Diary

27 June 2009

Quentin Wilson's diary

Home for the weekend to Stratford-upon-Avon, where I cringe at the local council’s latest Big Idea. A committee of madmen have decided that this precious heritage site should now be known as ‘World-Class Stratford’. And to prove it the council unveils a £3.5 million improvement to a garden area in the town centre. Once lined by mature trees, it’s now a cold expanse of stark new paving stones and stainless steel handrails. I could be in a Milton Keynes skateboard park. I look over at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (an art deco gem), now gloomily shrouded in scaffolding and ruptured by an enormous concrete obelisk. New aluminium windows have all the architectural appropriateness of pebbledash. It’s a world-class joke.

You’ll notice I haven’t once mentioned MPs. If only it were that simple. There have always been people who can’t tell ethics from elbows or taste from tat, and many of them may be currently running the country, but it’s the ones who are running everything else that I really worry about. Everywhere I look I seem to see the contagion of galloping cretinism. A plague on it.