October 2007 Archives
At Your Service
Posted by Ray on October 23, 2007 11:12 AM
I remember when certain services, such as electricity and gas, rubbish collection, the post office and Royal Mail, the railways, etc, etc, were services you paid for mainly through taxes and rates.
They made money through fares, stamps, bills to pay for the bulk of the industry in question, but apart from that it was subsidised by Government raised taxes and rate - depending on the service in question.
Obviously modern thinking changes all that and industries are expected to be not only cost effective, but to raise massive amounts of money for divident payouts as well as re-investment. I say what a crying shame that instead of only just modernising the way we treated these industries we tore them apart and threw most of them to the wolves.
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What a memory!
Posted by Ray on October 29, 2007 9:39 AM
In Remember When we like to talk of things in living memory, which means we can go back around 100 years, if we push it. But just imagine if the normal life-span matched that of Ming the mollusc, recently found in the Atlantic - because he is reckoned to have reached the grand old age of 405 (before, sadly, scientific tests to determine his age caused his demise).
I was just thinking, if we had such a long life-span, what a difference for Remember When.
We could recall the latter days of Queen Elizabeth I, maybe grab an interview with playwright William Shakespeare, asked Sir Walter Raleigh for his memories before his execution and so on.
Maybe we might have had a bit trouble with Oliver Cromwell, but I bet he was an interesting guy. But as our life rolls on just imagine the others who would have brushed shoulders with such as the Duke of Wellington.
Remember When would certainly have been quite different!
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