Barnard Castle Watercolour Signed Print - Ken Burton
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Weird and wonderful world of civil servant speak
Jun 3, 2008
EACH week, here at Mercury Towers, we wade through several trees-worth of council agendas.
One such weighty document landed onto my desk recently, with the bold heading ‘Things are changing in County Durham' (actually, I added the capital letters, because this is one of those trendy tomes where capitals are considered redundant).
The title, on a cheerfully wavy line accompanied by photographs of smiling people, was somewhat deceptive, because beyond the cover page, reading this document was like struggling through a Greek dictionary. Welcome to the mysterious world of the County Durham Local Area Agreement 2008-2011.
We are not alone in Durham. Every region in the country has a Local Area Agreement (LAA if you must). It is meant to be a kind of contract between local people and government, setting out what the region will achieve in the next three years.
A lot of time and effort has gone into producing this LAA. Work started in 2007 and this is its third incarnation.
The report sets out a number of ‘important principles' which ‘underpin' the agreement. These include: ‘place shaping' and ‘gap narrowing'. Helpfully, an explanation of these snappy phrases is included. The former is to do with making the county unique and special, and the latter means reducing divisions within the community. I think.
Other highlights include the ‘Outcomes Framework for County Durham', which, with the aid of some jazzy arrows and dotted diagonal lines apparently ‘sets out the structure for our Sustainable Community Strategy (SCS), LAA and Delivery Plan and demonstrates that there is a hierarchy of performance indicators which feature all levels of the framework.' Phew! Which school do you go to learn to write like this?
But the pick of the whole report has to be the jigsaw, which is, according to the document, a ‘rich picture of priority needs and aspirations in County Durham'. How many brainstorms did it take to come up with that? I think I'll stick to my 1,000-piece ‘Alpine Landscape at Dawn' thank you.
The Local Area Agreement is full of valid and important points about life in County Durham, but like so much that originates from government, it is practically unreadable. Putting words into charts and jigsaws does not make them any easier to understand for those of us without a Diploma in Jargonese. When will our civil servants ever realise this?
RIP!
NEW reports on the future of the region are ten a penny these days. Another arrived last week entitled ‘State of the Region 2008', from an organisation I'd previously never heard of - the ‘North East Regional Information Partnership'. The paper set out the current state of the North East, assessing the area's prospects. Unfortunate then that the document should come from an organisation called ‘North East RIP'.
GOOSE FAT
ALONG with the reams of documents we receive through the post, the Mercury is also sent nigh-on 1,000 emails a day. Probably only 10 will be relevant. I spend the first half hour of most mornings trawling through this mountain of data, fishing out anything of any interest. Many of the emails are trying to sell me Viagra, or convince me that a rich Nigerian widow wants to use my bank account to keep her fortune safe. In amongst these familiar annoyances there will be a sprinkling of press releases from over-enthusiastic public relations companies - most of little interest to our readers.
One such press release, last week, was intriguingly headed ‘How do you use yours?' It came from a somewhat unlikely source - ‘The Goose Fat Information Service (GFIS)'.
On reading the release, I can only conclude the goose fat people are looking to change their greasy image with a slick PR campaign. But can they succeed in making goose fat cool? They already have the all-important celebrity endorsement from funny man David Walliams. The Little Britain star has apparently done wonders for sales of the smelly stuff by smearing it all over his body before swimming the English Channel.
Once only known as a key ingredient in roasties, a whole new market for goose fat has been opened up and now the search is on for other uses.
According to the release, the GFIS has launched a nationwide hunt for ‘the most unusual use of goose fat'. What's more, a case of goose fat is being awarded for the most original and interesting idea.
There are probably subscription-only websites out there dedicated to ‘unusual uses for goose fat' and I'd like to hazard a guess that most of the competition entries so far would be unprintable here. But, if you do happen to have an original (and legal) use for goose fat, you can email it across to info@goosefat.co.uk along with your name and address.
First published in the Mercury May 28, 2008