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A Freedom Pass leaflet sent out to pensioners |
Post office is Freedom bypassed
ONCE, the elderly in Camden picked up their Freedom Pass through the Post Office.
But all that will change next year when the Town Hall takes over, I can reveal.
Essentially, London Councils – the overseeing body for local authorities in the capital – has decided to allow a new company, ESP Systex Ltd, based in Hull, to roll out the card.
Not all boroughs intend to go down this road. Some prefer to stay with the Post Office because they have a very workable system in place.But Camden isn’t one of them.
Here, thousands of oldies are now receiving forms to fill in through the post which, with proof of identity and a passport-sized picture, will allow them to send off to the Town Hall for a Pass.
The council says there is no extra cost involved and that this is an example of the Town Hall making things easier for people.
An official I spoke to put it more bluntly.
“We’re changing because post offices are closing down and the post is being privatised,” I was told.
This move by Camden and other authorities will, of course, mean a severe loss of revenue for the Post Office, which is already under siege.
On the surface, the new system espoused by the council, however, sounds attractive.
Though it could be said: If the system ain’t broke why change it? Everything will depend on the efficiency of the postal service.
If the current dispute, now put onto the back burner until the New Year, flares up again early next year the Camden system could run into trouble.
In any case, some might think, putting such vital documents in the post is a risky business. Foreseeing this, the council says applicants can take their documents down to the Town Hall, but this would be a long trek for elderly people who live in Hampstead or Highgate.
I hope every angle has been explored and that we won’t witness miserable elderly applicants complaining that their forms have been lost in the post.
Zoe to follow in dad’s footsteps
THE daughter of former mayor Ray Adamson has been selected to contest Gospel Oak in next year’s council elections.
Zoe Adamson, 34, will stand for the Labour Party in the ward she grew up in.
Zoe, who lives in Lismore Circus, was a pupil at Gospel Oak primary, then Parliament Hill school before studying social and political science at Cambridge.
Her father Ray was a much-admired Labour councillor in the 1990s and known as a campaigner in Gospel Oak.
Waste not... Celebrating ‘dull, dull’ TS Eliot’s work
POETRY runs like a silver thread through the Douglas clan, according to the poet Gawain Douglas, whose great uncle was Oscar Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas.
Last Saturday evening I was in the audience for a reading by Lord Douglas of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land at the Calder Bookshop in Waterloo. The shop is owned by the publisher and poet John Calder who, during his youth, actually met Eliot.
Before the reading, Douglas said his great uncle had detested TSE, who was recently voted the nation’s favourite poet in a BBC poll, and that his eldest daughter had asked him: “Does The Waste Land begin ‘April is the cruellest month’ because that’s when you have to file your tax returns?”
Douglas warned the 50-strong audience that The Waste Land was a notoriously difficult poem, but he said: “After tonight, you can say ‘I’ve done it’, and in common with many young people in the 1920s, you can declare: ‘I am a Waste Lander’.”
Eliot, who worked for a time as a nine-to-five clerk in Lloyds Bank and was described as, “Dull dull dull; a man who would lower the temperature in a room” by Bloomsbury friends, had become “a totem” by the 1960s, Douglas said.
He added: “He became the poet of a generation. Oscar Wilde once wrote: ‘If you give a man a mask, he’ll tell you the truth.’
“Eliot tells us his truth from behind the mask of literature.”
Douglas’s wife Nicolette played piano introductions to the different sections of the poem, part of which was written on Margate Sands in Kent, near to Douglas’s family home.
The event was arranged by The Living Literature Society. For details of future readings, see www.livingliterature.co.uk or call 01727 825 939.
Party award for Labour’s loyal Penny`
A PROUD moment came for Penny Abraham when she was presented with a Labour Party Certificate of Merit at a fundraising dinner at the Shah Tandoori restaurant in Drummond Street, Euston.
The scarlet-framed certificate, signed by Gordon Brown, was presented by the former No 10 Downing Street aide Alistair Campbell.
Quiet but determined Penny, who lives in Kentish Town, is a councillor for Bloomsbury and is standing down at the elections next May after 16 years on the council.
Congratulations Penny, you’ll be a hard act to follow as the kind of tenacious councillor who would never give up until she had won her case!
LS LOWRY'S The Gateway went under the hammer at a Christie’s auction on Thursday. The oil painting was part of the late Hampstead actor Peter Barkworth’s estate – he paid £57 for it in the 1950s after spotting it in Glasgow while appearing at the King’s Theatre. It sold last week for £181,250.
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