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BEHAVE NOW. YEAH, RIGHT

By Charlotte Hofton - Friday, May 16, 2008
THE VIEW FROM HERE
I MAKE no apology for returning to the subject of the visual vandalism the council, now aided by the police, is wreaking upon the Island.
Conservation area streets in Ryde have been subjected to a rash of monstrous billboards, fixed on to lamp-standards.
Hideously printed in red, orange and black, they carry police warnings to drunks and vandals to behave themselves. Yeah, right.
Even if literate when sober (and that can’t be taken for granted), our drunks are far too bleary-eyed to read some notice that is pitched well above gutter level and too befuddled to care even if they could.
If no policeman is in sight, are vandals likely to be deterred by a notice? Even CCTV cameras have recently been found to be hopelessly ineffective, so no further questions on this one, m’lud. Still, at least the notices will alert our visitors to the fact they have arrived in a very dodgy area, which will no doubt boost our flagging tourism trade.
These notices are, apparently, temporary, but you can bet they won’t be put away for long when they come down.
No, just watch them on tour round the Island, like an itinerant attack of pustular impetigo.
Naturally, the warnings carry the IW council logo. Our council has also been busy ruining the aesthetics of our Island in Bembridge, where a pedestrian crossing has been installed in Foreland Road.
That would be fine, especially as it’s outside an old people’s home, but not content with orange Belisha beacons, they have added a galaxy of ghastly and unnecessary fluorescent lights, making the whole arrangement look like something off the security perimeter at Guantanamo Bay.
The Tories will be pasting up more hideous notices next spring, imploring us to return them to power. If this scenic desecration of the Island continues over the next 12 months, I shall ignore them.

A LITTLE BOY'S LOT
LITTLE boys once dreamed of becoming policemen, with exciting lives spent blowing whistles and dashing in hot pursuit of dastardly criminals.
Is this the case any more? Hearteningly, it appears a career spent putting up tawdry notices, intended to take care of the vandals while you’re engaged in your more important work of harassing motorists, still appeals to some.
I recently spoke to a parent whose son wants to enter the police. But it wasn’t the idea of the notices that was the prime attraction. “He wants to do it because he’ll get a pension when he’s 45.”
After that, he’ll have time to become a councillor on the IW.
And it gets better. He’ll still be able to harass motorists by getting the taxpayer to stump up for all those steely-eyed traffic wardens, whose weapon of a swanky digital camera is so much more effective in the war on illegal parking than any boring old policeman’s whistle.

A SIMPLE LESSON
GOVERNMENT minister Ed Balls is known as “the children’s secretary”.
With education standards being so low, this sounds as if he takes dictation from kids who can’t read or write but need to get their essays in.
Sadly, this is not the case. He is employed to come up with bright ideas and his latest, very bad one, is that traditional parents’ evenings should be replaced by “a chat in the playground”.
What child, temporarily released from lessons and looking forward to a natter with his mates about such important topics as sex and drugs, wants his parents hanging around in earshot? Think again, Ed.