No Rock And Roll Fun

FIRST: WE GAVE AT THE OFFICE: Down in the First Great Western offices, something stirred, as we hear from Elaine Wilde, the Head of Corporate Communications:

As I am sure you are aware First Great Western is part of FirstGroup plc. FirstGroup has pledged to donate £65,000 to the Disasters Emergency Committee following the Asian Tsunami disaster. In addition FirstGroup is also looking at ways to provide practical assistance and our staff have held many fund raising collections.

In other words... they're going to keep all the extra money they make on Saturday taking people to the charity gig in Cardiff. Now, it's great they made a donation already - a very generous sixty-five grand, which works out as 0.000636p for every passenger journey made last year on First's UK bus operation (we decided to not count in the journeys made on their train franchises, light rail schemes or overseas operations as that might make the figure look somewhat tiny) but that was before the Cardiff gig was firmed up, wasn't it?

FirstGroup's last set of full-year figures showed a turnover of £2.5 billion; which you could choose to sit next to, say, the Maldives' annual GNP of about fifty million quid. Or you might want to point out the cost of a standard open return from Cardiff to London is £110, which only needs 509 people to make that journey before First have made back their original donation.