by Peter Cook

This is my latest big idea. Let’s bring back Dickens.

Forget those old campaigns to fetch HMS Victory back to Chatham, where she was built. That plan is dead in the water. Or rather dead in the concrete.

We would need dozens of road drills to dig her out before we could even get a tow line aboard. That might wake up the neighbours.

Dickens is a different matter. And we would be doing the old boy a favour. We’d also be doing Rochester a favour and people could come and pay homage at his tomb for free, instead of having to pay through the nose like you do in Westminster Abbey.

He never wanted to be buried in Westminster Abbey with all those other puffed-up writers.

The original plan was to pop him into Shorne Churchyard. But that might be a bit close to the motorway these days, albeit quite near Cobham Woods, where he loved to walk.

The Dean and Chapter at Rochester Cathedral offered to have him interred there. A grave was even dug for him. Perhaps it’s still there under the flagstones, waiting to collapse under some preaching prelate.

Imagine the astonished looks on the faces of the choir as the Dean or even the Bishop was inexplicably swallowed up, with just a puff of masonry dust to show where he had been.

Being realistic, they have probably put someone else in there now. After all, if you’ve dug a good hole, you don’t want to waste it.

So let’s start a campaign now to have the coffin exhumed and repatriated to the city that he knew and loved – well, it soon will be a city.

Devotees would flock to Rochester from every country where Dickens is read and loved – and that’s just about every country.

At a stroke it would make Rochester High Street a commercial gold mine, offering everything from Dickens soap on a rope, take-aways from the Chuzzlewit Chip Shop, treatments at the Our Mutual Massage Parlour and so on.  Actually, it’s a bit like that now.

So I’m looking for full support for this campaign. The next Dickens Festival should be a protest march with placard-carrying characters from his books chanting Bring Back Boz.

by Alan Watkins

One could almost hear the discussion a few months ago between Jim Hacker, if he had responsibility for education, and the chief inspector of schools at Ofsted.

It probably went something like this:

Hacker: Right! We’ve been in power now for more than a year, and the schools are not providing evidence that their kids are better off under our parties.

Inspector: That’s because ....

Hacker: No excuses! My job depends on showing improvements. Change the ground rules.

Inspector: As I tried to explain, Minister ...

Hacker: All those schools with satisfactory records! It’s not good enough. Re-grade them as unsatisfactory.

Inspector: Yes, Minister.

Good belly laughs all round.

The trouble with Yes Minister and Jim Hacker was that it was always so close to the truth.

Not that Michael Gove would have done anything like this, of course.

I was chatting with a head the other day. Her school is officially satisfactory with good grounds for Ofsted to say it should achieve a “good” rating.

Since she was appointed she has transformed her school from failing to the point where it can see an excellence label on the horizon. You would think she would be delighted – she’s not!

Instead of being praised, she now faces the sack if surprise visits from Ofsted are still “satisfactory” within the next two years.

She (as well as her governors and all her teaching team) face ignominy.

They will be sacked and replaced by a team who will manage to tick a few more boxes on the Ofsted checklist.

They have also found the rules keep changing that set their targets.

There are no problems with expecting improvement. Nor is there blame to be had in trying to achieve perfection.

What is completely ignored by the 'tick box’ culture encouraged by the inspectorate is the nature of the community served by schools.

My friend’s primary is typical of many in Kent and Medway. It has a mix of children – and a mix of parents. Most are responsible. Some are not. At home some children are ignored.

“For some parents – too many by far – children are status symbols,” I was told.

“When they come to an after-school dance they are made up to the nines, dressed in the latest fashion – they look like tarts, but they are only six and seven-year-olds.

“Some of my mothers are 19 and 20 – how old were they when they had their children? What understanding do they have of parenting, life and all the other skills? The answer is little or none.”

I often see mums pushing pushchairs and chatting on mobiles as their child tries unsuccessfully to get their attention.

“It’s the same in the home. Our children learn from nine to three – then they go home where there are no books, inappropriate television and violent video games, no house manners ...

"Some of our kids come to school without the basics like toilet training. They don’t speak. They have few personal skills.

“Parents arrive in the area and their children are suddenly dropped on us. We have kids from certain families where children come and go as they please.

“We have kids who arrive unable to understand a word of English. The trouble is the inspectors don’t recognise local problems such as this. All they are interested in is the ticks.”

Like lots of satisfactory schools, her team have been told they are unsatisfactory, coasting, not pulling their weight, failures ...

“If my school has not improved I shall retire – I’ve never said that before, but I shall.”

At another school there are dozens of children whose first language is not English.

They have appeared as their families move into north Kent. When the inspectors arrive there will be black marks against their place of learning for failing to teach them in the few weeks that they have been on the school roll.

There isn’t a school where conscientious teachers do not leave every day with bags full of work to mark, to check or to advise. They have forms to complete to confirm their projects are working, reports to produce on the ordinary and the exceptional, and pages to explain why a child has been punished and how.

They then work at home until midnight night after night after night. Is this what society really expects?

Surely our schools should be happy places of learning where teachers can pass on their experiences, and bring out the best in the children? Hard luck if Ofsted arrives on a bad day.

We may lose good heads if this happens – and is that really what we want?

by David Jones

Call me cynical if you like – and lots of people do – but the one thing you can always be sure of in Medway is that apathy will rule OK when it comes to consultation on an important local issue.

Take, for example, the fiasco over the Medway Test – Medway’s version of the 11-plus – last year.

For the past seven years, pupils have taken the exam in test centres, rather than their own primary school.

This system has never been popular with parents because the children have to go to a designated test centre – a local secondary school – to sit the exam in unfamiliar surroundings.

After errors and delays during last September’s tests, Medway Council promised to consider allowing pupils to sit the exam in their own school once again.

The blunders in September led to a record number of complaints on our website about a single issue. More than 500 parents demanded action.

The council embarked on a consultation exercise to seek parents’ views and guess how many responded? Just 47. Despite this lamentably poor response, the council’s cabinet will be asked later this month to start the ball rolling for some pupils to sit the exam in their own school this September, with a full return in 2013.

No doubt there are many thousands of parents out there who believe this is the correct decision but, as is usual in Medway when residents are asked for their opinion, hardly anybody bothered.

The same apathy afflicted a public meeting in Medway last month over social care charges. Six people – yes, six – attended a meeting called by the council.

People can hardly complain if the council does what it  likes in view of such a pathetic turn-out. Likewise, parents would have had only themselves to blame if the council had decided that public interest in the 11-plus issue was so limited that the status quo would be retained.

It may be that some parents felt they were wasting their time taking part in a consultation exercise. Sadly, the council does have something of a track record of consulting and then doing what it intended anyway.

In the case of the Medway Test, the council and notably education boss Cllr Les Wicks, received such a kicking in the local media that they dare not have ignored the protests.

Having gone through a consultation exercise, they might have argued they could justify keeping the test centre system because of the poor response.

And, if they had, I expect that considerably more than 47 parents would have complained. Too late, of course. But that’s how apathy works – or, rather, doesn’t.

by Peter Cook

Personally, I don’t have a problem with buying the Queen a boat for her Jubilee. And here’s the perfect solution.

Chugging up river soon, resplendent in her new steel overcoat, paddle wheels thrashing and puffing up smoke like an ancient mariner with an ounce of Navy Shag , will be the good ol’ Medway Queen. Hooray!

What better vessel could our monarch hope for? A Queen fit for a Queen.

They have so much in common. They come from the same generation, both saw service during the war, and both have brought delight to thousands.

Of course Her Maj will have to restrict her cruising to the Thames and Medway Estuary. But you don’t want to go charging off to faraway foreign climes when you’re well into your eighties.

And what price Boris Island when the Queen of England rules the very waves on which they hope it will become established.

Given a stair-lift, the Duke of Edinburgh would be able to relive his naval days by whizzing up to the bridge now and again and taking the helm.

“Glance across to port, Sir, and you will see the four LPG gas holders of the Apocalypse, each one as big as the Albert Hall, named after your wife’s great great grandfather, I believe Sir.

“Left hand down a bit. We don’t want to hit the poor old Richard Montgomery and unleash a tsunami that will have us surfing back to London quicker than a Red Arrow pilot on a jet-ski.”

What larks, as a famous estuary character used to say. They could call in to the Old House at Home at Queenborough for a pub lunch, swan round to Margate for a go on the scenic railway – which should be restored by then – and then nip across to Southend for a pint of whelks and to catch the end of the pier show. A perfect day.

Of course, there is a Royal precedent too.

Good Queen Vic used to chug down to the Isle of Grain on the Hoo Peninsula Railway, to meet her Germanic relatives, who presumably arrived by paddle-steamer.

So, Michael Gove, there you have it. You need search no more.

by Alan Watkins

In her column in Monday’s Medway Messenger, my colleague Nikki White lamented the fact that many people neither know nor care when an apostrophe is needed.

I share her angst over its demise. Dropping an apostrophe is a modern phenomenon.

I can already hear the illiterati insisting: “It don’ mean nuffin’, anyways!”

Trouble is, the apostrophe does have an important role in communication.

Waterstone’s has taken the step of becoming a pluralate. It wants to be known as Waterstones sans apostrophe.

Apparently, it considers the tick is superfluous to its trading identity and cuts down the amount of customers it gets through its web Windows and (presumably) subsequently passing through its doorways.

If you are entering a web address on a computer, that little apostrophe can be a nuisance. But it has a definite use: It means the shop of Waterstone, but it has now been simplified to become meaningless.

With the apostrophe it means something. Without, it means something different. Waterstones means... nothing. But when has that ever stopped the marketeers promoting Blotto beer, the latest Zemantic car, – or heaven forbid – initialised, lower-cased names like bhs?

Schools have dropped the 3Rs. With it has gone the art of punctuation.

Fewer people are therefore capable of reading because the beauty of punctuation is that it explains the meaning of a word or sentence.

Instead, we have morons unable to read, write or communicate who would pick a fight instead of picking up a good read.

We have an increasing number of new words having to be invented because technology can’t cope or appallingly “simplified” to create awful-looking texts.

Can you imagine Maria singing:

2nite, 2nite,

Wont B lyk any nite

Would a modern-day Hamlet consider suicide with:

2B or not 2B

Thats the quezz, innit?

From a marketing viewpoint, it is easier to promote Jacksons than Jackson’s.

For those few who don’t know whether or not to use an apostrophe, re-read your sentence:

Is something missing – like the “i” in “It’s a long way to Tipperary”?

Or something longer such as in: “Mike’s car is dirty” (which means the car belonging to Mike).

In either case use the apostrophe. If not, don’t!

Meanwhile, if you are a bookseller, surely promoting good prose, bad prose or plain speaking should mean more to you than getting ticked off by a simple apostrophe?

by Alan Watkins

The Watkins residence has an oversized library with rows and rows of books, often three deep with more piled on top.

Like Codger Cook I have always been a sucker for a book bargain. That’s why I like trundling into the one surviving bookshop on every High Street, namely WH Smith.

I used to have one of their regular customer cards until the marketing team scrapped it. Now I am feeling suckered by one of their saver offers that isn’t.

It’s the one that says: “Buy One Get One Half Price”. It has a gold circular label often stuck on to the books (but not always).

The other day I dropped into a  branch where I picked up various items including two books advertised under this  offer.

One was a James Holland Second World War story, the other was a Jo Nesbo.

They were ideal reading for the poolside in Egypt where I am currently soaking up the sun and hunting large fishes on the nearby coral reef.

I was told they were different offers (even though I pointed out that they were the same wording, the same label and the same offer.

I was told the Nesbo offer (additionally marked Mix and Match on the supporting shelf label) was different from the Holland book offer.

I left the two books on the counter, along with a magazine, assorted stationery and a few pencils, erasers and a pen.

I rang the customer support team at WH Smith’s call centre where a pleasant young lady named Kirsty said they were different offers even though they did look the same.

She admitted: “I have suggested to the marketing department myself that they should use different coloured stickers.

“Unfortunately, it is not something we are able to do,” she claimed.

The old cobbler is at work here.  It is the simplest thing in the world to print different coloured labels.

It is even simpler for a junior promotions person to design a different sticker for the offers.

Pity. That was about £25 of business they lost.  I picked up the books on the internet for less than WH Smith were charging.

by Alan Watkins

Talk of disasters and thoughts turn to the Woodlands school row.

I know most of the people involved in the costly debacle. None emerges with much credit.

How anyone thought awarding the contract to Tony Riddington, the school's caretaker, would not have raised questions needs to go back to school. Headmaster Nic Fiddaman (his deputy is Mr Riddington's wife) recommended him.

It appears (though it is not certain because of the lack of any meaningful paperwork) Mr Riddington got the £750,000 contract purely on that basis.

There appear to have been no checks on his skills (he is a door specialist) and no competitive tender process (required by EU rules). Was there any questioning his ability to handle such a sizeable job?
Most council officers involved have been allowed to leave.

Mr Fiddaman - a school leader with plenty of supporters in the local community - stayed silent and remains so about what he was disciplined with, or what was his punishment, and the council would never reveal any disciplinary act.

I cannot comment on the build quality of Mr Riddington's company. The auditors' report was pretty disparaging.

Mr Riddington is pursuing a claim for unfair dismissal after leaving at the height of the investigation. He refused to provide any paperwork to support the payments made to him by the council.

The chairman of governors, Elena Mutter-Child, was new into the job. At the audit committee meeting she was dissuaded from speaking to me by her head teacher and her vice-chairman. As for the council, what can one say about the education team?

Once more the director, Rose Collinson, investigates the lessons "learned" after her repetitively-wrong deputy, Simon Trotter, committed Medway to another million or two. He was in charge of the Walderslade overspend - £5.2 million was twice the original estimate - the Borstal school debacle, where about £350,000 was committed to designing a school in the wrong place, and the primary school closures row, where inspectors said no closures in most cases, which it has now emerged placed an additional £500k onto the council's stretched budget.

Get it wrong at school and you got a 'must do better'. Get it wrong twice and you saw the head teacher. Repeat the error three times, and it became painful.

Mr Trotter got a golden handshake to go quickly and quietly. Ms Collinson remains.

Why were auditors not panicking immediately the figures exceeded the budget? What about Neil Davies, the chief executive?

He was virtually silent throughout the audit committee's public meeting.

As for conspicuousness, the portfolio holder, Cllr Les Wicks, stayed away, and avoided all calls.

Why did they allow Ms Collinson to investigate whether or not she has learned lessons?

Regrettably, I suspect the council will be asking: where's the carpet, the brush and the corner to lift.

by David Jones

This week, feeling especially curmudgeonly after a couple of unexpectedly high bills, I had intended to complain again about everything I have ever complained about. Sadly, space and time do not allow me to reprise all my rants, but I will enlarge upon a recent observation made to me by a friend of equally mature years.

“Do you know,” he said. “I don’t think anything today is as good as it used to be.” It’s an interesting view but one not uncommon among those on the wrong side of 60. They, or rather we, always view the past through rose-tinted spectacles. It’s on the job description for grey-haired folk about to draw their pension.

Things were always better in that distant land we call the past. They were, weren’t they?

What better place to start than the NHS. To get a next-day appointment with your GP, you first have to convince the receptionist that you only have hours to live. It didn’t used to be like that. These days, if you want speedy treatment, it’s best to be knocked down by a bus or develop a terminal illness. Dodgy hip? Forget it.

The minor injuries unit at our  hospital has been closed for weeks because of “staff sickness.”  I was asked to make a 20-mile round trip to another   to get my foot checked out.

A regional NHS spokesman says the situation at our local minor injuries unit is “not sustainable in the long term.”  I fear that is NHS-speak for “we’re going to close it”.

Many of the NHS millions over the last 10 years have been spent on “administrators” – people who do nothing but attend meetings and write trendy slogans on wall charts. So much for progress.

Now for call centres… Make an attempt to get in touch with a large organisation and you will end up dealing with one of these.  On average, it takes about four times longer to get in touch with a call centre than it did when you simply dialled the number of a local office.

And why is it that staff in call centres are so poor at communication? You might think that language and communication skills should be at the top of their job description. It seems to be at the bottom.

They also tend to be clueless about geography, because they are based hundreds of miles away or on the other side of the world. “Strood, that’s in Gloucestershire, isn’t it?” So much for local knowledge.

Oh, and I mustn’t forget banks. Remember bank managers?  They knew all their customers. Try talking to a “bank manager” today and you will be shown into a small room where you have to listen to the accumulated wisdom of a spotty-faced 20-year-old wearing a name-tag which says “Gary” or “Lee.”  Or “Sharon”, who looks as though she is still in the fifth form. So much for knowing your customers.

Supermarkets remain high on my list of despised institutions. They patronise their staff by calling them “colleagues” and they patronise their customers. So, it’s “our” store is it? And I thought it still belonged to Asda or Marks & Spencer’s. They reduce one essential by 50p and put another up by £1. Don’t insult our intelligence.

Energy companies aren’t far behind on my hate list. Watch your bills creep up a month or two after you switch suppliers for “a better deal.”

You can’t even escape “centralisation” if you are unfortunate enough to be a defendant, or a witness for that matter, due to appear in court. Courts are closing all over the country and for some this will now involve an unacceptably long journey. Even if they are there on time they may not be able to get home again if they rely on public transport. So much for local justice.

You will no doubt have noticed, dear reader, that I have not yet mentioned the word “computer.” None of us could exist without them, could we?  Do your Christmas shopping online, book a cheap flight online, find out anything about anyone via Google. Computers have made us all lazy. But I will admit they have made the job of the journalist easier. No more carbon paper, no more clapped-out typewriters, just clapped-out computers.

And what would we do without mobile phones? Have a stress-free life is the answer. Strange though it may seem to anyone under 30, there was an age when mobile phones, or computers, did not exist. Unbelievably, we survived.

When we went on holiday, we were on holiday. Nobody rang us or texted us. And we sent postcards to our loved ones bearing stamps from exotic and sometimes not so exotic places. It was a delight receiving a postcard, even from Benidorm.

There was no sending pictures from a mobile phone. Mobile phones have taken the mystery, even the romance, out of holidays. We did not Tweet, or use Facebook to tell all our “friends” what we were doing every hour of every day. Our lives were private, or as private as we wanted them to be.

It was also possible to be a first-time home buyer. I feel sorry for young couples wanting to get a foot on the housing ladder. Today, for most youngsters, the dream of home ownership will remain just that – a dream.
OK, there are some things which have improved. We could all draw up our own list.

Despite what I said about the NHS, medicines and surgical techniques have made dramatic advances,  which is why we are all living longer. That’s one change no one’s going to complain about.

Living longer,  we can now all spend our twilight years secure in the knowledge that everything is better these days. And bigger means better, we are told. But, fellow Codgers  we’re not fooled are we? We know they’re doing it for them, not for us.

“Bigger” might mean ­bigger profits or a more cost-effective method of operating but all too often the impact on those at the receiving end, namely you and me, does not figure in the ­equation.

by David Jones

Is the Royal Mail having a laugh? I've got four letters to post and it's going to cost me nearly £2.

The cost of a first class stamp is now a whopping 46p after a 5p increase - the latest in a series of inflation-busting rises.

FORTY SIX PENCE, that's nearly 10 shillings (50p) in old money. Outrageous. Ten shillings when I was a kid was a small fortune. I can still recall clutching the crisp 10 shilling note my parents gave me when we went on holiday one year. It was a week's spending money.

Okay, inflation has taken its toll over 55 years but 10 shillings to post a letter? Still seems outrageous to me.

Letter writing is becoming a ridiculously expensive business. No wonder Royal Mail now appears to be in a state of terminal decline.

It's not as though the escalation in the quality of service has matched the rapid escalation in the price of a stamp.

In the late 19th century, there were between six and 12 deliveries a day in London. It was possible to write a letter and receive a reply the same day. Unbelievable. No mail vans then. Just horses and carts.

Yes, Royal Mail, I know that vastly fewer items were posted in those Victorian days but despite all the advances in technology, things have got worse, not better.

Royal Mail can't even manage two deliveries a day now. Royal Mail's rebuttal argument is that no private sector company will deliver a letter, posted in Cornwall, to the Isle of Skye for 46p, so better the devil you know, Mr Customer. But then most letters are not delivered to the Isle of Skye.

In our street, like everyone else, we now only have one mail delivery a day and that arrives at any old time. One day it plops through the letter box at 9.30am and the next it mysteriously fails to arrive until 2pm. Which begs another question: What do postmen do in the mornings when they do not deliver the mail until 2pm?

Presumably, they have to spend the whole morning sorting the mail because it has arrived five hours later than usual.

And if they do, does that mean they got up at the crack of dawn, five hours before they needed to, ready for a 9.30am delivery of mail that hadn't yet arrived?

Or does Royal Mail have some sort of automated posties' alarm call?: "Have a lie-in this morning, Charlie. No sign of the mail for Kent yet. It's somewhere between Milton Keynes and Tunbridge Wells. We'll give you another call when it turns up. Go back to sleep."

This conundrum creates another mystery: If Royal Mail knows, roughly, how many items of mail are posted each day, why is there such a large variance in delivery times?

There's no logic to it, either. Our post is sometimes late when it's a beautiful morning, or early when the weather's lousy.

If anyone out there knows the answer to my questions, drop me a line. On second thoughts, send me an email. It'll get here immediately and cost virtually nothing.

There's no denying that letters have a special quality, which cannot be matched by the starkness of an email.

We've all felt a tinge of excitement or apprehension as we tear open a letter from an unknown sender. Or a sinking feeling if the letter is an instantly recognisable brown envelope from the tax man.

If the cost of stamps continues to rise well above the rate of inflation, then sending a letter, especially first class, will become a luxury for many.

I am aware Royal Mail is not a charity. It has to be financially viable, but it is in danger of pricing itself out of business. And there are plenty of private sector predators snapping at its heels.

We should not forget that not even national institutions are sacrosanct. Remember Woolworths? We thought Woolies would be there for ever, didn't we?

by Alan Watkins

In my days at school it was not unusual for the headmaster to wield a cane when someone stepped out of line.

It kept the rabble under his command in order and ensured that for most the lesson was learned in a way that was painful, but swiftly understood.

I was an ordinary, hyper child. Fortunately, I was also a coward. All it needed to control my misbehaviour was for me to know that he had the stick in his office.

We had a few “special children”. Pupils treated them with a mixture of care and toughness, while staff taught them with a degree of scepticism.

Something has happened in society since then. These days children with special needs have become a major cause for educational care. It is costly to care for them.

What has caused the explosion in the number of children suffering autism, ADHD and similar special needs is not clear. The genuine ones really do need support and help.

They frequently need their own transport (because some do not understand simple directions and safety, or are physically weak).

They need classroom care, covering everything from one-to-one support to basic cleanliness issues.

Specialist teaching assistants provide that support, and help to maintain peace when the child becomes excitable, over-awed or confused.

Today such care is under review. It costs millions to transfer Medway’s special needs children from home to school and back again.

It costs even more to have the specialists trained to provide the support, and to manage the individuals. One of the more go-ahead schools in Medway is now planning to get rid of the teaching assistants.

Delce Junior School’s head, Karen White, is concerned about the cost. Talking to her, she is also concerned about the school’s image, and its standing in the community.
She is also a lady on a mission.

She believes teachers will be able to plan ahead for Johnny’s trouser-wetting, Susan’s misbehaviour, and David wandering across the desktops.

The money Delce saves from getting rid of the 16 assistants will go towards the cost of four more teachers (the school is expanding just as the government is cutting its funding) and four support staff.

From my limited knowledge of the subject, I think a can of worms is about to open. Talk of close liaison with parents and pupils, of tackling problems before they reach the classroom, is fine.

But what happens if Johnny, David and Susan all misbehave at the same time? What about the teaching of the remaining 20 in the class?