Woking – the place where every-fallen-daffodil counts – is a suburban town filled with suits-who-commute-to-London, young families and pensioners. It has a disproportionately large number of hairdressers and coffee shops, and its great claims to fame are that it contains:
1) the largest privately owned burial ground in Britain
2) the oldest purpose built mosque in Britain
It is the kind of place where the train station has a rather beautiful canopy of solar panels that power the station lights.
It therefore seems out of place that the station should contain adverts for two really Big, Serious Things that it seems unlikely could be major concerns in this little backwater.
amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research
STOP THE TRAFFIK – a global movement against the trafficking of people
I started to wonder: why were these adverts in Woking station? The only reason that I can think of is that someone must think that us commuters have the resources to do something about them.
It also got me to thinking: perhaps my back-of-the-water blog could also be a place where Big, Serious Issues were raised…
(the problem is that Big, Serious Issues are almost always Very Complicated…)
I thought one of the raison d’etre (pardon my bad French) of blogs was to raise Big Serious Issues and to propose dumb, half-baked answers. Or to virulently attack other bloggers whose suggestions are similarly dumb and under-cooked.
It shows you how little thought I have given to the task I signed up to that no such issue has really been raised in this space – well not terribly seriously anyway. :)
This is all about to change. I am determined to start inflicting my half-baked ideas onto the internet in a more determined way. Starting tomorrow… maybe…
The martians in H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds landed at Horsell Common, which is near Woking. So it’s probably all their fault.
@Bob: Do I have to eat the whiskers? And do I get fries with that?
Henry, you can have milk too.
Aaaaah!!!
Well, Appendix A of the Health Protection Agency’s 2007 report Testing Times shows there were 399 HIV diagnoses in 2006, in the South East Coastal Strategic Health Authority (which includes Sussex and Surrey), which is 9.4 per 100,000 population – the joint third highest in the UK. London had 40/100,000, West Midlands 10/100,000 and then there’s three SHAs with 9.4/100,000 – East of England, South East Coast and South Central. And 0.10% (52/50,817) of them are from women giving birth.
Back in 2003, the HPA reported that “The area around London – the Home Counties and London suburbs collectively termed by HPA researchers as “the London fringe” – has seen the largest increase of heterosexually-acquired HIV infections in recent years.”
Even sleepy old Woking may have more to worry about than daffodils, alas.
And, perhaps as pertinent, it is where folk like you live – the movers and shakers, doers and thinkers, talkers and influencers. Hey, it worked, eh?