Royally flushed

I am one of the lucky ones to have an office all to myself, albeit a cosy one, since the ACC lost his staff officer. Not that I spend much time in it, but I do have a nice view over a slice of greenery that backs onto HQ car park.

Such luxury may be short-lived as plans to centralise may mean my spell in blissful isolation comes to an end. As BCU-based support teams come back to HQ, I am told I may have to share again with one of the colleagues to be recently given restricted duties. Not that I mind, unless it is one of the most obnoxious bores like the last occupant of the desk opposite who thought us desk wallahs are simple skivers and drove me crazy re-enacting every arrest and car chase since joining.

Such trivial hardship is put into context when I heard how Thames Valley officers in Old Winsor will soon be taking up accommodation in old council premises. As every force seems to be shedding estate, TVP is making use of buildings that are loosely termed brown field. The old conveniences will be converted before they make use of them but rather them than me when it comes to lunch breaks.

Our force has gone the other route having conducted a survey and realised the flow of traffic at stations is so low it is closing down many premises and selling them off. Perhaps TVP confused flow with footfall and the information relating to Winsor pre-dated the purchase.

At least there shouldn’t be a problem with blocked drains when files are accidentally lost. That is not an option anywhere these days with the advent of electronic files; you can’t even trust Twitter to lose your records so case files are a real challenge. I bet the Government wishes they could shred a record or two as I saw its promise to jail anyone carrying a knife back-fired this week with the revelation that fewer knife carriers were actually sent to prison this year.

I am not sure how long these judges can carry on running their own fiefdoms without being accountable locally. Perhaps they’ll be next to get their own commissioners.