Thanks to those who raised funds on memory walk
MORE than 6,000 people took part in the Alzheimer’s Society’s Greater Manchester Memory Walk and I would like to take this opportunity to thank every single walker for helping us to raise money and walk for a world without dementia.
The magnificent number of people who signed up for the event held at Heaton Park demonstrated awareness of the need to support the 850,000 people in the UK living with dementia and to fund research into a cure.
I’m also very grateful to all the volunteers who made the event possible, our sponsors, and to the media for highlighting Memory Walk, helping us to be there for 30,000 people living with dementia.
Manchester Memory Walk showed the fantastic community spirit here of which all of us have a right to be proud. Thank you again to everyone who took part for making it a wonderful day for a great cause.
Sue Clarke Alzheimer’s Society operations manager for Greater Manchester
CUT PAY FOR COUNCILLORS
SO we now know that next year’s council tax bill is to rise 3.99 per cent per household with further cuts to services in the borough.
When was the last time a councillor knocked on your door, not withstanding elections? In my area never and on allowances of £9,000 plus expenses.
So my answer to the rise in the council tax is to halve their wages or in fact abolish them and let them pay for their own meals.
This not might wipe out the £13m shortfall but it will help!
The young may not recognise these names but were Len Fairclouch or Alf Roberts on that kind of money?
No, they weren’t. But were they approachable in the pub to ask a question of them? Yes they were!
But today these councillors think they are politicians, unapproachable, better than us and above all else do absolutely nothing for the masses.
M D Cawley Offerton
COMMENTS IN BOOK ‘WRONG’
I NOTE that in the book ‘Just Julie’ written by Julie Goodyear, who acted as Bet Lynch in Coronation Street, that one problem she had with being well known was that men would sometimes stalk her and that she learnt that one of these men had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, was a very dangerous character, had been in prison but discharged himself before treatment was complete.
Can you discharge yourself from prison?
I am wondering if she meant to say ‘I later heard it?’ That is it hearsay; because it wasn’t the typical behaviour of someone with schizophrenia. Violence isn’t a symptom and nor is it they would be violent if they weren’t taking their medication. It is only the worst cases that reach the newspapers. Yet to use her words ‘this nutter would suddenly tear up out of the blue, point his car in my direction and then head straight at me.’
A schizophrenic is far more often someone that is merely very quiet and withdrawn, maybe just lives like a recluse, gets attacked more often than they attack someone else and when one does it is usually that they are on drugs or alcohol, and it is this that’s done it, not the schizophrenia.
Julie Goodyear calling this one, maybe I could say coupling it with the word schizophrenic, ‘one of the mucky mac brigade’ may frighten these innocent people even more and make them even more quiet and withdrawn.
In fact it wouldn’t surprise some people if this ‘nutter’ she talks of hadn’t been diagnosed properly. Psychiatrists can vary in opinion, they can sometimes make a poor or even wrong diagnosis. Glenys Ann Edgeley
STRANGERS MADE MY DAY
I AM writing to tell you about an incident which happened to me recently.
I was in The Works on Merseyway when a man came in asking for phone cloths. The lady at the till said they had none in and to try a mobile shop.
He shouted very loudly ‘they’re all run by Muslims.’ I held my breath and wondered what to say or if to say anything at all.
Then the lady said to him ‘we don’t allow this sort of behaviour in this shop, you need to leave.’
He carried on shouting horrible things but she just said ‘I think you need to leave.’ Then another customer, a man, told him to get out and he left.
Neither the lady or the man were Muslims or Asian, they were white but they stood up to him and I was very grateful.
It made me feel better to know people in Stockport do not all think like that horrible man. Those two strangers made my day. Mariam Ali Stockport