Let's stop moaning

As Britons, we are a nation of folk who, pelted with incessant rain and waking to grey morning after grey morning, are accustomed to a groan and moan. And, to a certain extent, why not?

Winter lasts a long time and even now, in Spring, a time that should be all flowers and sunshine and skipping through meadows, has been cold and dank. March 2013 went on record as being the coldest ever in 50 years. Enough said.

But moaning, constant moaning, gets us nowhere. Around Gloucestershire, a lot happens that gets our goat. New homes being built where we don’t want them. Gas works creating never-ending congestion in towns. Super prisons. Budget cuts. Lack of sufficient car parks. Our towns are what we know. Yate. Wotton. Frampton Cotterell. We get embroiled in the daily grind that is our lives and we do what is inevitable – we moan.

But it has to end, this moaning, this almost national sport that we have created, created to such an extent that it’s dragging us down.

I don’t know, call it tiredness, call it the end of the line, but there comes a time when we have to wake up, all of us, and take a long hard look at what we can actually do. Moaning is not it. Moaning about something wastes energy. You may as well, as my mum used to say, talk to the wall as to moan. No one hears you.

The only answer is action. Action. That’s what works. People campaigning in the public gallery against the waste incinerator proposal. Fundraisers climbing the three peaks for the Meningitis Trust. A local primary school blasting its way to a cracking Ofsted report after it was labelled originally as failing. Action. It’s all about taking action. Because if we don’t act, if we just moan, then what?

Take that school, Dursley Primary School. What if its senior management team had simply moaned at the original scathing Ofsted judgement? Nothing would have happened. Nothing. The children wouldn’t now be in a school that the Head and his team put major actions into place to improve.

It’s an amazing achievement to turn a school around. But not only that – it’s an amazing message: actions speak louder than words. Because moaning is just words. But doing something about it? Now that’s action.

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