-born population now in a minority in this cosmopolitan crossroads of corporate governance and cultural pollination.

Undoubtedly this diversity makes London an exciting city but there is a bubble of international wealth that has colonised much of the city centre whilst the centrifuge of the housing market ditches the low-income households off to the outer suburbs or beyond. Crossing the roads in Knightsbridge involves dicing with Range Rovers, exotic Italian jobs, blacked-out limos and the odd Boris bike. We were the only lunchtime diners in the cafe not drinking champagne or wine. The Oyster card allowed us to escape Harrods and its wannabes and join the thronging streets of shoppers and office workers east of Regent Street, where service workers on less than a living wage and destitute characters exist in a parallel universe to their fellow citizens.

Some of the inner suburbs such as Brixton and Shoreditch seem to have found a niche in this game of chance and with their vibrant melange of cultures and provision of services that accommodate every need, they are attracting an energetic younger population that will nourish their regeneration. I doubt that Chelsea and Westminster will evolve in the same way, it has priced itself out of the UK economy as a virtual tax haven and is now the only borough with a declining population - is this the start of London falling?

Leveson Inquiry: Jousting with Euphemisms

The response by the PM, David Cameron, to the Leveson Inquiry has been a useful gauge of the declining morality of Britain. The recommendation from Leveson was a statutory underpinning for a regulatory system to provide an "appropriate degree of independence from the industry, coupled with satisfactory powers to handle complaints, promote and enforce standards, and deal with dispute resolution". Cameron's response was obfuscatory, he has "serious concerns and misgivings" about legislating for a regulatory body and "the danger is that this would create a vehicle for politicians ...to impose regulation and obligations on the press, something that Lord Justice Leveson himself wishes to avoid".

In many ways, the PM provided the very evidence of why a statutory framework is necessary. Like the Press Complaints Commission who rejected many complaints against newspapers, he simply extracted what he wanted from the Inquiry Report. He ignored the key recommendation and then jousted his way through Parliamentary Questions with a pre-rehearsed set of euphemisms to imply that he agreed with much of Leveson.

He refused to stand by the recommendations of Leveson for a statutory underpinning and by doing so justified the imperative for a motion in Parliament to determine the need for legislation. The victims of Murdoch's invasion of privacy were not duped by Cameron's duplicity. The British public is angry at the latest evidence of the subservience of the PM to the press barons. There have been two petitions with more than 100,000 signatures calling for some statutory regulation. According to a YouGov poll, 79% of the public support some statutory underpinning for regulation. Cameron may sound reasonable (and even chillaxed) but his actions are unreasonable in his quest to bury the Leveson Inquiry recommendations.

Meanwhile, some of the more self-acclaimed 'ethical press' are arguing that it was the small minority of newspapers (Sun, Mail, Express, Mirror, Telegraph) who have misbehaved, regional newspapers never behave in such a manner and that to legislate for the crimes of Murdoch is an overreaction. Anyone who has personal experience of press reporting (national or regional) knows that the stories that emerge in the press leave out facts that do not fit their slant and emphasise those that do and by the judicious use of headlines and photographs to give the reader a very lopsided view of events.

Maybe the press is becoming an increasing irrelevance in shaping opinions but when it gets personal it does have irreversible consequences and people feel besmirched for life. This is why Leveson was right to stress the need for an independent body and his suggestion of Ofcom to oversee a revamped Press Complaints Commission was prescient in that this could be extended to the abuse on the internet at a future date.

The only conclusion you can reach is that the press has such a hold on Cameron that it is overriding his normal inclination, which is to sway with the public mood. This would surely tell him to implement Leveson. The counterargument advanced by Michael Gove, the Barclay Brothers, Richard Desmond, Lord Black and the hopelessly optimistic PCC chair, Lord Hunt, comes from a vanguard of characters who are hardly blessed with an independence of spirit. Nor do they have ethical standards that give them the gravitas or entitlement to convince the public otherwise, they are only slightly less toxic than the Murdoch mafia. 

Aberfoyle Deluge

Bank corner -  synchronised wading

Flood Sale

Flood and Rescue

Loch below the Covenanters, but the eyesore of the Covenanters remains

Coop closed

Another holiday for the school

Water sports centre, Lochard Road

This is the worst flood since 1950 said the man in waders climbing the steep path behind the school to access the Duke's pass in order to march right back down to the village. And so it was, the water had reached the bottom of the drive at Menteith House and was waist deep along Lochard Road. The school playground was flooded and the Main Street was knee deep with a strong current clearing the pavement of street furniture and almost floating the post vans. The roads service and the Fire (or should that be Flood) and Rescue service were distributing sandbags to the already flooded shops and urging shoppers and voyeurs to get back.

It is not unusual to have floods in November but the rains of last week had swollen the rivers, saturated the ground and a night of continuous heavy rain coupled with a high tide conspired to create a local harbinger of global warming. The minister was moving out today to her new parish in Perthshire, or at least hoping to, but god moves in mysterious ways. Hopefully she will not need to wait 40 days before the removal men arrive. The man in the waders regaled me with stories of the rowing boat that had acted as a ferry in 1950 between the Baillie Nichol Jarvie and Menteith House. A young woman reminded me about the time I dragged her and her brother through the flood in a rubber dinghy and then speculated on whether there would be a real flood sale at Guyana.

Meanwhile, several houses that had never been flooded before were sand bagging furiously as the water lapped up the garden paths in search of thresholds to cross. The early van drivers had been trapped and sat in their cabs, the post did not get through, the children had another day off school. Friends have been calling to check the flood levels. When will they build that levee that was proposed all those years ago?

Jimmy Quinn takes charge

November Nihilism

Blue skies and bare branches - a model for corporate tax evasion

 Commissioner policing - oligarch replaces democracy

 Outsourcing: Public services swallowed up by sphagnum    

November is my least favourite month as the light fades, the leaves fall, plants die and the dreich damp days get even shorter. This autumn it seems that representative democracy is also dying. In recent weeks we have watched large corporations, which have cheated governments of taxes for years become global pariahs in the eyes of an increasingly energised electorate. The same electorate that has chosen not to exercise its right to vote for police commissioners or for the government for that matter, the Tories received votes from only 30% of the electorate in the last election.  

Elsewhere there are multiple stirrings of employees and customers demonstrating their opposition to the government contracting out services to global companies who reward executives and exploit workers in an exhibition of corporate greed. They bring along a rope of different professionals who feed on the ever more lucrative processes of outsourcing and procurement. The time is ripe for a mass outbreak of nihilism against both corporate and political governance. Don't expect any outcomes!

It is hard to find a newspaper or a senior politician that is not appalled at the level and extent of corporate tax evasion. The same newspapers that have carried adverts to invest offshore, and the same politicians of all parties who have refused or turned a blind eye to the long-running scam of tax dodging. Amazon, Starbucks and Google may be getting the headlines for tax evasion but there is much evidence that the majority of FTSE 100 companies have engaged in the same ploys to reduce corporate taxes. Although the generally recognised ethical businesses like John Lewis, the Coop and even some of the big companies like BP have a more honourable track record. In the latter case profits, and with them go taxes, are needed if they are to pay dividends to sustain our pensions.

Despite attempts by several newspapers to expose the scale of the problem, it is difficult to unravel what is the level of the unpaid tax. In total it is generally reckoned to be of the order of £125bn per annum.  More than enough to reboot the economy and protect many public services which are being devastated in all sorts of ways that are not yet understood. It would help if the Inland Revenue would cooperate to make the scale of the evasion (legal or not) more transparent so that there could be greater scrutiny by the army of investigative citizen sleuths. One thing is becoming quite clear, the public is seething and want to use their wallets and their credit to punish the miscreants. Even the Chancellor seems to realise that the public has knocked down the door of corporate tax evasion. He would be foolish not to seize the day and rattle the cages of the global corporate offenders.

I watched the first Police Commissioner being interviewed after his election by the rag, tag and bobtail of electors that had bothered to turn out. "I will do everything possible to reduce crime", he said, "but it is not just a job for the Police, we must involve local councils and the public". Exactly, which is why the local police were established by and responsible to the municipalities in the first place. As they merged they became Joint Boards and the chairs became puppets of the Chief Constables whose ever-increasing operational responsibilities discouraged any interference from elected representatives. In the top-down budgeting regime of Cameron's Britain, it is asking too much of lone commissioners to understand let alone challenge massive police forces. They have become more insular to protect their budgets instead of collaborating with other services that are equally important in the drive to reduce crime.  The danger is that the commissioners will soon be house trained to voice the demands of Chief Constables. With democratic accountability through Councils, these demands are considered in the wider round with input from other services from road engineers to youth workers to produce more holistic solutions. 

If success is measured in crime rates and clear-up rates then it has been the smaller more localised police forces that are the most successful. They usually work closely with the local council at a community level. The Metropolitan Police is hardly a model for the rest of the country with a track record of institutional corruption and racism that is well documented and unenvied by the rest of the Police authorities. I have worked with well-governed police forces where informed and knowledgeable councillors encourage corporate working, community involvement and accountability in ways which the police commissioners will have great difficulty replicating. Perhaps the electorate intuitively felt this and refused to be conned by the government who failed to make any case for this new form of autocratic governance.

The third strand of nihilism concerns the increasing scepticism of the benefits of outsourcing public services. The well-documented failures of G4S during the Olympics highlighted this but there are similar examples across a multitude of services from care homes to rail franchise operators. The police, NHS, further education and local government are being forced to transfer services to scavenging outsourcing companies. It is usually accompanied by rising costs and loss of local ownership. Localism is being sacrificed on the altar of mythical efficiencies and th transfer of capital projects from public sector borrowing requirements. The sense of indignation by communities and their local representatives of all political parties is an anger that will not be easily assuaged. They did not want this but it was imposed by successive governments who have been too easily swayed by the vast array of lobbyists and professional service companies who have sponsored their way into the inner sanctums of central government. A central government that lacks any procurement savvy but also believes that their big-ticket procurement failures are endemic across all other public services. This is not usually the case with localised and competitive procurement, although there are some exceptions.

At the local level, local companies have lost business to national or global providers who are better equipped to play the complex procurement games invented by some of their numbers who have been seconded to the government and devise the rules of engagement. This is despite the fact that most local companies usually have good relations with public services. They are likely to go the extra mile to deliver services in their own patch and unlikely to demand additional payments for unspecified activities. But this is the root of the issue, governments of all persuasions have hocked themselves to the outsourcing companies rather than trusting in localism with its values of community, trust and respect. The outcome is not just the loss of small local businesses with altruistic motives and good customer care,  but ultimately the long term cost of the service. To twist Mrs Thatcher's infamous phrase, this government is not for learning.