Time for ill-will and lack of charity to all

FROM MY CORNER .... with Ann Brunswick

Christmas is supposed to be the time of goodwill towards all people, but scores of struggling Valley traders have been shown none of that in recent times. At a time of year when they badly needed sales to end a tough year in the best possible way, the owners of Walton’s abruptly scuttled those hopes by slamming shut the fire doors to their section of a crucial pedestrian walkway from Valley Metro before start of business on Monday 12 December. “Closed until further maintenance” and “Walkway closed for4 maintenance” the signs said.

Potential customers who normally exited the Fortitude Valley railway station and walk in their thousands across the airbridge to McWhirters were reduced to a trickle of just hundreds. Adversely affected have been traders in the Happy Valley building that faces Wickham Street, those throughout the McWhirters building and even business beyond. They have had a truly awful Christmas. Personally I do not have a clue as to who is really to blame over this disgraceful state of affairs. Rumours about that have swirled around the precinct like the balls of dust and other awful fluff that blighted the Walton’s section some months ago, along with cigarette stubs and discarded food scraps, when it was left uncleaned for months. But what I do know is that those traders have shown enormous restraint as the days have passed by and not a single moment’s “maintenance” work has been done on the sealed off walkway. That’s right: absolutely nothing while these poor blighters see their livelihoods go to potty.
And on the Valley Metro side, I reckon the oversized bright red Xmas bauble cutout with “Happy Holidays” emblazoned upon it has mocked those traders each and every day since. I personally would not have blamed any or all of them if they had taken the law into their own hands and ripped the barricades down and busted the doors wide open. Those traders have ridden a rollercoaster of emotions since the closure.
Their hopes were raised when rumours circulated on day two of the closure that the Fire Department might come to the rescue by declaring the walkway a fire exit. That fizzled out. A well-intentioned protest meeting organised by the ALP a few days later got some mainstream media coverage but proved to be largely hot air. Lord Mayor Graham Quirk swept through the place on day 5 and gave traders hope with talk of a meeting the following Monday. That achieved bugger all.
In the middle of the second week, traders were told an agreement had been signed between the major parties concerned to maintain the walkway and that it could be opened by the next morning. It remained closed. The disgraceful state of the walkway has been highlighted by the Indie for a very long time, the most scathing some months ago when someone slapped a coat of paint over the dirty ceiling in the Waltons’s section and replaced some 18 broken floor tiles with white ones.
Those tiles broke up within days – locals claim they were totally inappropriate kitchen tiles – and if traders now facing ruin want to blame someone, they can blame whomever was responsible for that work. If we assume that work was paid for, then someone should have immediately demanded that the job be redone to a professional standard. If that had occurred, then this tragic financial loss for so many traders would have been avoided.


Christmas a special time to forgive and, hopefully, forget

I don’t know about you, my loyal army of devoted readers, but I’ve always believed that Christmas is that special time of the year when you put family relationships back on a sound and manageable footing after a year of trials and tribulations, don’t you?

Sometimes it’s difficult to remember how these things happen, but I find myself at year’s end with both my defacto mothers-in-law getting fairly close to starting to talk to me again after 12 months of blissful separation. I’m really hoping that the present I’ve got for them – the complete boxed set of every concert violinist Andre Rieu has ever recorded and which I’ll be cutting in two and giving each half – will get things among the three of us back to a normal and manageable standoff for the year ahead. Similarly, both my current partners are going through uncomfortably affectionate periods that I can honestly say I’ve done absolutely nothing to either warrant or foster, and for them I have Scottish tryhard Susan Boyle’s latest best-selling Australian album (for her) and Michael Buble’s latest sickening Christmas CD (for him).
If those two have not become a handful, my daughter is starting to leave her troubled midteens behind her, so even she is becoming unbearably nice and supportive of recent times. I’m really hoping that my Xmas present for her – a $50 gift voucher restricted to the plumbing section at Bunnings – will do the trick there.
So, my dear friends, all is not lost at this special time of the year. Select gifts for your loved ones with care and you could get through 2012 in perfect peace and disharmony. Choosing the right present can make all the indifference in 2012.