Last week we happened to be at Ruskin’s grave for his 200th birthday and there was a special service of celebration.
Today when walking in South Abingdon I remembered that there is a Ruskin Avenue in Abingdon. It is a small road between Gainsborough Green and Cotman Close, part of a painter’s theme.
The other link to John Ruskin in Abingdon is a Historic Building and can be seen on the town portal created by Abingdon Area Archaeological and Historical Society”John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic and social commentator, made the Crown & Thistle his home for a period in the early 1870s, walking the 7½ miles to Oxford when giving lectures and visiting the university.”
I notice Backstreeter that you did not take a photo of the other side of the road. Since the council have stopped killing weeds the weeds have grown up trapping rubbish. It looks a dreadful mess. My son who comes to visit said the area has realy gone down. People do not clear up outside their houses like they did at one time. When the weather gets better I will attempt to get rid of the weeds and rubbish along Ruskin Avenue. I hate being associated with a dirty dump.
On about poor services Janet think of this?
We arrived at Throwing Buns this morning at 11pm and found an elderly man with crutch laying at the foot of county hall steps, he was unconscious and bleeding heavily from a head wound, the guy from the jewellers attempted to bandage the wound and called an ambulance. 20 mins later and no ambulance the guy from the barbers came out to see him, still unconscious! He phoned 999 again and tried to help the man, another 20 mins have passed and staff from Throwing Buns rang to see where the ambulance had got to only to be told there is none available and it could be another two hours before one arrives, it’s now 12.20 and this guy has been laid unconscious for 1,5 hours! Now a PCSO’ has arrived, but still no ambulance! What are we paying for !!!
This is appalling! I’ve just asked the PCSO where’s the ambulance got to and he said he’s as confused as anyone – he’s just radio’d his control room and asked them to call for an ambulance only to be told they won’t do it, they’ve told him to dail 999 from his mobile phone! Meanwhile the guy is still unconscious and bleeding heavily!
Any more news, Horsesmouth?
Hope the elderly gent gets the attention he needs,This is the reality of voting Tory ,The really nasty party.
He was eventually put into the back of an ambulance at 12.45 !
Sorry but we have all known that this sort of thing was coming. The population of the UK has grown by 14 million but at the same time resourses have been cut. It is the same with the police force. The ambulance service themselves have been saying that the service will break down as they have not got enough ambulances to cope with the demand, which because of population explosion has increased dramatically.
Hi Janet, I did not want people to think we are letting John Ruskin down by showing the other side. I will do a post about litter soon. It is bad and another litter pick is on the way.
Well done to all those helped the guy before the ambulance came.But yes, terrible it took so long.
…surely in these times of austerity we should actually have taken the poor unconscious man to a&e ourselves.
Save the drain on our services.
I don’t see why we shouldn’t be expected to “cover the service shortfall” here, if we are accepting carrying out our own litter picks?
Daniel I can’t believe you’ve just suggested that! How do I know he hadn’t broken his neck or had a similar life threatening condition? Indeed I did suggest just that to the PCSO but was told police cars aren’t ambulances!
I hope the gentleman makes a good recovery – well done those who came to his immediate help.
It is desperately sad (and shameful) that people are sleeping rough on our streets. It seems absurd that when a PCS O calls into the police station about the emergency he is told to call 999, but he was on the scene and he would have been able as a PCSO. However, it does sound a bit of a nonsense.
Undoubtedly, the UK population is growing and we need resource ourselves to deal with this. The current population is 66million. If we want to discover when it was 14 million fewer, we have to go back to 1950 when the UK population was 52 million. That’s seventy years ago; it hasn’t happened overnight.
What is undeniably true is that cuts in local government funding have made things a great deal worse. Yet the latest polls suggest that a General Election would be unlikely to produce a Labour victory. Now there’s a thing!
When I “lost” my purse shopping in Oxford before Xmas, I went into St Aldates Police Station. I tried to report it as stolen and was told to use the phone on the wall and ring 101. I rang them and they asked me where I was. I told them I was at St Aldates police station and they asked me if it was manned. I said yes and the man told me to use the phone! All I got was a crime number and advised to call my bank to cancel my card. The automated answering system kept asking for my card number so I gave up. Had to wait till I got home to cancel the cards should have just gone straight home in the first place.
C phone…how stupid to blame the tory party for the non arrival of an Ambulance !!!!!
C phone..how stupid to blame the tory party for the non arrival of an Ambulance!!’m
The Lady. It is the Conservatives who have driven austerity to its limits. I heard today that Sussex are to cut most of their services for the homeless and rough sleepers to save money. Four rough sleepers have died in Oxford in the last couple of months. The Conservative Party have never cared about the poor and homeless and they are not about to change now. When the M P’s got in they voted themselves a pay rise when everyone else had a pay freeze and directors are being given more outragously large pay rises.
the other day I was on my laptop that I bought from Amazon, and sitting in Starbucks having a coffee whilst having a Google to see how the government could somehow get more money in to the coffers and end or reverse this austerity…it seems there’s no easy answers.
Janet: don’t exaggerate – your point loses force when you do. I know plenty of Tories who care about the poor. Not everybody we disagree with is evil or stupid.
I agree that the Osborne policies have been very tough and that there has been terrible suffering. But we are not re-living the 1930s – thank God.
Stop Press! Apparently Evette Cooper is offering to house Shamima Begum ( her who left the UK to support Isis, but now wants to come back to have her child) in one of her three houses?
Probably because she knows she will get a guaranteed income from the government coffers for her rent!
re: police control asking pcso to dial 999 – that is not absurd, it is simple common sense. the pcso is on site, he can report to ambulance control what he sees – symptoms, condition.
He could tell the police control what to tell the ambulance control, but if ambulance control needs more information about the condition of the patient what’s police control going to say to ambulance control …. “hang on a minute while I ring the bloke on the scene and ask him” ?
The person who has the information should talk directly to the person who needs it.
I agree, Ainia.
You’re missing the point Ainia, by the time the PCSO arrived no less than four people over the course of 45 minuets had already called for an ambulance and had already given a sit rep, in fact at one point the ambulance controller had rang staff at Throwing Buns back to say there were no ambulances available and it could be another two hours before one arrived! They had all the info they needed – elderly man unconscious and bleeding heavily rom a head wound! What more info do they need? How many teeth does he have?
My point is that someone who is at the scene will always be more effective at getting the right information to the people who need it than someone who is not at the scene. The ambulance service need to printoritise limited resorces, and need accurate information to do that. It is distressing to be at the scene, however no one there has knows what other incidents the ambulances might be dealing with at that time. Resources need to be deployed effectively.
My point is that someone who is at the scene will always be more effective at getting the right information to the people who need it than someone who is not at the scene. The ambulance service need to printoritise limited resorces, and need accurate information to do that. It is distressing to be at the scene, however no one there knows what other incidents the ambulances might be dealing with at that time. Resources need to be deployed effectively, accurate information is crucial.
I apologise for the double post .. s it possible to delete one of them?
Ainia you’re trying to defend the indefensible! No matter what the poor soul was suffering from one and a half hours to wait for an ambulance is absurd!
There is a difference between (1) offering an explanation for the need for 999 calls to be made by a witness rather than through a third party – however, “official” that third party might be – and (2) suggesting that the delay was acceptable. In fact, Ainia describes it as “distressing”; that is hardly defending the indefensible.
But what does all this have to do with Ruskin?