Category: parish council
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Under the Oak
Under the oak we met, and played. When Sun was hot, in shade we stayed. It cooled the breeze, and branches swayed. It served us well, and all unpaid… But now today I look, dismayed. This gorgeous tree has been betrayed. Who felt they could, this oak, degrade; Who’s moral code has been mislaid? Now […]
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Hail to the King
I spent all morning getting ready for the thing itself. Tested the parish council web site in a black theme I’d prepared some time back… made sure the vicar was managing the Book of Condolence… checked we still didn’t have a flagpole… The London Bridge plan has long been in place, but then I went […]
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It (still) isn’t easy being green
A lot of my time at the moment is occupied by an impending planning application in my village. It’s for a new railway station, and there is a large part of me that goes, yes! Public transport, accessible in the village, has got to be ‘a good thing’, right? Buses come and buses go, and […]
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The Privatisation of Place
There are approximately nine thousand parishes in England, and their history goes back to the Local Government Act of 1894. Some sixteen million people in England live within parished areas, and the local taxation of precept that they raise (a listed part of the Community Charge) is in the order of six hundred million pounds. […]
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Parish Council Meetings in Covid Times
As I type we are one week away from the expiry of the 2020 Coronavirus Act provision that allows Parish Councils to meet remotely. After May 6th, Parish Councils are expected once more to meeet physically in a public venue. This is to comply with laws that were written long before teleconferencing was even a […]
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Lockdown Remembrance
Well, that went ok. You cannot imagine the number of conversations, video meetings, guidance emails from national and local government, local government associations and British Legion, risk assessments and “informed commentary” we’ve dealt with over the past months… Our parish clerk has kept up to date with the vacillating and often contradictory pronouncements from various […]
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Videoconferencing
I’ve just completed chairing our first ever Online Parish Council meeting and gone straight into the second half of a live Facebook concert by my good friend Talis Kimberley… I can’t help thinking she can see me as she sings, like I could see my Councillors during the meeting. Or some of them. More on […]
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Meeting but not meeting…
Many things are thrown into disarray during this Corona Virus pandemic. Parish Council business is no different from any other, and we are effectively in a monitoring mode, holding space for things to happen but not actually meeting as a council. We could meet, of course. We’re all online, and I guess we probably all […]
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Another day in the life…
Perhaps the hardest part of accepting the proposed urbanisation of my community through more than doubling the housing stock in the village is transport. We are served by one B-road, a closed railway station and poor bus services. The B-road is also an arterial route from Gloucestershire to the motorway. There is very little employment […]
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An Environmental Remembrance
I’ve just taken delivery of the Remembrance wreath that I will lay, on behalf of the Parish and alongside many others, on Remembrance Day. Remembrance is important. In these times more perhaps than at any other time in my life, the honouring of the fight against fascism and the survival of freedoms we take so […]
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