AN intrepid Old Town animal lover called Laura Davies raised £700 for the Dogs Trust by making a sponsored wing walk.

I’ve always wanted to do a wing walk, but as a person who’s seldom met a cake trolley he didn’t like, I never get past the bit on the application form which asks for my weight.

I reckon it stands to reason that there are many more people in a similar predicament, and that the charity sector is therefore potentially losing out on a great deal of revenue.

If the major charities all chipped in to buy some secondhand planes suitable for people like me, I bet they’d more than recoup the investment.

I hear Aeroflot has some old Airbus A320s going spare.

They need to sort out their priorities

ON Saturday half a dozen people from the Keep Our NHS Public campaign handed out leaflets in Canal Walk. Or rather, they did until they were ordered to leave after a protracted argument.

Apparently the campaigners had turned up without paying the requisite fee or going through health and safety checks.

Quite what health and safety risks are involved in handing out inoffensive leaflets is beyond me.

While there clearly can’t be a free-for-all, some form of compromise could surely have been reached.

It’s not as if there were fire eaters and a brass band, or a queue of other groups demanding to use the spot.

But all that’s by the by. The real problem here is that the various organisations in charge of the town centre might want to reassess certain policies in light of the inevitable bad PR.

There are some positive things to be said about the town centre. Chief among them is that for the first time in years the major players seem to be fully co-operating with one another.

Also for the first time in years, the people at the top come across as having a genuine commitment to the town born of personal loyalty.

Plenty is being done to attract new businesses, improve the diversity of what is on offer and discourage shoppers from heading elsewhere.

There are assorted special events, ranging from musical performances to international markets, and from fairground attractions to seasonal gatherings.

Those are the good points, and they should be acknowledged and encouraged.

Inevitably there are also some bad points – and none of them are NHS campaign stalls. Those of us who use the town centre, try to give its businesses our support and encourage others to do so are more concerned about other matters.

We’re concerned, for example, about empty shops, especially when there are two or more side by side. They make parts of the place look like locations for a Ken Loach film. Can’t we offer businesses such preferential rates that they’d be daft not to move in?

We’re also concerned about those fake shopfronts used to board over some of the empty places, the ones with pictures of beautiful people in sophisticated cafes and whatnot. They fool nobody.

Returning to the subject of people handing out leaflets in the town centre, ask anybody to list nuisances and I’d bet about three of my fingers that NHS campaigners would be pretty low on the collective list.

They’d certainly be beneath, for example, oily sales people for phone companies, especially the ones working for that notorious company whose security is so lousy that clients might as well wear their bank account numbers, sort codes and PINs on T-shirts.

Any concerns about NHS campaigners would also be far beneath concerns about litter. Many’s the time we’re appalled to see it casually dropped by some slack-jawed slob who seems to be the result of an unhappy genetic experiment involving three short planks and a pig.

The same goes for spat-out chewing gum. Or dodgy representatives of dodgy charities claiming to be helping children, injured veterans and so on, but who actually pocket at least half of the cash themselves.

Or dodgy representatives of well-known charities who hassle us for direct debits and look at us as if we were murderers should we demur.

Or people who get blackout drunk in the middle of the day, demand cash from passers-by and scream abuse. Or full-grown men who think it’s okay to ride a bike at full pelt among pedestrians.

If getting the best out of a town centre is a war, some of the people running ours should choose their battles more carefully.

Top marks for George

ROYAL Wootton Bassett Academy head teacher George Croxford should be saluted for describing GCSE grading changes as barking mad.

When the results come out in late summer, some subjects will be given the usual A to E letter grades, while others will be graded from one to nine. Strictly speaking, they’ll be graded nine to one, with nine being the best grade and one being the worst.

That’s completely counter-intuitive, of course. It makes about as much sense as calling the winner of the London Marathon number 40,000. Still, you can’t fault our top education officials’ dedication to their mission – assuming their mission is the creation of utter chaos and anguish among pupils and teachers.

Mr Croxford’s forthrightness won’t win him many friends among those officials, but who wants buffoons for friends anyway?

In an ideal world, I’d send the best of his pupils to London to run the examination system for a while – and have the officials sent to his school for a term or two and taught basic common sense and consideration.