The man from the ministry, Pamplona bull run and other thoughts for Sunday.

An old friend of mine who I hadn’t seen for some time dropped in for a chat today, he now works in what we once would have called the ministry of education but is now probably made up of a great many government departments, at local, national and European level.

We had quite a considerable chat about the coming of the end of the public service gravy train, partly as the government department he works in is one that David Cameron says he will close if he gets elected.

My notion that the whole UK education system could be improved for nothing, just by ensuring that the teachers took the examinations with their students and that as long as the same examiner marked all of each classes and their teachers exam papers, many of the problems in our education system would be resolved, went down quite well with him.

Interestingly he considered that many civil servants including him were grossly over paid, he considered that pay in the public sector was now markedly better than in the private sector, for similar jobs.

Catching up on this week’s news, “Man gored to death by bull in Pamplona run,” was one I had missed click here for story and video footage, it seems hardly credible that this should still be going on in modern Europe.

Having read the article and watched the video I am trying to get my head round how I feel about this, I suppose this is probably the most dangerous legal public event still in existence.

From the point of view of the young chap who got killed, I don’t suppose he really thought of the danger or the awful consequences for his family. I would like to say that when I was in my late teens or early twenties, especially if goaded on by my friends, I would have been too sensible to what he did, but am not so sure.

From the bulls point of view as the bulls that are bred for Spanish bullfighting are just that and wouldn’t exist without the sport, this is more difficult for me than just saying it’s barbaric and has no place in a modern world.

If I had been born a bull in the UK, castration, intensive farming and the slaughterhouse would have been my lot.

The bulls bred for Spanish bullfighting however pretty much range freely, as close to the bovine natural habitat as one is likely to find in Europe today, I think reaching maturity intact and dieing relatively quickly has more appeal for me.

Anyway moving away from the Hemmingwayesk to the more mundane, I have just put last weeks planning applications on http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/ and am once again pondering the bizarre nature of TDC planning online.

The most ridiculous aspect of the plans as they appear online is that pretty much all of them are scans of scale drawings, the only way one can work out any of the dimensions on them is to use a scale ruler against the paper sheet.

This means that when viewing the planning drawings online it is impossible to tell how long any of the lines are i.e. the height, width or depth of any of the proposed buildings, rendering most of the documents published on the site next to useless.

I have been asking TDC to get linier scales added to the drawings before they are scanned for some time, this wouldn’t be difficult, it could be done as simply as having a rubber stamp of each scale made and applying it to the plan.

I know that TDC are working on a new planning site, which should be working by now, however they tell me that this has been beset with technical problems. Not having got as far as putting liner scales on the sheets yet suggests there will be quite a long wait before we get anything really useful.

Pondering our local water contamination a question that occasionally flits through my mind is, would the combination of government agencies that appear to be incapable of insisting in basic safety measures, like a flood risk assessment for Pleasurama, combine through incompetence or design to supply contaminated tap water in a first world country click here to read.

Still on the water issue, some of you may be interested to see how Thanet Earth have addressed some of the problems that China Gateway will have to solve click here to view, as you can see it will a mammoth and expensive task. I believe something like this sort of solution will have to be used for the car and lorry park runoff, looking at the size of these parking areas the tanks will have to be massive

I will endeavour to add more as I get time today.