by Alan Watkins

he Mayor of Medway has cost local council taxpayers £150,000. But is it so shocking?

Looking at the figures unearthed by the Labour councillors it’s not too surprising.

Whether you think it is right the mayoral office exists at all is more relevant.

According to the miffed opposition, the bill breaks down as staff (£74,000), another £24,000 went on parties and events, £1,200 on ceremonial clothes and £12,000 so far on his chauffeur-driven car.

These days the mayor is no more than a symbol. But he does an important job – one that goes back more than 400 years.

He is the Queen’s representative, the first citizen of the borough. He’s the meeter and greeter of the council and chairs their often acrimonious meetings.

Some mayors can be self-important prigs, others hard-working servants of an authority that needs to wave the flag. All raise a lot of cash for local charities.

Those staffing costs are reasonable.

There’s a secretary plus three officers that need to be on hand at different times when he is on duty. Then there’s things like computers, phones, cleaners, paper, postage and photocopying.

The cash spent on parties and events is a bit of Medway cheap-skating, to be honest.

Take out cleaning, repairs, room rental (well, someone has to meet the cost so why not the mayor?), hired waiters and maids, cooking and preparing everything from petits fours to biscuits you can forget the pate de foie gras.

The days of a roast swan with all the trimmings were long gone even before I got involved with events as a cub reporter. So £24,000 seems to cover a fair number of stale biscuits!

Ceremonial clothing costs are questionable.

One mayor whose name I have since forgotten spent more than four hundred quid on a fancy hat with black plumes. There were no queries from the politicians then: it was left to the Medway Messenger to uncover the truth.

The lady was never seen in it after its debut at the mayor-making ceremony. (She did look as though she was auditioning for a bit part in an Edwardian drama though).

Do we actually need our mayors to appear in flowing fancy dress? – No. Should they dress up at all? – Definitely. It’s a visible sign of their office (along with the civic chain).

It’s a tradition as important as Queens, uniformed soldiers and bewigged judges. Our outgoing, machismo mayor, Vaughan Hewett is one of the modern breed of Tory councillors.

He’s ideally suited as figurehead, chairer of meetings and shaker of hands.

The question is, will he gain a position of importance within the council now that his year has come to an end.

Or will he be one of the numerous Conservative cast-offs – which seems to happen to most of this council’s civic “leaders”.

Labour councillors are annoyed because they are being barred again from holding the civic office. Fair or not, it is politics.

Would Labour ever allow the Tories to hold office in future if they gain overall control of the council?

Meanwhile, their task should be holding the administration to account. I see little sign of that.

by Alan Watkins

It was 40 years ago that the first mobile phone made the initial call that turned humans into zombies.

It was with thoughts of dark places that I shoved my office mobile in the company letter box when I retired.

It was my final act and one in which I delighted. I had walked away from the accursed glowing object which had dogged my passage for years.

Not everyone, of course, agrees with me. Apparently the business is worth in the region of £190 billion a year. Yet it has nothing to endear itself to mankind.

Mums push their children along with half a thought for their offspring’s care. They chatter on the phone or idly thumb a message while waifs try to understand the world around them.

Businessmen stick bits of plastic in their ears at the beginning of the day (at least one hopes that it is not left there from the previous week) and then shout loudly to let everyone know they are using a business phone.

In the theatre and cinema, some users ignore the polite requests to switch the phone off during the performance.

Lights pop up everywhere as incoming calls are received. Be grateful that sometimes the sound is switched off.

You might be in the middle of a conversation with someone when suddenly they will glance at their pohone, say: “Sorry – I’ve got to take this” and then walk away from you, your last sentence hanging in the firmament.

No one supervises the ban supposed to be enforced on drivers. Sporties, truckers, van men and others talk away at 80mph on the M2.

And what about the pedestrians who blissfully walk off pavements and stroll across busy roads as they joke at 150 decibels?

So I was delighted that my phone was “handed” in. No editor can phone to ask where I was during my lunch hour.

Nor can he ask if I would pop round to the home of the latest villain to ask if he felt happy at his non-existent sentence.

That joy, peace and self-righteousness reigned for all of 35 days.

Then my good lady wife insisted I get a mobile to keep in touch with home while I am wandering the marshes of north Kent, enjoying the tranquillity of an ancient church or (when it eventually comes) lying out beneath a blazing sun, listening to the larks chorusing upwards to the heavens.

I shall do what I used to do for peace: switch off the damned thing and then forget to recharge it.

Meanwhile, apologies to all – no one’s getting my number.

by David Jones

My award for eternal optimism goes to the ice cream man I heard trying to flog his wares one afternoon earlier this month.

This was the day, just when I thought it surely can’t get any colder in April, that a Siberian wind whipped up.

Undeterred, Mr Softee was doing his rounds in his van, with a tinny amplifier belting out I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.

He was out again, two days later, in what was the coldest April week for 20 years. True, the kids were on their Easter holidays, but I couldn’t imagine anyone stepping outside for an ice cream – even if they were being given away.

This was what the marketing men call a hard sell. But at least he wasn’t at home in the warm on benefits.

George Osborne would have been proud of him. Mr Softee could well front up the next Tory election campaign.

Talking of George, I wouldn’t be a fully paid-up old Codger if I didn’t have a rant about benefits. Codger Watkins has already harrumphed on the subject but Codger Cook, unusually for him, has allowed Mr Osborne to escape unscathed.

Must have been too busy planting his onions. I feel more than qualified to harrumph myself, having been in employment for 47 years and never having claimed a penny in benefits. Perhaps I should count myself as lucky never to have been out of a job. Nevertheless it rankles with me that I have paid massively more into the system than I have ever got out of it.

While I have sympathy for any family left worse off by the new restrictions, I have none for those who have chosen benefits as a lifestyle and, until now, have been allowed to get away with it.

Labour, meanwhile, sensing it is out of touch with the national mood on the growth of the benefits culture, appears to have been converted on the Road to Damascus. It has jumped on the unfair bandwagon and given a foretaste of a probable new policy under which benefits will be based on National Insurance contributions.

Labour has now also discovered, like me, that people are peeved because, in the words of shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne, they pay in an awful lot more than they ever get back. It took Labour a long time to work out what most of us already knew to be the case.

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward with eager anticipation to spending my state pension increase of £2.70 a week, which I received for the first time this month. For the more youthful among you, unaware of how the system works, State pensions are not taxed, so this means the 20 per cent slice of tax has to be taken off any other income or pensions you might receive. This means the State pension increase actually equates to £2.16 a week, not quite enough to embark on a wild spending spree.

To make matters worse for The Three Codgers, and millions like us, the Chancellor has frozen the personal tax allowance for over-65s at £10,500, the so-called granny tax. It means the only increase in income many pensioners will receive is a few quid a week, linked to inflation.

It’s easy to blame George Osborne, or Labour, for the mess we call our benefits system, but the reality is that ALL politicians stretching back over 40 years have a collective responsibility for allowing it to degenerate into such a shambles.

But why am I moaning about my pension? Some hard-working people I know haven’t received a pay rise for four, or even five years.

by Peter Cook

Good for Ann Barnes the Kent police commissioner. Standing up for her young people’s commissioner Paris Brown, against the outraged Mail on Sunday shows real courage and strength of purpose.

Just as her appointment of Paris, using her own salary to help fund the post, showed imagination and initiative.

What a shame her robust defence of her protegee was unsuccessful because what better way to get messages through to teenagers, than through a teenager?

The misfortune for Mrs Barnes was that she got a real teenager for her money. One that in the past has used social media indiscreetly, incautiously and politically incorrectly. One that expresses herself sometimes through derogative terms such as “pikey” or “fag”.

It’s not pretty. It sounds offensive. But it’s what teenagers do. You only have to sit on the top deck of a bus full of school kids to know that.

Of course Mrs Barnes could have opted for a nice young lady with a home counties accent and impeccable manners, who was discretion itself.

Although being a well brought up middle class girl in no way makes you immune to binge drinking or drug taking, and certainly not to tweeting about such things.

And how would this perfectly pleasant young person go down among the teenage sub-culture on the Isle of Sheppey. They would eat her alive I imagine. She wouldn’t have a hope. You need to know a society from the inside if you want to make a difference.

There are not many of us whose teenage utterances would stand scrutiny by the voraciously nasty Mail on Sunday or its counterpart the Daily Mail. Fortunately Twitter was not even a concept when I was young.

Sadly Paris Brown has been forced out of her job by this press campaign before she had a chance to get started.

I hope she is not too damaged by the experience and that Ms Barnes is able to recruit another teenager to do the work Paris had been engaged to do.

If she is able to keep even a few youngsters out of trouble the experiment will have paid off and the money will have been well spent. The cost of youth crime, in both monetary and human terms, is immensely greater than a £15,000 salary.

by Alan Watkins

Waking in a panic, sweat streamed from my forehead: the terror only hit me after I finally left the office to work (occasionally) at home.

The fear was brought about by my new car. It’s the first one I have owned for a long time.

The KM Group provided a little runabout that took me to France a few times. It also went to Belgium and the Netherlands. It was pleasant, insured and accident-free. It was also a diesel. And the taxman took his slice.

It got me about, was reliable, black and smothered in adverts. Its replacement is my very own car. It’s a shock to find out what it’s like for the great majority of car users.

I have had a licence for 35 years. I last got into trouble in 1990 when I tried to ram a police car at the foot of the Sir John Hawkins flyover (even young Codgers will remember that ugly structure).

Some years ago – about 12 or 13 as far as I can recall – someone actually succeeded in driving into the side of me at the Four Elms roundabout. (They had decided to go right and I was the sucker in their path).

Certainly it’s more that 10 years since I had an accident. The insurance people were advised.

“It doesn’t matter – you don’t have any years accumulated,” came their helpful retort.

Well, eventually someone agreed to comprehensively insure me at a sensible price, and accept I would be able to “protect” myself from accidents in 12 months time.

Panic over? No way, Jose.

The new motor has a petrol engine. I am sure I won’t be foolish enough to put diesel in the tank – but you never can tell. And that’s which drives my early hours insanity.

I try to keep away from the pumps as long as I can. I am sure I will always pick the right one to stick in the tank when I have to do it. But still I have this horrible vision of putting thick, clogging, oily diesel in the tank of my nice new beast.

The fuelling deserves to be accompanied by a bit of Berlioz, maybe the March to the Scaffold from his Symphonie Fantastique.

Courage, mon enfant!

by Peter Cook

Recently I went to photograph some paintings and prints by the Rainham artist Martin Turner, who trained at the College of Art and Design, as it then was, and included Medway scenes in many of his paintings.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that one of his pictures, used in an advertisement for the National Savings Bank, included Aylesford Post Office – and, two doors to the right of it, our first house.

My carer and I bought the property, in 1968, I think it was, for £1,500 cash. Those were the days.

Despite an almost total absence of mod cons it was a wonderful home.

True, the lavatory was halfway down the garden, in a tiny but solidly built brick hut, semi-detached from next door’s loo. Lady dinner guests would sometimes find this disconcerting on dark nights, particularly if they had issues with spiders.

The water supply came from a single cold tap over a stone sink, of the kind now trendily described as a ‘butler’s’ sink. It made an excellent bath for our first-born during the first three years of his life, even if we did have to heat the water in a kettle.

For grown up ablutions I purchased one of those galvanised baths you still sometimes see hanging up in ironmongers’ stores. A Baby Burco electric boiler heated the water and the trick was to keep one end of it close to the open fire in the kitchen, which kept everything toastie.

I think what we enjoyed most about the place was that it included just about every kind of cottage feature going back to the days of the Normans.

Despite the somewhat austere Victorian front, I was told the foundations had been laid before the Conqueror invaded.

The front room had a ceiling striated by oaken beams. In the upstairs bedrooms the walls were held in place by uprights that did nothing to disguise their woodland origins. Interior walls were faced with cow hair and plaster, somewhat sagging in some places. And at the rear the cat-slide roof swept down to a ragstone wall, farmhouse style. It was wonderful to think of generations growing up on that spot for at least a millennium.

To add to the attraction, the tidal Medway swept past not far from the bottom of the garden, beneath a medieval bridge and an old barge wharf which provided a free mooring for the boat I had at the time.

Then we decided to modernise. We had a new brick kitchen and bathroom extension built on the back, with an indoor loo and modern cooking facilities. Suddenly the place lost its appeal. It wasn’t the same anymore.

We sold up and moved on.

by David Jones

by Peter Cook

A recent survey suggests that people are happiest when they reach old age. Why is that a surprise?

Retired people have probably paid off the mortgage, they don’t have to get up and go to work every morning, the kids are off their hands and their time is their own. What’s not to be happy about?

On top of that, any ambitions you might have had have either been achieved or abandoned. So there is not that nagging sense of failure that dogs many of us in our working lives.

Of course there are a few painful twinges here and there and you don’t have quite the energy that you once had. Just watching my four-year-old grandson racing up and down our living room wears me out. But you can cope with that.

I retired last year at the grand old age of 68, although HMRC don’t seem to have registered the fact and clobbered me with a horrendous bill last month.

So I divide my time between home, the allotment, the boat and historical research. It’s enough. But the great thing is there is no pressure. What I don’t get done today can just as easily get done another day.

What makes people unhappy is stress. So many people have to work at jobs they dislike and are completely unsuited to, usually for an inadequate wage. How can you be happy in those circumstances?

We are told people work much harder these days. Many don’t even take lunch breaks, stuffing their faces with a horseburger at their desks instead. More fool them. I always stopped for lunch when I was working, sometimes several pints of it.

Then there is the impossible task of work-life balance, as they call it. Getting kids to school, making sure they are picked up on time, taking them to football or ballet, getting the shopping done, keeping the home in reasonable repair, responding to demands from parents, coping with Christmas etc. It’s all too much.

I don’t know who I will vote for at the next election. The last Labour lot were too up themselves for their own good and took us to war.

The Tories are too money-minded without having the talent to actually repair the economy. And the Lib Dems, well where would you start!

But if there was a party that styled itself the Let’s Ease Our Foot Off The Accelerator party, they would get my vote.

People need to work less, not more. We need to ease the pressure on our working population. If parents worked fewer hours, and less intensively, they would have more time for their children.

They would also have some time for themselves, to take up interests which would ameliorate the distaste of an unfulfilling job. There would be less rush and hurry, people would have more time to think.

And of course more people would have jobs, because they would have to be shared out more widely.

People will say that such a policy could never be afforded. The economy would nose-dive. But I think the reverse would happen.

How many accidents occur because people are rushing and not thinking? How many really bad and costly decisions are made because people are exhausted?

What is the financial, not to mention the social and health cost, brought about by the stress currently placed on family life?

Next time there’s a general election, vote for the Easy Party – I’ve shortened the title. Who’s going to start it?

by Alan Watkins

It seems like only yesterday I started at infants school, learned the three Rs and moved through the neighbouring junior school to the local grammar where I was one of the conspicuously poor pupils.

Then one day I was let loose on an unsuspecting world with one dream in mind – to be a reporter.

Never mind journalists: they are unlikely to recognise a news story and be able to report on it. I mean a hardbitten newshound.

I started with a freelance agency in Gloucester that’s still going, took my exams, got 140-words-a-minute Pitman’s shorthand and got ticked off by a judge for misunderstanding a court order allowing a couple of villains to have a few more days of liberty. Yep – I’ve been in the dock and never want to return there.

I have covered some of the big stories of the day. Tough newsmen covered in mud and coaldust were reduced to tears when they were offered a cup of tea after returning to the office from Aberfan.

Concorde’s first flight in Britain was like watching an anaemic mantis as it roared oh so slowly around the tower of Gloucester Cathedral before returning to its test base at Fairford.

I remember one High Court judge who could never refer to ladies underwear other than as nether garments (a distinct problem when dealing with many sex cases).

He hated psychiatrists – yet one had the temerity to turn up late for his court after carrying out trials on himself of a new drug called lysergic acid diethylamide (or LSD to the pop followers of the Sixties).

Fortunately the police stepped in, said he had been taken ill and rushed him back to his hospital to sleep it off.

We competed in a TV quiz called Beat the Press and defeated the Mayor of Taunton’s team so convincingly the Beeb ended the series.

I have chatted with some of the most notorious post-war murderers – they in the dock, me at the adjacent press bench – and watched the Home Office pathologist, Keith Simpson, as he ended the courtroom appearances of Quinton Hogg, the QC who went on to be Lord Chancellor.

Politicians? I’ve known a few and I still consider John Prescott to be misunderstood and under-rated (certainly he did a lot for Medway when he was Deputy Prime Minister).

I’ve had my day. I’ve loved every minute of reporting, most especially for the KM Group.

Now it’s time to give my wife the attention she richly deserves and let others get the stories I missed or failed to uncover. There are many of them to be unearthed.

It’s not the end, however. I shall still be writing for the Codgers column from my bath chair, as long as readers want it.