While I'm here, some arty photographer guy gave me this the other day - see above. He had some idea that Auchterness could look a bit like this after we were finished. What a load of rubbish - there are already enough pigs in the streets here and I'm not talking about the four-legged kind. Our new town will not be a pigsty! My God! Our heroes would turn in their graves - Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, Josef Stalin, George Wimpey deserve better than this slap in the face!
I was speaking to the Chief Planner the other day and he said it might be easier just to close and move to Glasgow. Well that is a point of view but as I was saying to a government minister the other day, we can't just walk away. This isn't the first time this has happened and often when you type something in Word and you get to the second line, the machine just hangs. We're supposed to be a professional office and Doug Harper of course is a strong player now that the Chief Planner has sided with him. But the quality isn't there at the moment. Do you know that we only have one width of masking tape here? In Glasgow I've heard that you can get two widths and in London maybe three or four. I was out for a drink with the Laird's daughter last night and I told her about the new settlement proposal in more detail and how it is an ideal platform for a developer led consortium that actually taps into the value gradient inherent in the Scottish housing market. Why aren't we doing that?
What's happening with other new settlements? Why doesn't someone tell me? I asked Heather to find out more about who rang the door bell the other morning. You know other offices have a proper doorbell that people can use and people do use it - much more than up here where they just wander in with their muddy feet. I've asked Heather to send a Powerpoint presentation to the Scottish Government explaining things. You know we keep coming across the same problems everywhere I go. The trouble is that people just don't listen to me. We have the plumbers in the office at the moment - we need electricians. I asked Heather to make sure that she let them in before she left but - well I don't know what happened - I was struggling to find this file on the computer but Groupwise told me that it wasn't configured for that. I'm really struggling with Groupwise at the moment. You see the Chief Planner doesn't understand what the problem is and we need to refocus on some of the issues here and he is just manipulating things. I had lunch the other day with Alex Salmond. Did you know that he is now First Minister? I just found out about that the other day but apparently it happened in May. Why doesn't anyone tell me these things - because if I had known, I would have been able to help.
Anyway where is that bottle?
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