Comment—did anyone think?

I WAS absolutely amazed when those at Canal & River Trust launched a national flood appeal to restore the waterways damaged in last year's Boxing Day floods.

There we were, with hundreds of people flooded out of their homes and in dire straights, with emergency services at full stretch attempting to save people, their belongings and their homes, and many in desperate need of money, yet the Trust took this time to launch an appeal for funds to restore its damaged navigations!

Navigations, that many of us know, are looked upon by the public (though often wrongly) as providing little more than a pastime for the middle classes to spend the occasional week-end dawdling along with cost very much of secondary importance, and certainly not worthy of funds to restore such activities.

Something that is only too obvious, at last realised as a faux pas by the Trust, that sensibly and very quietly dropped its appeal having received we should imagine little more than a measly few hundred pounds for its very much misjudged appeal.

It really makes you wonder about the thinking of the people devising such schemes at this self-vaunted Trust, whose ever increasingly irresponsible decisions now cause so much puzzlement.

Tom Crossley