Get on board the good ship Charlie

LIFE AND OTHER BITS: ANOTHER day, another new dawn with chief exec Charlie Parker saying that if we want a bigger, brighter and better Oldham we should stop talking the talk and start walking the walk.

And Charlie is the right man to show us how to do the walk. Charlie is a sailor and will have the sea legs to balance on the churning tides that will take us to the sun-kissed shores of our brighter tomorrow. There are those who also claim he can walk on water and he’ll need to.

Like that other seafaring legend, the spinach munching Popeye, cap’n Charlie is going to need all his strength, determination and powers of persuasion to combat the massed ranks of Oldham’s demons — apathy, scepticism and the familiar we’ll-believe-it-when-we-see-it, shoulder-shrugging majority.

Still fresh in the minds of local folk is the Oldham Beyond, so-called “visioning document” visioning presumably meaning now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t. That was six years ago and was published to launch a 15-year transformation project to turn Oldham into a cross between the trendy parts of Florence and the commercial hub of Paris. Instead we got a clock in the floor that doesn’t tell the time and that no one could see if it did and a musical fountain that didn’t do music and produced bubbles that would have done Fairy Liquid proud.

Charlie says that in five years Oldham will be a very different place with a lot more to offer and his no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is approach will ensure that he deals in fact not glossy fantasy and will not make lavish promises that he cannot keep.

I don’t know about the Brokeback coalition, but Oldham has certainly been the borough of broken promises and it has to stop.




MANY moons ago British Rail used to provide a public service but like Royal Mail, buses and people who work behind the counters of some shops, today’s railway owners have driven that old fashioned notion of service into the sidings. Huge ticket price increases are on the way but will that mean a better service for passengers?

Will they all get a seat? Will the carriages be warm when it’s cold and cold when it’s hot? Will the train be on time? Will it take passengers to a nicer place?

The answer to all of the above is an emphatic “NO” and passengers will go on suffering cattle-class conditions while the privatised rail companies top up their coffers.


FINAL WORD: I have mentioned several times how cannabis farms are a growth industry (if it was on the stock market it would be blue chip and in the FTSE (footsie to us) 100. Now we are growing so much cannabis we are exporting it.