PPS 21 - Will life in the country ever be the same again?
HACIENDAS on the hillsides. Developers licking their lips at the prospect of more lucrative rural building sites becoming available.
Ribbon development may be worse than Donegal's bungalow blight.
Oh dear. Environment Minister Edwin Poots is getting it in the neck from just about everyone except farmers with his department's new rural planning policy.
The new document PPS21 replaces PPS14 which clamped down on what appeared to most of us to be endless development in the countryside, some of it entirely out of place with the environment, during the years up to 2006.
This new policy seems to be a bit of a free for all and a grand one for farmers who will be able to apply for a building site on their land every 10 years. It will also allow infill homes where there is a little clachan already.
Edwin Poots is adamant, however, there will be no ribbon development, no repeats of the ruined Donegal. Quite how he expects to control that is anyone's guess.
I understand people's passion for wanting to live in the country; most of my life has been spent in its wild depths and even though it has its drawbacks, such as five-day electricity blackouts in the dead of winter and sheep and cattle occasionally breaking in because, yes, my grass is greener than theirs, I couldn't possibly live anywhere else and it's nothing to do with recent reports that country folk live longer than townies.
Throughout the UK some 2.4million people have relocated from city areas to rural areas in the last five years. This is quite an astonishing figure coming from the Office of National Statistics and I've no doubt programmes like A Place in the Country have created the appetite for country living as people suddenly realise how stressful it can be to live in a built up area.
I often wonder how those who feature on such programmes eventually fare in their country idylls. I imagine the transition to be quite scary initially.
During the house-hunting they drool over the views, express a wish to be self-sufficient in food, like rearing a pig or two, chickens and vegetables. It's a generation brought up on programmes like the seventies' sitcom The Good Life where taming the wilderness seemed so easy, such a lot of fun.
But how much fun is it? While I was a working mum there was not much time for country pursuits or creating gorgeous gardens. I left that to my retirement and so, when I retired to this my third country idyll (this hopefully will be our last move) the first job I set out to do was sort the garden and create a flagstone path. I started in the month of June two months after the day I retired, the weather was gorgeous and when I lifted the first flagstone I felt a little click in my back. That little click turned out to be a prolapsed disc which put me off my feet for weeks and cost me a small fortune for an MRI scan since the NHS waiting list was two years and consultant's fees.
It has never fully recovered (yes, I know at my age it's not likely to either) so energetic gardening is out of the question. That potato patch I long for will never be dug because Himself also has a bad back and he can't understand why I would want to involve myself in such heavy work when I can buy a bag of spuds at the local supermarket for a fraction of the cost of keeping my spuds free from the dreaded blight.
Then there's the hedge cutting and the taming of the leylandii, keeping the weeds at bay, lawn mowing, flower bed trimming and hours of watering when the weather's dry and hot. Obviously not a problem last year but who can you get to keep all this in order when you go on holiday? Coming back to grass knee high is not unusual for us.
Then there are the cats, of course. Everyone living in the country has a pet or six. My three moggies patrol the area like soldiers, dispatching predators on two feet and four. They love their freedom and would probably never forgive me if I put them in a cattery during the holidays. So my neighbours look after them for me.
And I suppose that's the nicest thing about country living, your neighbours become close friends, we come to depend on each other even if the snow's three feet deep.
We all share a love for this wide open space we live in here with it's beautiful valley backdrop and mountains in the distance. At the moment most of us waken to the dawn chorus and in the evenings we can chat over a glass of wine in the garden with no noisy, polluting traffic to annoy us.
We are also good for the countryside. ONS figures show we have a higher household spend than those living in the cities. This is good for local shops and garages since we tend to use a lot more petrol.
The last Labour government ignored the countryside and those who lived in it. Despite its disgraceful neglect, we've survived and are flourishing. What we don't need now is for Mr Poots to grant big time developers, who don't understand country living, new opportunities to make big bucks and swan off leaving a mess behind. We want what the Ulster Farmers' Union president John Thompson calls "a vibrant, rural community". Not too much to ask, is it?
Is Sex and the City simply a means of escapism?
I'VE been missing out on the whole Sex and the City thing. So Sarah Jessica Parker and her band of women don't mean a lot to me, yet I can see their appeal for women brought up in the credit card era who don't mind splashing out on handbags costing hundreds of pounds, flashy designer dresses reminiscent of fifties fashion and Jimmy Choo shoes so that they too can have their Sex and the City moment. At the hairdressers last week, I sat next to a lovely lady who confessed she was heading out with her girlfriends to the Sex and the City premiere in Belfast.
In her middle 40s with four growing-up children I could see how she wanted on occasions to extricate herself from all this child rearing and dress up like SJP. I then discovered a friend's teenage daughter and her giggly friends were also preparing for the same SJP night in an array of flowery outfits with fascinators and killer heels. Pure escapism, I suppose, even if I can't quite work out what the teen gang thought they were escaping from.
No place like home for hols
TOURISM Minister Arlene Foster says our domestic tourism figures increased significantly in 2009 and have grown again this year, the trend generating a 30million boost for the sector in January and February.
It can be explained by Northern Ireland Tourist Board figures which show that more and more people have been holidaying at home, the increase driven by more people enjoying short breaks (holiday trips lasting one-to-three nights). Yet in the south of Ireland the tourism industry has lost a hefty 100,000 visitors each month this year, with even the St Patrick's Day celebration failing to entice people out.
The simple explanation must be the cost of living in the south which is way above our own. Maybe southerners should return to the punt and like the costa countries of Europe – Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain - extricate themselves from the ruinously expensive EC which is still one of the largest gravy trains on earth for its politicians.
The means to do her own wagging
OUR own Christine Bleakley at 31 is hardly in the first flush of WAG-ful youth. Yet she's been lumped in a newspaper article with all those other footballers WAGS since she's stepping out with Chelsea's Frank Lampard who earns 130,000 a week.
Christine's style was described in the article as "fake tan, muscle-bound, loves killer heels". Any woman who water-skied across the Channel for charity, and acquitted herself well on Strictly Come Dancing, is no shrinking violet. She also has a record for dumping men. That makes her a much more powerful WAG than those other simpering Barbie lookalike WAGS who can't keep their men from straying.
Nice work if you can get it
THE salary bill for just eight of our district council chief executives comes to a mega 830,000 a year. On top of that will be the pension contributions paid for them and bonuses here and there, all from the public purse. Which makes the delay in downsizing the number of district councils we have nothing short of a disgrace. The sooner we reduce the 26, all with chief executives, to about six the better for the ratepayers. This kind of profligate spending on salaries is totally out of kilter with what the public can afford.
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Wednesday 30 May 2012
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