●THIS newspaper recently carried a story about a Barbourne man by the name of Mark Harborne who has been given the council’s go-ahead to develop a marina complex on the Severn.

I know this area quite well. In fact, I heard a rumour last year that the gap in the bank which forms the bay to the marina was actually created back in 1940 when a German raider dropped a stick of bombs.

The missiles were apparently intended for the main river bridge but missed their target and blew a cavernous hole in the bank just past Waterworks Road.

Of course, this may be a load of old manure but nevertheless I would be intrigued to hear whether there was some truth in the tale. If you have any theories, perhaps you would like to write in to your Worcester News.

●THERE are now more than one million young people without jobs. The reasons are obvious – record population growth and relentless industrial decline is an equation that even the most stupid politician must be able to understand.

Over the last 12 years, the public sector has taken on a million extra employees while it’s probable that a corresponding number of private sector jobs have disappeared.

At the present rate of attrition, the wealth-producers will soon be so vastly outnumbered by taxfunded workers that the money will simply run out.

When will the politicians realise that there cannot be real prosperity until people start to make and sell things again?

●THERE’S nothing like a good costume drama on television and we’ve been really spoiled for choice in recent years.

Despite an absurdly handsome and impossibly lean actor playing Henry VIII in The Tudors, I must admit that the series was not without a certain allure. Its crowning achievement was probably conveying how society in those days was so divided by religious questions and also how perilous it was to challenge the prevailing religious orthodoxy.

Mind you, the same attitudes persist today.

For example, you may have noticed how the most recent heresy is to question Darwinism, a belief system and latest craze that is quite obviously the new Catholicism.

Thankfully, no one’s been burned at the stake lately or been subject to some kind of politically-correct inspired Torquemada… yet