Drowning in a sea of curry and kebabs

THE FRIDAY THING
LIFE AND OTHER BITS: NOT all the plump tons who travel up Ripponden Road are men of the cloth, unless, of course, it is the tablecloth, but Rev Paul Plumpton (a delicious name that makes me think of Christmas pud) is right to be concerned at the creation of a gluttons’ alley leading up to his church.

There are already 18 take-aways within sniffing distance of St James’s Church in Barry Street which is irritating enough unless you are on a sponsored eat-till-you-bust splurge, and the last straw is the decision by Oldham Council’s planning committee to allow a KFC drive-through, right opposite the good vicar’s church.

Why does Oldham have such an obsession with take-aways? There are some pretty big appetites round the council benches (round being the word) but can 18, soon to be 19 within such a short distance be needed?

Do they all make a profit? Indeed, how does the ever-growing crop of take-aways in Oldham town centre make a profit? We have our fair share of fatties around the town who eat their weight in curries, burgers, kebabs and flied lice every night but take-aways must be rivalling cannabis farms as Oldham’s fastest growing industry.

Why don’t the planners just say: “No, we are already drowning in curry and exotic spices and we can take no more.”

And it must of course be a co-incidence but Oldham, the curry capital of the North-West, had the second highest number of food poisoning cases in Greater Manchester — 322 last year. Maybe the good Rev Plumpton should call upon his boss upstairs for a miracle; not turning water into wine but turning takeaways into something useful during the day as well as at night. It’ll give Oldham a whole new ambience.


CAN we draw any comfort from David Cameron’s promise that the deepest public spending cuts for decades will affect everyone’s way of life? No.

Yes, it will affect us all, but the effect it will have on a millionaire Cabinet minister and someone living on the minimum wage or benefits in Oldham will be somewhat different.

And what about the banks, those who played blind-man’s poker with our money, lost it all and more besides and then had the bare-faced, gambling addicts’ cheek to come to us for a few hundred billion just so they could keep on playing?

Government should make the first cuts, slashing its waste, bureaucracy, quangos, spin doctors, consultants and, of course, the number of MPs and the vast sums it pays them in salaries, expenses and pensions. It won’t happen of course.



FINAL WORD: Headline of the week, if not the year so far was surely “Still life in the old Willie”.

On behalf of older readers I ask if this means that there is still life in old Willie or that poor old Willie is now reduced to still life in the inanimate, artistic sense? A fine point, but it matters to some.