A quieter week, lull before the storm?!

Went to my second councillor surgery in the Phoenix Centre – still early days but this time took up some flyers to leave in the café.  I could see people were reading them – one even made a very creditable paper dart out of it! – and another said thanks, and took it away with him for future use.  No enquiries yet but we only just changed the timeslot so people are getting used to it.  Back home had another ‘play’ with the flyers – when I worked for BT one of their 5 mantras was ‘continuous improvement’ which is an excellent idea but I find I don’t always know when to stop!

Had a break from formal stuff until Wednesday when I went to my last (I think?) training session.  It was on Equalities – what a huge area covered by just that one word.  A number of people have in the past pointed out that as everyone is different you cannot treat everyone equally.  Maybe not but what you can do is your utmost to treat them all fairly.  There are all the obvious factors that need to be considered, like race, religion, sexual orientation etc but treating people fairly really does cut across everything, and there are times when you really do need to think ‘outside the box’.  One of the short film clips we were shown was a good illustration - a couple both suffering from dementia had reverted back to the language they grew up with, yet they were provided with care assistants who spoke in another language - certainly not fair, and possibly, even probably, did more harm than good.

Afterwards managed to catchup with one of my fellow councillors - sorted quite a few things out – then did a bit of work on casework I’d picked up.

The rest of the week was ‘Civic-Centre-less’ which meant I could do some more background work - reading, research etc - whilst still keeping on top of business.  But I didn’t get completely away with it as on a Friday anything left in your pigeon hole is delivered by courier – my weekend reading would be the agenda for the next council meeting, quite small really at only just over 100 pages!!

Les