Serving your community with legitimacy

Countryside Column for 18 April.

I have before me a sheaf of forms to complete.  They’re nomination papers for the forthcoming Parish Council elections and are, frankly, a bit intimidating.

There’s a seven page Guidance for Candidates.  Part 1 says: “before starting the process … potential candidates need to …  meet all the requirements for standing for election.  You should therefore read Part 1 of our guidance.” 

But I thought I WAS reading Part 1.  And there’s nothing about eligibility here. However on the Consent to Nomination form it says you need to be a commonwealth or EU citizen, over 18, and to have worked in the parish or lived in or close by it for the past year.

Another seven page form gives you myriad reasons why you might be disqualified from standing.   Most common seem to be working for the local authority or having been in jail within the past 5 years.

Anyway I wont go on about the bureaucracy.  It’s irksome but can be dealt with. The important thing is to encourage people to participate on their own local council.  And it’s not that onerous. You only NEED to attend 10 meetings a year. Though it gets more interesting if you are more active and join a committee or two.

You’ll discover a great deal about your community and about the other tiers of local government above you – the District and County Councils.  Some of the work is fairly mundane – ensuring the bus shelter and public toilets are kept clean – but you do have a say on local planning applications and there’s usually a small budget which members can decide how to spend.

Naturally you get moaned at a bit. But that’s sort of why you are there: to help others with their problems or concerns.

The biggest problem is getting enough people involved.  Our parish has struggled to maintain its full complement of nine councillors.  If fewer than ten nominations are received for the May elections, we’ll be elected without a vote.  That saves the council a chunk of money, but arguably gives us rather less legitimacy.  I think it’s better for residents actively to vote for specific people.

  Though to be honest I’m not that keen on campaigning. There’s three pages of guidance on what I’d be allowed to spend.  I don’t want to find I’m being castigated over my expenses.  No.  I don’t have a duck house.

The benefit of a man of wise counsel

Countryside Column for 11^th April

The evening light was fading outside the church’s leaded windows.

Inside, the bulbs were low, the rector was informal in a pullover and the Lady Chapel was full to overflowing.

Residents had gathered on the news of the death of a village doyen.  Anthony Beattie had been taken ill abroad. His wife rushed out from England and reported he seemed to be recovering.  But then came the shocking news that he had died.

He was a tall man with a wry smile who could be spotted daily walking his dog along the lanes. He’d retired ten years back and thrown himself into village life. Early on he agreed to help our community orchard. He was instrumental in re-writing the constitution and seeing through our change to charitable status.  It was he who dealt with the Charity Commission and advised us neophyte trustees how to proceed. 

Then he involved himself in the Parish Plan, organising and collating questionnaires about future directions for the village, advising on the many charities within its boundaries and gently steering various committees forward. He seemed to love minutiae and have inexhaustible patience for drafting complex sub-clauses. On each and every issue he proffered sage advice.

I’d known vaguely he’d been in the diplomatic service but had no idea until he died just how important a player he’d been, and on how wide a stage he’d operated.

Anthony hadn’t travelled much since his last posting as British Ambassador to a UN agency in Rome.  But before that he’d flown the globe in senior management roles for the World Food Programme, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the UK’s Department for International Development. He’d begun his public service career as a development economist in Africa.

And it was in Africa he died.  A few weeks ago he went off to Kenya and Tanzania to do a short job for the World Bank. But still he emailed us all back home in Kent about projects in which we were jointly involved.  He was taken ill in Dar es Salaam and flown to Johannesburg for treatment which failed to save him.

As we left the church and gathered at the lychgate to exchange memories, I reflected on how much rural villages need the expertise of such men and how lucky we were to have had his wise counsel.  We will miss it.  And him.

Ditching the culvert

Countryside Column for 4^th April

            I looked out of the bedroom window the other morning to see the front garden covered in a sheen of water. Given the recent weather this might not seem exactly front-page news. More on the par with Claud Cockburn’s famously boring headline: “small earthquake in Chile, not many dead".

            But the point is that it hadn’t actually been raining for a few days, so how and why did the lawn resemble a little lake? Donning wellies, I ventured forth to find out. It was as I suspected. The roadside culvert was blocked and water coming down the hill was actually bubbling up out of a drain and flowing into my garden.

            My surprise was limited because this happens with predictable regularity.  In fact it’s been happening, off and on, ever since they filled in the ditches some 40 years ago.

            We used to have a charming humpback bridge over the little river next to my house. It had attractive brick arches and was sufficiently narrow to afford passage to just one car at a time. This had the very considerable advantage of slowing down drivers fearful of meeting oncoming vehicles. And, anyway, if you drove too fast over the hump you were in danger of taking off like those cars in James Bond films.

            Unfortunately boy racers (as my mother dubbed them) often failed to heed the ‘narrow bridge’ sign and then had to slam on the anchors at the last moment. My sister and I, playing in the garden, would place small bets on whether the squeal of tyres would be followed by the exciting crash of glass and metal. Once a car came right through the hedge and ended up on the lawn with mother scurrying to bring cups of tea to the startled occupants.

            Eventually the council decided to replace the bridge with an ugly concrete structure wide enough for two lorries. For a blessed six months during construction no traffic at all ventured down our lane. But when it re-opened, the wider bridge had the effect of encouraging all drivers to behave like boy racers and roar down the hill at excessive speeds.

            At the same time the local authority filled in the ditches and installed the roadside drains. Which always get blocked. And spew out water onto my front lawn. There are times when even I wonder at ‘progress’.

Salacious Local in Nursery Rhyme Shock!

Countryside Column for 28 March

The Courtesan Casanova Turned Down 

 

You remember the old nursery rhyme: “Lucy Locket lost her pocket, Kitty Fisher Found it”? Well there are many in my village hoping that our Lucy doesn’t lose a packet or at any rate isn’t out of pocket on her latest venture.

Now before you start complaining about strained metaphors, there’s a reason why I introduced the 18^th century doggerel. Lucy is the landlady of our village pub. And she and husband Mark have just taken over the second inn in the village, the old William IV.

Opinion is divided as to whether this is a cunning ploy to remove their main competition, or an unconventional business model, inevitably taking custom away from their current, successful establishment. Either way, along with a revamp, they’ve given the William a new name.

Normally I’m not keen on renaming pubs. And this one seems to me to be a particularly high-risk strategy. It’s to be called the Kitty Fisher.

A little delving will disclose that Ms Fisher was a high class courtesan and mistress to the sixth Earl of Coventry. It seems that Lucy Locket was in the same line of work, and the ‘pocket’ she lost was in fact a client who Kitty took on, only to find he was broke. (There are other interpretations of the rhyme, particularly a double meaning for the word ‘pocket’ but this being a respectable publication it’s perhaps best we don’t dwell on it.)

Now what, you may well ask, is our Lucy doing naming her new pub after a woman who, as Casanova rather ungallantly said, one could have for ten guineas? Moreover, is this the sort of association that a rectitudinous village like ours would wish for?

The trouble is it’s a bit late for moral scruples because Kitty Fisher is apparently buried in our churchyard. After publicly eating a £100 note, sitting for portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds and having open spats with Lady Coventry, Kitty renounced her ways, settled down and married the son of the MP for Rye. He was John Norris who lived at Hempsted, today the home of the girls’ school famously attended by Princess Anne.

Kitty was apparently generous to the poor and thus well liked in the village but, sadly, she died in 1767, only a matter of months after her marriage.

I suppose if nothing else, the name will provide patrons of Lucy’s new pub plenty to talk about.