Progress at last

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It's been a busy day, but the one notable thing is that while I was out the Police Inspector in charge of the Cathays station got in touch to say that Vincent's house had been accessed and relevant phone numbers retrieved to start with. Now he has to get Interpol to contact the Police in Australia to go around and tell Vince's sister in law that he's died. "As she's likely to be pretty old and we don't know what state of health she's in, it would be better to do this than for me, a stranger, to ring up long distance and tell her." I thought that was very considerate. Let's just hope that the local aussie cops are are humane and sensitive in relaying the sad news.

The astonishing thing is that his house keys weren't held by the police, but held on the ward where he died, after an ambulance man handed them over. Somehow nobody on the ward remembered this, or if they knew, thought fit to act upon it. They simply got stuck at the point of embarrassment caused by realising what when he died the still had no record of who his next of kin was. Normal procedure seems to have collapsed in ruins. And it's not surprising, since every other person I spoke to about this matter on the ward, in the social work office, seemed only to be working part-time. Whilst people were aware of the case and its concerns, there seemed to be no coherent way of working together and sharing information and making decisions. Failure to remember the keys has had a lot of people running around fruitlessly for a whole week.

Hopefully now it won't be too long before we can arrange a decent funeral for him.

One more piece of progress to note. The building site hoardings around town are finally beginning to get decorated with information about who's doing what to the city centre and why. It's the best part of two months late. Hoardings on both sides of the churchyard site are now decorated with childrens' art work. Tomorrow there's a photo opportunity for SD2 bigwigs with a couple of councillors to publicise the effort in aid of 'Keep Cardiff Tidy'. I'm doing assembly at school first thing, then celebrating the school's 'class mass' at St German's straight after, which means I won't get to take part in this. Just as well, I'd only embarrass them by saying "Too little, too late."