SO a third of Kirklees ambulances are late in getting to their destination. I would expect the figures to get worse before they get better.
Just go back 20 years and what had we got? Far fewer vehicles on the road, more dual carriageways and no traffic calming.
What we have now are dual carriageways made into effectively single carriage roads where traffic with the best will in the world find it difficult to pull out of the way to let the emergency vehicles past, so a few seconds are lost there.
Then we have the speed humps – OK if you can get to straddle them but whoops there’s a car parked at the side of one, so a few more seconds lost, then we must have something like 100% more traffic on the roads, and then finally we have the speed plateaux.
If the emergency vehicles have manoeuvred the rest the plateaux are sure to get them, even in the dead of night they are there to get them, so I think we can add a few more seconds.
Finally the Holme and Colne Valleys are full of outlying villages with single track roads owing to parked cars, good chance of a few more seconds lost here, then.
Not hard to see where the time’s going, is it?
B Tinker
Longwood
The road into town
I WAS left puzzled having read ‘A third of our 999 ambulances late’ (Examiner June 25). A former Ambulance Service employee said ‘Huddersfield is one of the biggest towns in Europe’.
Wow! I’ve not heard that one before, what great news for our town, but I bet Kirklees, all 161 square miles of it, would be the biggest town in the world.
The Examiner comment states that Kirklees has ‘a motorway running through the town’, which seems to confirm that Kirklees is already a town, although the M62 motorway only skirts its northern boundaries.
Let’s give Yorkshire Ambulance Service a break. Given the state of our dreadful roads, it’s a miracle they can get to any of their calls in under the eight-minute target time.
Uncle Grumpy
Golcar
Goods in transit
I WHOLEHEARTEDLY agree with Mr Corcoran’s idea of transporting work equipment on buses (Tradesmen going by buses: Mailbag, June 24).
I am sure some readers will recall the long-running debate in your letters column regarding a person attempting to take a can of paint on a bus.
It would not take that much redesign to have storage space under a bus, similar to where we put our bags on holiday.
I have also been told that in the trolley bus days, bags of mail, bales of hay etc were dropped off at outlying areas.
I additionally know a now elderly plumber who was allowed to take a toilet pedestal on a trolley bus.
Brian Horton
Berry Brow
A line you don’t cross
I’M sorry but my sympathies for Ms Rustamova (the teacher who wrote a racy story for her teenage boy pupils) are scant to say the least. She can try and get public sympathies, but she was in a position of trust, for which she has a duty of care.
Teenagers have a hard enough time with all the things that happen to them as they are growing up, without a teacher writing racy literature about them.
As most adults know, many teenagers are confused and have crushes on older people especially teachers. Most of us have been through it ourselves. Luckily most of us had teachers with a level head who realised their responsibilities.
I have children and if this literature had been written about them I would be seeking legal advice against the teacher responsible.
When my children take things a little far with me, I have a saying which always brings them back to earth ‘I am your mother not your mate’.
Perhaps if this lady loved her job as much as she says, she ought to have known there was a line she shouldn’t have crossed.
Nichola
Fixby
A matter of choice
NOT just one but two Lockwood men have written to the Examiner in the last week to warn us poor women of the dangers of the Pill. I’d like to thank them for their concern.
Both men failed to point out that the one thing the Pill has given women living in Lockwood or anywhere else in Huddersfield (or indeed the world): Choice! We get to choose whether and when we want to have babies.
Nothing in life comes risk-free. We women take our lives in our hands when we walk the streets. There are health risks in childbirth and in not having children. There are risks in all forms of contraception, and we speak to our doctors about that because they’re the experts.
The biggest risk however is taking our choice away. All of us, men and women, should be allowed to make our own decisions about what risks we choose to take in our lives.
Jo Coles
Dalton
It’s all a bit daft
AS the saga of the crossing/driveway dilemma at New Mill Road, Wooldale is now spreading beyond the parameters of the Examiner readership, it may be time to reflect that this fiasco has been created and protracted by the people we were urged to give our votes to on May 6.
Further evidence, if we need it, that we get the council we deserve.
Perhaps the matter could have been resolved by someone in some kind of chief executive position with an overview of council matters.
Hang on, didn’t we have such a person? Oh yes, that guy on footballer’s salary who is now going to work his expensive magic at Doncaster!
Perhaps this matter was of too little importance for him, or nobody had told him about it.
Surely we could at least have expected a critical mass of councillors to have looked at the way this case was developing and said ‘This is daft, even for us’!
See Sense
Golcar
Flying the flag
GREAT feeling to see the England flag being flown from cars, windows, roof tops etc in the past few days.
Not being a football fan myself I can imagine the great disappointment being felt by fans losing (especially to Germany) on Sunday.
Please, please don’t throw away your flags in disgust – fly them for our brave young lads in Afghanistan and fly them to show that you’re proud to be British.
Sue Bradford
Meltham
Not flying the flag
WOULD it not be more a sense of occasion, if we flew our England flags on match days only instead of a month before the football tournament starts and two months after it finishes?
Peter K Garside
Slaithwaite
Mentioning the war
I AGREE wholeheartedly with Martin Fletcher’s letter (Pension Reality, Mailbag, June 26). In fact I was going to write a similar one myself, adding the selling of our gold by Gordon Brown (the price has gone up ever since) and the cost of the illegal war in Iraq.
Also, before the run-up to the election, the number of deaths of our soldiers in Afghanistan was rocketing. In the run-up to the election, the number decreased significantly and now the election is over, they are going back to the number before.
Did the spin doctors have anything to do with this? Was the Army told to have a ceasefire so as not to spoil Gordon’s chances?
Coalition fan
Holmfirth
