comes around...

A jeez, I thought I'd try to aid my recovery by doing a small amount of exercise. All I succeeded in doing was exhaust myself (I did bugger all) and apparently divert necessary healing energy into frivolity.

I now feel like I've gone backwards and am not feeling clever.

Will no-one deliver me from this turbulent virus ?

keep to the Fen Causeway

This is the sort of thing which drives me to fury. Newcastle council demonstrate that all elective services will be unaffordable by 2018 under the current govt settlement. That is children's services, libraries, arts, everything will be gone. Not gutted, gone.

Equally it is the unfairness. Newcastle reliably votes labour, whilst more leafy southern Conservative areas are doing very nicely thank you.

Areas which are already deprived are being abandoned

Guardian - John Harris - There is cold fear and resentment, but little sense of hope

Having taken serious financial blows since 2010 and set its budget on a year-by-year basis, Newcastle city council has just finished its public consultation on cuts of around £100m spread over three years to 2016 - and they make for terrifying reading. By then, it says it will have to cut about a third of its budget and shed 1,300 jobs.

There is an undercurrent of local noise about the aspects of the cuts pinned to cost inflation, and allegations that Labour council leader Nick Forbes is proposing such drastic moves in order to pick a fight with Westminster. If that is the case, you have to believe not only that he thinks laying waste to the city is a good career move, but that beneath an Alan Milburn-ish exterior lies a secret clone of Derek Hatton. The truth is much more prosaic, and all about a grim pincer movement afflicting councils across the country: in Newcastle, about £50m cut from money the council receives from central government, coupled with rising demand for the basic services it is statutorily required to provide.

Last week, while the Treasury reportedly plotted further cuts to local government, the National Audit Office issued a report ominously titled Financial Sustainability of Local Authorities. With some understatement, it acknowledged "evidence that local authorities are reducing services", and pointed out that they "may find it harder over the rest of the spending review period to absorb funding reductions". But only some of them: to quote those well-known lefty provocateurs the Audit Commission, "councils in the most deprived areas have seen substantially greater reductions in government funding as a share of revenue expenditure than councils in less deprived areas." In other words, Hackney, Hastings, Newham, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle take a big hit, but Elmsbridge, Winchester and Richmond-upon-Thames have got off very lightly indeed.

But this is the statistic which leaped from the page and made my blood boil

We might note that what Newcastle is losing over three years, we have been spending in Afghanistan every 8.3 days. Funny, isn't it, how the prime minister can apparently find money for his adventure in Mali, but still insist that places nearer home are all but crushed in the cause of fiscal exactitude?

keep to the Fen Causeway

Link to video on Facebook: Security cameras show Tel-Aviv municipality workers painting a handicapped parking space around and under a parked car - and then towing away the illegally parked car.....