IN this week alone I hear or read of these: ‘They are still taking the back off the Alexandra but keeping the theatre!’.

‘They are taking away DVLA correspondence/payment from local POs’

Via ‘Spotlight’, the SW BBC magazine programme which I watch occasionally and with great reluctance - ‘GWR closing ticket offices’ where they exist. A GWR “manager” confirming this after “consultation” with a smirk on his face’ last Friday.

I saw what was on offer at our Newton Abbot station five months ago when my wife Sue was buying a ticket to Sherborne so she could see and care for our daughter Fiona.

Sue with a stick, sight failing due to macular degeneration and cataract, and balance deteriorating as it seems to do more often in women. The ticket office with its most helpful ex-Hungarian lady was closed. A big and colourful screen and no doubt buttons in small and shiny font was by the barrier. I think I recall that one first had to select an actual destination and time of departure! Anyway, there was a young and helpful employee there to help Sue.

But how efficient and kindly was this work of the Devil compared with what has been there for all travellers since the British invented the permanent way in the 19th C?

It is all about complication and adding difficulty and distress when for ALL reasons our lowered country needs to encourage the use as often as possible, and with affordable cost, of OUR railway.

Some readers will recall the Major government’s handling of rail privatisation. This process had started in earnest with Thatcher and the ‘think’ tank the Centre for Policy Studies. The reader will recall that three prominent Tories, Ridley, Letwin and Redwood had recommended that all public services had to be dismantled surreptitiously ie quietly, as with the burglar – in the dark and in soft shoes. And admit, that as well as Tweedledum, Tweedledee - ‘Labour’, and tweedle - Lib’Dem’ have not opposed these destructive moves.

The worst example – on the home page for those with computers and able to afford connection at about £30 per month - https://dhalpin.infoaction.org.uk/ bottom right ‘A Quotation From: The NHS Dismantled’.

You will recall also that the first soundbite in this black propaganda ensuring the destruction of what our people of Britain had constructed and most often paid for was ‘Don’t Tell Sid’. Anyway – back to the railway, and those weeping for our extraction from the ‘Common Market’, transmuted into the EU serving NATO, note this.

In obedience to EU competition RULES, the government lead by John Major, a ‘nice, mannerly man’, had to separate the wheels from the track! So we have Network Rail for the track and Uncle Tom Cobley for the wheels - and don’t you know it.

I wanted to get to Nailsea near Bristol on Saturday 29th by rail. So I went ‘on line’ - that is electronically and by copper wire. (It was the GPO – a nationalised industry, that at its research centre near Ipswich, electronic engineers worked out how impulses carrying 0s and 1s could be carried on these tiny copper wires.)

I found the usual variety of websites making out that each was the best way forward. I came to a stop here - https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/travel-information/find-atrain-company/ and my anger swelled - though I have known the picture for years. I count 34 train companies. Churchill often used the expression - ‘a dog’s dinner’. I think one should refer to the other end of the dog’s dinner here.

How does the local ‘climate emergency’ brigade respond to the deliberate destruction of what was one of our many prides and cause for joy? By the new leader Mr Wrigley being keen for a new cinema/s? I have just learned that the former leader has retired from ‘politics’. I recall that in a letter by me to the MDA I had noted that Mr Connett was alone as a councillor, but with one planning officer, for permission being given to a major land owner for a 40 acre solar ‘’farm’’ on the Haldon Hills. Ah, but ‘climate change’ trumps all.

When I took an exam at aged 17 and at Shaftesbury Grammar School in 1957 it was called the State Scholarship. I had taken one for the County Major Award just before in that glorious summer as I recall it. Outside the room where we wrote nervously, was the large beech on the lawn by the headmaster’s house, restless in the breeze on a lovely Dorset hill.

That Dorset County award got me my education as a doctor at St Mary’s W2 and the great privilege and joy of being a doctor surgeon. I failed to get a State Scholarship but I remember the two hours I spent for the essay. It was on the likely benefit of a low mass train for local journeys! This principle is applied in that service to Canary Wharf!

So against what a majority of thinking and caring citizens know is what our disintegrated society needs, we have instead a vicious madness. Logic, logos, there is none.

I gave a talk to a large audience in Totnes Town Hall in July 2010. The title, as requested, was Zionism, Dr David Kelly and the BBC. They are connected topics as I said at the time.

The previous evening, I had written quickly, my mild definition of fascism, which is often in a velvet glove. See if this fits the present viciousness -

‘The subjugation of the individual’s will and freedom by an overweening state. Humanity withers, freedom of speech is stifled and the soul dies. Self preservation becomes a dominant drive.’

And when you learn that only one TDC councillor, Mr McGregor, voted against the Lidl corporation with its 11,000 + stores setting up shop by the entrance to our wonderful National Park, with 14 in favour, know Mussolini’s definition, and he knew!

‘Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power’ Benito Mussolini.