Social responsibility

"Pressure group Cymuned (Welsh for communities) believes holiday homes should not account for more than 5% of any community's housing stock.
It wants VAT added to the price of second homes, council tax raised at 200% on each property and says planning permission should be required before a permanent dwelling can become a holiday home"

Doesn't that sound remarkably like my Utopian World post on second home ownership?

Maybe some parts of the world are moving in the right direction:-) I don't think I'll be moving to Taffland quite yet though;-)

Being off work at the moment, we were quite disturbed to see how many school age children were wandering around town, visiting leisure facilities and generally going about life as though school didn't even exist. We decided to make use of Friday afternoon, and went to the local cinema to watch the new Bond film - we thought it would be more polite to hack our guts up during a quiet afternoon showing than a busy Friday night;-) Aggie mentioned the numbers of youngsters going in to the guy selling the tickets, who just shrugged & said he didn't know how old they were and why should he care anyway?

That attitude really pissed me off, so I pointed out that they were obviously school age as he had just sold them childrens tickets! And he should care because he could be aiding and abetting a criminal act. He looked a bit worried by that & called his manager over. The manager was even less interested, and said it wasn't anything to do with him who used his facility, and how was he to know if kids should be at school or if they were legitimately off. Aggie suggested phoning the school, which he grudgingly agreed to do when we said otherwise we would consider phoning the police.

The cinema obviously has school age children using their facility reglarly, and have made a corporate decision to "turn a blind eye" to this. To the extent, that when we left the cinema they asked for our names & addresses to "keep on file" - I assume as troublemakers!

A few years ago there was a big push for the community to be involved in truancy, and to report where children where. That campaign has obviously passed Odeon Cinema's by completely. But more to the point, how many times have you heard people moaning about the kids of today, and when we were young, any adult would give a child a clip rpund the ear and all that? Yet the cinema staff (and a number of people queueing) acted as though Aggie was the criminal in suggesting adults should check up on children roaming the streets in the middle of a winters afternoon.

So much for social responsibility & community action!