The Wardman Wire

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This ten minute segment is from “Open Country” last Saturday (at 6:30am) about a project under the Community Rail Development Scheme to rejuvenate the Poacher Line from Sleaford to Skegness in Lincolnshire.

Open Country is on Radio 4, at 6:30am on Saturdays, and is repeated the following Thursday at 1:30pm.

This is a good conversation about the nature of, and challenges facing, rural railways. Among other things, they are trying out Skiffle Bands and Speed Dating on the train, and it seems to be working.

The story about the NHS Co-payments policy - that you lose the opportunity for NHS treatment once you pay for extra drugs privately - is all over the BBC News (used to be News 24 and I keep forgetting the name) Sunday Papers review this morning.

This story is in The Times (for about the 8th time in a fortnight) being driven by certain Doctors with private practices and (obviously) a good PR consultant.

They have concerned the accounts of patients such as Colette Mills, Debbie Hirst, Jack Hose, Linda O’Boyle and - this morning - John Burrell, Sandra Baker.

This week Blog Platform is about a new group blog that is being launched about now. A number of bloggers with a technical background on the Internet have got together to start a new blog called poligeeks.co.uk. This is the description:

“A collective of geeky people that are into politics too. We help other bloggers like Guido and Iain Dale on the right as well as LabourHome and and others on both sides with their geeky stuff. We thought it might be nice to have our own collective blog where we could speak geek and share ideas.”

Here is the introductory article by Mike Rouse.

There is a competition for a hilltop sculpture to be a focus or the new “town” at Ebbsfleet. David Keen reflects on the five competition entrants, and wonders whether a giant silicone sculpture of Jordan’s breasts would be a better symbol of the national soul. Surely three hills are better than one, anyway?

Any life worth living is a life spent bothering about something important: our families, apartheid, justice, politics, community, the environment, the vulnerable. That’s the reason (we hope) why people want to get elected. The reason we campaign, argue, work, study, pray, organise, battle against injustice, and put up with criticism without quitting is because we care. It’s when we bother only about trivial things that we lose our humanity

Simon Barrow has been thinking about the tensions within the Roman Catholic Church between a traditional vision of authority, and a desire to engage with human rights and the modern world.