Council Tax = Money Down The Drain
Time for another rant about Oxford Council. Or, as Kev G would probably say, Oxford Julian Council. (Don't ask, but it is conducive to being said with a bit of anger and venom).
I was attempting to cross Cornmarket Street on Monday evening and was confronted with a truck laying crowd control barriers and lots of confused people being forced to go all the way to one end of the street and back again to get across.
Behind this truck was a tipper truck and a machine scraping away the (fairly new) surface. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, for the third or fourth time since I've been in Oxford, Cornmarket has been resurfaced yet again. At least this time they didn't close it for very long. So now we have a nice new, slightly yellow, surface. Oooh. My life has been improved no end, and I'm sure that the taxpayer feels that their money has been oh so well spent.
To make matters worse, Cornmarket is the only street in central Oxford where the surface has always been of good quality. Every other street is full of potholes. Indeed, cycling down Headington Hill not all that long ago I came across a pothole - in the cycle lane - which took out my front tyre and my front wheel. Unless I wanted to be flattened by a bus, I had no chance but to go over the pothole, and my afternoon was ruined by the need to walk home and pay money to fix my crippled bike.
If I were to pay council tax I would expect my bin to be emptied and the roads to be of reasonable quality, but to be honest, not a lot else is needed. Of course there are things such as libraries to consider, and extra curricular activities for kids, but given the number of cuts in funding to such areas I'm obviously in a minority thinking that.
What instead we have is poor quality roads (except Cornmarket), litter (except when they employ someone at 5am with the world's loudest street vacuum), traffic problems (thanks to the one-way system which requires you to go through Torquay and Keswick before you can get anywhere) and a bunch of hypocritical councillors who bang on about the need to use public transport and still whinge about the lack of central parking spaces for their meetings (yes, really).
What a joke.
On another note, apologies for the lack of too many recent postings, but life has been very busy this week. Anthropax, I will continue our theological debate in due course, fear not...
I was attempting to cross Cornmarket Street on Monday evening and was confronted with a truck laying crowd control barriers and lots of confused people being forced to go all the way to one end of the street and back again to get across.
Behind this truck was a tipper truck and a machine scraping away the (fairly new) surface. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, for the third or fourth time since I've been in Oxford, Cornmarket has been resurfaced yet again. At least this time they didn't close it for very long. So now we have a nice new, slightly yellow, surface. Oooh. My life has been improved no end, and I'm sure that the taxpayer feels that their money has been oh so well spent.
To make matters worse, Cornmarket is the only street in central Oxford where the surface has always been of good quality. Every other street is full of potholes. Indeed, cycling down Headington Hill not all that long ago I came across a pothole - in the cycle lane - which took out my front tyre and my front wheel. Unless I wanted to be flattened by a bus, I had no chance but to go over the pothole, and my afternoon was ruined by the need to walk home and pay money to fix my crippled bike.
If I were to pay council tax I would expect my bin to be emptied and the roads to be of reasonable quality, but to be honest, not a lot else is needed. Of course there are things such as libraries to consider, and extra curricular activities for kids, but given the number of cuts in funding to such areas I'm obviously in a minority thinking that.
What instead we have is poor quality roads (except Cornmarket), litter (except when they employ someone at 5am with the world's loudest street vacuum), traffic problems (thanks to the one-way system which requires you to go through Torquay and Keswick before you can get anywhere) and a bunch of hypocritical councillors who bang on about the need to use public transport and still whinge about the lack of central parking spaces for their meetings (yes, really).
What a joke.
On another note, apologies for the lack of too many recent postings, but life has been very busy this week. Anthropax, I will continue our theological debate in due course, fear not...
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