Who owns the Parish Pump?

Courier Countryside Column for 24^th May

So who exactly owns the Parish Pump?

It’s extraordinary how you can live in a village for years and still have little idea of how it actually works.  You may know there is a village shop and a pub or two.  But say you’re watching cricket on the green and glance at the church clock to see if it’s still ten-to-three, do you ever think who owns the green?  Or who pays for repairs to the clock?

For most people this may not much matter. The green has always been there and will probably go on being there.  But suddenly for me it’s of consuming interest.  My village has just embarked on a Parish Plan. This is a government backed initiative to enable local people to determine how they would like their community to develop over the next ten years and more. The steering committee thought a good first step would be to find out what ‘assets’ the village had, who owns them and who runs them.  And then they handed the task to me.

Some things are clear.  The main village hall is owned and run by a charity whose sole trustee is the Parish Council.  But there are two other smaller community halls. One is owned by the church even though it was built by public subscription.  But I don’t know whether it’s run by the parochial church council or another committee. The other hall or pavilion is even more of a mystery.  And dotted around the village are various small parcels of land whose title is obscure.  Who, for instance, owns the little triangle on which the war memorial sits? Or the land housing the two parish pumps?

Does the cricket club pay rent to use the village green and if so to whom? I believe there is a separate committee that ‘runs’ the green, even though the Parish Council is responsible for maintenance.

So far we’ve discovered twenty separate charities or charitable trusts operating within the parish, mostly for the direct benefit of villagers.  And that doesn’t include the twenty-five different clubs or organisations you could join.  Most are run by committees meaning there could easily be two hundred and fifty people serving on them.  That’s getting on for 20% of the village population directly involved in some aspect of running it.

Now I have to discover who owns the church clock. I understand it may be the village not the church.  But I’ve no idea why.

Uninvited House Guests

Courier Countryside Column May 10 under headline:  

I'm not letting wildlife I share this home with drive me bats

 

If you live in an old house in the country you get used to sharing it with an extensive assortment of creatures and insects.

Our place was built around 1480 making it - as I never tire of telling - Plantagenet rather than Tudor. Since Richard III was dethroned, countless generations and a wide variety of spider species have made it their home. It’s definitely no place for arachnophobes.

Indeed in spring it’s no place for anyone of a nervous disposition. Birds nesting under the eaves make extraordinarily loud scrapings and scufflings in the early hours. Until I put a mesh over the top of the chimneystack, a succession of starlings filled the flues with twigs and moss resulting in smoke blowing back and filling rooms. Cleaning the chimney became an annual penance with sackfulls of debris to be removed.

Mice, too, regard the house as their own des res. Since the cat died they’ve become ever bolder in their nesting choices and they seem as oblivious to the dog as Myrtle is to them. I feel bad about evicting them, but am annoyed when they chomp their way through my larder or rip up perfectly good picnic rugs in the loft.

Until last year the attic was also home to not one but two sets of bats. I’m no chiroptophobe – in fact I’m quite fond of their furry bodies and umbrella-like wings, but two complete colonies did make an awful mess. The carpet of droppings was bad enough, but the ammonia odor of urine was worse.

We once called in the local bat protection society to identify them. The chaiman turned out to be called Robin, which rather upset Mrs B’s little Batman joke. He spent a good deal of time rubbing droppings between finger and thumb and sniffing the result to analyse their diet.  Eventually he pronounced one lot common pipistrelles: a bit disappointing – you don’t want plebby bats in your house do you? But the second colony was the rarer brown long-ear.  Anyway, after using the place as a toilet for a decade, they upped and left. Whenever I go up there I still shine the torch at the apex hoping to see that mass of little brown bodies suspended upside-down, undulating gently.

I found some droppings outside the back door today so they clearly haven’t moved far.

Tomkins Goes Boating!

Buzzing off this mortal coil

Courier Countryside Column 3rd May  under heading:

Please bee  discreet over the fate of London hives

The first shaft of spring sunshine and the Bees begin to emerge from their hives.  It’s always a huge relief to see they’ve made it through the winter.  I’ve only lost three or four colonies in twenty five years bee-keeping but it’s extremely distressing when it happens with the hive floor piled high with little bodies. Even though pesticides may be to blame, you inevitably worry it’s your fault. Take off too much honey, or replace their winter stores with too little with sugar syrup, and they can starve.

The last losses were London bees.  In a city you have to be much more careful to avoid swarming. Neighbours don’t take kindly to twenty thousand insects buzzing loudly round their back garden – even though swarming bees are extremely unlikely to attack or sting you.

So friends in Crouch End had decided to part with two colonies and one evening at the end of October we blocked the hive entrances with foam rubber, screwed the supers together tightly, and wheeled them down the garden path into the back of the car.  It’s rather nerve wracking driving with bees.  However well secured, you always imagine one or two will find a way out and start buzzing round your head just as you’re overtaking an articulated lorry. So I decided to wear my full protective suit with hat, veil and gloves. 

It so happened that it was the 31^st, and the streets of North London were heaving with ghoulishly costumed children demanding sweets with menaces. I distinctly remember one little witch peering into the car and saying loudly “that man’s wearing a funny Halloween costume mummy”.

The journey was uneventful with not a single escapee.   I arrived at the Orchard in the pitch dark and did my best to make them comfortable in their new home.  But they clearly couldn’t adapt to country living, and the whole of the following summer they struggled to make up numbers.  I even bought a new queen when I failed to find eggs or larvae in one brood box. Despite plentiful autumn feeding, they were all dead by the following spring.  I still haven’t been able to tell my friends in N8.  But two new colonies are up in the Orchard now, so if they do visit I hope they won’t realise they’re different bees. They can be a bit hard to tell apart!