The opinions expressed by John Blunt are not necessarily those of this newspaper

THE Geordies have their famous Angel of the North statue to tell drivers coming up the A1 that they have reached heaven on earth.

Blackburn's new "hello" to visitors is a huge bare backside!

Now we know what the expression "arty-farty" was coined for.

For while Blackburn with Darwen Council already has an established record of spending our money on commissioning "public art" that's a bum joke - the town's metal trees, the bizarre beehive and the tin treble clef - with the latest, it has reached rock bottom. Literally.

Amazingly, sculptor Thomas Dagnall thinks there is nothing crude about his immense naked "Arte et Labore" bloke whose big bare behind is the first thing visitors to area will see as they turn off the M65 at Lower Eccleshill.

"He is lying flat and carving the town crest into the stone," he explains.

Fine. But why does the geezer have to do it in the buff? Well, why? Art? Buttocks! (There's another word a bit like that which I was trying to think of to go there, but it just wouldn't come).

But if this chiseller has loads of cheek, the council really has monumental impudence. You, in your taxpaying sanity, might have thought that if Blackburn with Darwen was to even consider a monstrous mooning male as a "gateway" greeting to new arrivals, some widespread canvass of public opinion would have been in order first.

But, no, just like that surreal steel beehive that's just gone up at Guide - with nary a word about planning permission despite it making folk wonder if someone's put LSD in their tea - this is democratic choice at its most arrogant. It is the like-or-lump-it decision of an all-Labour sub-committee of just three councillors.

The unitary Blackburn junta, of course, is so mucked up with aesthetes that one of its first acts on independence was to try to shut a museum and art gallery and turn it into offices for its own bureaucrats.

So it should come as no surprise that it should be forking out for another expensive item of vulgar frivolity when it dumps such things as a special needs primary school and old folk's homes because it says they are unnecessary and unaffordable.

How they enrich the community!

Give us a break!

THE Punjabis campaigning for the return of their famous Koh-i-Noor diamond that the half-inching Brits bunged in the Queen Mum's coronation crown have got their eye on the wrong bit of stuff if it's a really precious piece of crystal they want to put in the Sikhs' Golden Temple at Amritsar.

They should go for Accrington pensioner Barbara Thompson's sparkling new window instead. For this bit of glass, all of one metre square, she was charged £270.

And, for it to be fitted, it cost her £432.69 altogether. Outrageous!

But then if any collector of precious stuff wanted to be in the same league as her, they would have to be both the victim of vandalism and Lancashire Constabulary's one-eyed quest for efficiency.

Some lout smashed 76-year-old Mrs Thompson's window at midnight. The police called out the firm - EG Glass of Huddersfield - to which they had recently awarded a year's trial contract to carry out emergency window work throughout East Lancashire.

Before, they used to use different local companies. The idea was that dealing with a single firm would cut costs and paperwork.

But look what handing one outfit a monopoly meant in Mrs Thompson's case. A bill for a pane that was apparently priced by carats not centimetres.

Now, we are told EG Glass had reduced their bill for boarding up that night and later replacing the broken glass by £82 as a "goodwill gesture."

Yeah, after the complaints and the disclosure that Mrs Thompson could have got a piece of armour plated glass the size of her window for under £40. But, get this, the police, now reportedly "concerned" about the firm's level of charges, still accepted that they would be higher than what people had been previously charged - because of the extra costs they would have under the trial scheme and having to turn out to each incident in 30 minutes.

Yet what right have they to go about first of all creating a monopoly and then blessing a price rocket - for their own interests?

It's the public who pay their wages whose interests they should be looking after, not some opportunistic firm's.

Besides, if they improved their woeful detection rates for vandalism and burglary, they would have a lot fewer broken windows and bothersome bumph to deal with in the first place, would they not?

Food for thought

HYNDBURN'S 'new kid on the block' Adrian Shurmer, the independent councillor now with sole control of the council, sounds like a new broom who might sweep wholesome change in this once-secure Labour stronghold.

This week, we found him appalled that the four-course Mayor's Supper, washed down with evidently limitless wine, was evidently little more than a slap-up "free do for old pals" - a "few hundred council cronies" in the form of councillors, wives, ex-mayors, dignitaries etc, all at the taxpayers' expense. Coun Shurmer swears he won't be going to such a function again unless everyone pays - bless him for his innocence - and, furthermore, he has made a donation to council funds for the two meals he and his guest had at the mayor-making at which some sour grapes over the outcome of the elections were also apparently on the menu.

He hopes others will follow his example. Again, bless him for his innocence.

But I do wish he would set others a stronger test of his example and their integrity by using his singular position to propose a total ban on such tax-funded functions. Then we would see how well Coun Shurmer's noble standards are matched.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.