Liberal Burblings

Archive for the ‘Newbury’ Category

Putting aside laughably exaggerated and (initially on their website and in the printed edition) inaccurate “reporting” by the Newbury Weekly News, this week’s story about Trinity School reveals quite a lot about the Conservative controlled West Berkshire Council.

Consultation? Forget it. They’ve just announced a “super head” and are about to axe the governing body without any warning or even a whiff of consultation.

These decisions were announced to an emergency meeting of school’s governing body which was called at four days notice, with no agenda and no disclosure before the meeting of its subject.

And if the governing body don’t like being axed, the Conservative Executive member for Children and Young People, Cllr Barbara Alexander says:

We can do what we like anyhow. It will go through but it might be slightly rocky ride.

Excellent. She’s obviously been taking management tips from Vlad the Impaler.

One of the few items in my diary these days was a Farewell Reception for Gillian Durrant, who has been our excellent Mayor of Newbury this year. It was a most joyous event made even more joyous due to sponsorhip of the wine by Gardner Leader and some excellent fare from New Greenham Tandoori.

I mentioned that I am now spending a lot of time going up to my calendar and admiring the gaps. At 8.45pm I apologised and left, saying that I had recorded a new episode of Taggart which I wanted to watch. Joy!

Normally only the contestants get wet at Newbury’s Crafty Craft race. This year everyone got soaked. When we ventured out it was just drizzling slightly. So we didn’t take any heavy duty rainwear. Big mistake. It poured down.

We watched our little one taking part in the Steps Ahead dance routines on the 2-Ten FM stage with some trepidation due to the slippery conditions.

Fortunately, we managed to find a warm, dry refuge in the West Cornwall Pasty Company, where we could watch the crafts going past in the comfort of an armchair!

When we came home, before we changed all our clothes, we excitedly looked into the water butts to see that they had a few centimetres of water in them. Bliss!

Quite a few people are googling for local election results in these parts. The Newbury Town Council results are here (albeit without figures). The West Berkshire Council results are here.

I am typing this post at 6am on 27th April. I will press “publish” on this posting after the actual results are announced on 4th May. Today I will print off this posting and post it back to myself in the Royal Mail, sealed in an envelope with sellotape which I will sign across, to prove through the postmark when I typed this.

For West Berkshire Council I predict this result:

Conservatives 41 seats
Liberal Democrats 11 seats

And for Newbury Town Council I predict this result:

Conservatives 16 seats
Liberal Democrats 7 seats

The Liberal Democrats locally and nationally fought a fantastically good campaign. It was first class. However, there is a tide at work at the moment. National trends, Tory phone banks, repeated letters – that sort of thing. West Berkshire is a marginal enough area as it is.

As I learnt as a kid living on the coast, you can’t fight the tide. It comes and it goes.

Us Liberal Democrats in West Berkshire and nationally have all slogged ourselves out through hard work. But then again, we fought just as hard a campaign in the mid-1990s when we won all but seven seats on Newbury District Council. But at that time the tide was with us and against the Conservatives.

We should remember the old Rudyard Kipling lines:

If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;

At the end of the day, we should be able to say that we did our very best and that we know what we believe in. In West Berkshire and nationally, us LibDems did our very best in this campaign, we clearly know what we believe in and we are our true to our beliefs. That is all that matters. The rest is tide.

Two of my friends are currently facing cancer and have days or weeks left in this world. It puts things into perspective.

It is sometimes worth asking oneself: “When I am on my deathbed (if I am lucky enough to have one!), what sort of things will I regret not doing?”

The answer for me is: I would regret it if I didn’t spend enough time enjoying my family, being with friends and enjoying God’s world – sun, dawn, sea, rivers, exercise, fresh air, real ale etc.

What I definitely won’t say to myself on my deathbed is this:

If only we had won that election….and if only I had spent more time in council meetings.

There are not many tangible reminders of Newbury’s agricultural past. So it was good to have one the other day, although it was not entirely tangible.

We came out of our house the other Sunday and inspected the bottoms of our shoes. There was a nasty smell about. A dog? But as we travelled around Newbury, the smell remained, despite there being nothing on the bottoms of our shoes. We checked several times.

Conclusion: a local farmer had been muck-spreading and the wind was in the right/wrong direction to spread the smell all over Newbury. Good for the farmer. It is good to have a reminder of Newbury’s roots and the occupation of many people in the rural community around the hinterland of the town.