Since they've almost sold the airport now Leeds City Council are pondering on how to spend the estimated £40million windfall - and they're asking us residents for suggestions.Councillor Carter suggests that Leeds could be "an even more attractive and vibrant place to live, work and play" and in doing so makes our city sound like a soundbite from a Mars bar advert.
One thing that has long since been touted as a way to quickly spend the airport money is to build an arena on an already earmarked riverside location - our failed supertram was going to call there on one of its stops. For the fourth largest city in the UK to not have an indoor concert venue is quite honestly astounding and at long last it appears that we may be getting one, in the next decade or so, if no objections are lodged, and if the airport money comes through, and if we can get planning permission what with the venue now not having any public transport access to it.
But what can be done to improve the city to "make it even more attractive and vibrant" ?
Well...
A couple of years ago I wrote this about my home city, and as far as I can tell it is still a valid critique.
So a good place to start would be a squad of highly trained chewing gum police who, with the aid of the thousand and one cctv cameras that cover every square inch of the city centre, would swoop on any citizen seen chewing with intent to spit out in an unauthorised way, I'd even offer that phrase to entitle a new by-law, "chewing with intent to spit it out in an unauthorised way" - five years imprisonment or a day spent on your hands and knees peeling it back off the pavement, and my shoes.
And while we're on with specialised snatch squads of police, we really, really, I mean really, need the chav-o-cops in Leeds - the city centre is now over-run with multiple generations of nylon tracksuited, gormless, dateless, pointless and fruitless cretins wandering our streets in daylight with their hang-jawed, mouth breathing expressions, shouting at each other with their awful Leeds-accented gutteral expletives, chomping on a Greggs pasty while at the same time and from the opposite corner of their mouths, spitting out said pasty into their mobile phones with which they converse with their parents who are walking two yards behind them, all of them shoving pushchairs so that you cannot work out which generation has squeezed out the infant from between their thighs, the generations only being recognisable because of the premature ageing effect of 100 Silk Cut a day and the fact that the smallest will use the word "mam" in ten second intervals to attract the attention of the wrinkliest.
City centre shoe shops and sports shops are another problem that needs working on - you cannot walk further than five yards down any of Leeds's many precinct streets without passing a shoe shop, in theory us citizens of this otherwise fine city should be the best shod citizens in the country for we have on average one shoe shop per resident, all of which sell the same design of shoe - if you spend 12 hours on a saturday looking for shoes in Leeds you will discover, as I have to my chagrin, that whilst you will visit approximately 1,287 shoe shops in that time you will in fact only view four different styles of shoe, and they will all be priced at £29.99 - how fucking pointless is that - an instant ban on any more shoe shops is urgently needed from our councillors.
In order to be served in one of the many "sports shops" in the city you should first of all have to demonstrate knowledge of what constitutes a "sport", a simple question and answer would do, something on the lines of "what is a cricket box" although in fact you'd find that most of the sports shop sales assistants would bar themselves from entering their own shops if that was the case. Its an inescapable fact that sports shops do not sell sporting goods, they sell clothing that several decades ago would have been confined to the sporting efficionados, but now your average "track suit" will not come within twenty miles of a running track during its life, and neither will its purchaser, or its vendor - similarly sports shoes, or to give them their generic name "trainers" will not be used to train their owners in anything and will only burst into anything more than a slouch when their owners are on their toes after robbing a different sports shop for another pair.
I could go on...
What the hell, I will...
Fast food outlets - how fooking hard is it to eat BEFORE you go shopping or perhaps save yourself and actually make it all the way home to eat ? Its not fooking hard at all is the answer, you do not NEED to eat whilst out of doors, no-one ever died of starvation during a two hour shopping trip, "poor love, she'd not eaten for nearly 30 minutes, dropped dead just ten yards away from a Pizza Hut too" - and if you do desperately NEED to eat when in town then the least you can do is to throw the remnants into a waste bin and not throw it on the pavement two yards away from the wastebin, what happened there then love, faint from starvation on your way to the waste bin after eating a 12" family pizza but forgetting the strawberry flavoured slush puppy afterwards did we ?
Street vendors - how many fookin mobile phone covers do you need ? Who the fook buys themselves an expensive mobile phone with all its latest designs and features and then feels the need to clad it in a plastic cover with a picture of Britney Spears' arse on the back, purchased from an eastern european chav who will of course keep proper accounts and declare all of his taxable income when he gets back to his lodgings - probably while he's laughing at the thought of the 250 of you who will be out on the town tonight with your Britney Spears arse phones.
Of course, will Councillor Carter ask me ?
Will he bollacks
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