Always Hope

Always Hope is equally fascinated and appalled at the workings of the bureaucratic mind. The world according to petty officialdom is a wonderful place, where words have alternative meaning, reality is determined by flow charts drawn up in airless offices, and nothing happens unless a form is filled out 3 months in advance. Anyone who shares my fascination will thank BBC Cornwall for publishing this in full on their website: Residents living in the former North Cornwall, Caradon and Restormel district areas should get a complete set of three new reusable sacks and a black box to replace the coloured disposable plastic sacks they currently use. But former Carrick district householders, who already have a black box, a red sack and a yellow sack can expect a new orange reusable sack for recycling cardboard. Households in the former Kerrier district will also get an orange reusable sack, a blue reusable sack for paper, but no box as they already have a blue box. Whereas residents ...

Please don't bother Always Hope this weekend with tales of Brent Council banning Easter, plausible though you may find it (guess which newspaper website has been trumpeting this one today?). It's true that it looks like a group of churches in Willesden won't be having their Easter march because they haven't complied with the council's health and safety protocols. But then, a headline in the Daily Mail saying "church fails to submit procession application in good time" wouldn't have quite the same impact, would it? Father Hugh MacKenzie who, according to the Mail, is "defiant", is adamant that the procession cannot proceed on the pavement alone, although if the picture above is anything to go by, it's difficult to know why. It would certainly be preferable to the solution offered by Cranmer , who declares "it's the Queen's Highway", so "just go out and march". All well and good, but it should be noted that t...

A bit off message this, but it sneaks in on the grounds of local interest. Always Hope has a soft spot for the traditional British eccentric, and so today we lament the case of the Plympton Owl Man: Man banned from taking owls for walk We should note, in the interests of fairness, that Plymouth City Council hasn't actually banned Russell Burt from walking his owls because, er, they can't. But by intimidating this one man with the full weight of local government, they have effectively done so. What's particularly dispiriting are the given reasons for this sledgehammer-to-nut approach. "Owls live a nocturnal lifestyle" intones the council spokeswoman, demonstrating a grasp of Biology gained from the Ladybird Book of Nature. And, to cap the argument, she invokes the danger of "a large spooked bird of prey running amok on a highway", apparently confusing the Owl with a Road Runner. Always Hope respectfully suggests to Plymouth City Council, in the unlikely e...