Category: parish council
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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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Vote for me (or at least, vote!)
I’m in the interesting position of actually being on a ballot paper next month! I first joined my parish council in 2007 (twelve years ago!) under the rules of co-option. That means there was a space on the council due to someone leaving but there was no election scheduled. I can’t remember now why the […]
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Time for change
At last night’s Parish Council budget meeting, someone asked the question I’d rather been putting off and tipped the domino over. “Please will you reconsider and say you’ll stay on as Chairman?” And the answer was, of course, not in the positive. But hey, the cat’s out of the bag. And since I had an […]
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A day in the life – Remembrance
Previously blipped on my daily journal (ie not this one) at https://www.blipfoto.com/Incredibish Awake at silly o’clock, because Janet is on gate duty and has to open the village hall for six thirty. Because she’s then wide awake, there is vacuum cleaning from seven… At eight thirty I go and set up the public address system […]