I’ve always loved the pleasure boats that carry passengers up and down the Thames and I wrote in a recent column that as a youngster in the 1950s I used to enjoy watching the steamers coming and going from the pier at Richmond as they carried passengers upstream to Hampton Court or downstream to Westminster.
I’ve mentioned before in this column that I have a certain amount of sympathy for the Environment Agency because, in this age of austerity and Government cutbacks, it has struggled to meet all its commitments to river users because of a lack of funds.
I really hate bean counters. Those faceless accountants who sit in the background out of the firing line in so many organisations and who, with a stroke of a pen, decide that services must be cut to balance the books without any real thought about how the decision could impact on people’s lives.
