This is nothing about herbs, instead it’s about the much vaunted “Warm Front” Scheme, which has now become a very cold front indeed as the government desperately casts around for ways to avoid putting its spin into effect. Read on, this is just one daft story amongst thousands

Being a sad old geriatric, the government decided I was eligible for a supplementary heating grant. I applied in the autumn and just before Christmas a bloke phoned to say he would come and do a survey the following Monday. Two weeks later, I called him back and asked why he had broken the appointment.

“I spoke to you, I did the survey last week”, he replied.

I suggested acerbically that old though I was, I could still remember who I had let in to my house the week before. It transpired that he had surveyed the wrong house, so he came and did the right one, telling me that an electrician would come and do a more specific survey of the (one bedroom) house later and another surveyor would come and assess the insulation requirements. That done, electrical and insulation teams would come and do the actual work. The electrical bloke turned up, the insulation assessor didn’t and that was the last I heard of the matter. Then last week it was exceedingly cold so I thought I would chase them up. The first time I dialled the free phone number, the phone went dead, the second time I was put through to a lonely hearts club and the third time I got through to the appropriate multiple choice “don’t hang up, you’re valuable- Cracked-Mozart-playing automated switchboard thing (and no, I may be a geriatric etc....but even if I was incapable of hitting the right buttons on my phone, the number dialled would flash up to indicate I had done it incorrectly). Eventually the girl on the other end denied all knowledge of my application, I pointed out that two of her functionaries had already been around but it turned out that no one had corrected the address erroneously filled in by the HQ computer, so surveys at the correct address couldn’t be reconciled with the one held on the central computer, - This happens frequently, the civil service post-code software remains resolutely twenty years out of date. I gave her the correct address, “we will have to send someone round to do a survey”, she said brightly.

“You’ve done it,” I said.

“But we have no record of it” she replied “we’ll have to do another one.

“Would it help you to find it if I gave you your customer reference number?” I suggested helpfully

“Yes perhaps it would”, she said and vanished for a while

“Found it,” she said in triumph “I’ll see what I can do to speed the matter up, but we are still within the stated time frame”

“No you’re not”, I said, “your bit of paper said the insulation work should be completed within two or three months”

“Ah but we can’t do the insulation work until the electrical work has been completed and the agreed period on that is six months”

An amazingly short time after that, a bloke from North Dorset, ie two counties away rung to make an appointment, he efficiently followed this up by a snail-mailed hard copy confirming the appointment, -- inevitably sent to the wrong address. So I e-mailed him the correct address and ticked the “confirmed read” box in “options”. Thus I suppose it was equally inevitable that rather than reply, he should phone up two days later on his mobile saying he couldn’t find the (wrong) house.

Nice chap, one notices that with each succeeding visit, the surveyor whatever turns up in a posher car  which may or may not be relevant to the funding available for the actual installation.

I asked him whether the misgivings of the previous surveyor, that the weight of the heaters could possibly cause them to drop through the floor had any validity. He dismissed these, but came up with an objection of his own, that he couldn’t fix the heaters to a wooden wall because of the fire hazard. So it was back to the mobile. Someone on the other end told him there was little danger of cremating both me and the house so it was ever onward looking for a chance not to spend any more money on the government commitment  to pensioners whilst not prejudicing the bureaucrats own gravy train. Hurrah, he soon found it. The house, he said, was too far away from the meter position and they would have to dig a trench. There were no funds available for trenching so he went again and that was that.

So to tell a pensioner that the government won’t honour its commitment to provide heating for pensioners takes at least two silly girls in an office and visits from three pen pushers.

I wonder what happens when a light bulb blows in their HQ

Alice and Kafka were amongst the words floating around my mind at the staff coffee break the next morning and we discussed other ways the government wastes our money, not on mega projects like siting airports in the wrong place on the basis of dodgy evidence,  nor sending under-resourced troops in to battle on even more dodgy evidence nor indeed on the self-evidently crass Olympics but just on the domestic front. We came up with

1)      Funding an elderly hippy to take her multiplicity of children to Goa, and there to abandon the surplus

2)      Pay for almost an entire constabulary to spend two weeks searching for a chavvy child staying with a member of its family

3)      Giving an old bloke £75,000 for allegedly begetting sixteen children in four years and rearing them all in a two-roomed flat.

Finally just think of  all the consternation and confusion sown in the fraudulent (ie criminal , not governmental) community, by civil servants leaving all those inaccurate data discs around. Makes it difficult to earn a dishonest crust!