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The Barrie Hudson Column
Barrie Hudson is a known quantity when it comes to writing words. Sometimes he even spells them correctly. In fact he has been writing words in the Swindon area for more than two decades. First of all for the Swindon Advertiser and then for Swindon Link and now for The Ink. Here are some of his words…
How to make the town centre an advert for itself - and not an advert for elsewhere
Swindon Police have brought in extra officers to help deal with antisocial behaviour in the town centre.
They will be joined by two new council antisocial behaviour officers.
The move should be welcomed by anybody who cares about the town, its prosperity and the simple pleasure of doing a spot of shopping without finding yourself in the midst of an ordeal.
Far be it from me to tell anybody how to do their job, but I have a respectful suggestion or two for the new offcers as to possible priorities.
For example, up until...oh...early 2020 or so, anybody who tried bombing through the town centre on a pushbike, or bombing through the town centre even faster on an illegally-modified electric bike or scooter, could expect to be stopped and warned.
This is because they were a mortal danger to everybody they came anywhere near, especially the elderly and children, and a major deterrent to anybody who simply wanted to do a spot of shopping without ending up being loaded aboard the Wiltshire Air Ambulance.
The fact that a pandemic has intervened since early 2020, with an assortment of changes to our attitudes, doesn't make nearly being mown down by one of these self-centred, gormless sociopaths any less annoying today - or any less likely to make us say: "Stuff this for a game of soldiers - I'm off to the designer outlet, Greenbridge or the Orbital where there’s less risk of ending up with tyre tracks the length of my spinal column."
There's also the matter of drugs. What people do in their own homes, of course, is a matter of personal choice, legal debate, political cowardice and ill-informed editorials in certain newspapers, but as a general rule, if a part of the town centre smells like the Woodstock Festival or some squalid chemical experiment in a backstreet lockup, shoppers probably won't want to wander around with their children and spend their cash - and you'd therefore do well to investigate somewhat thoroughly. Start with the blokes struggling not to fall off the bench.