11th September
I now have two teenagers... double the trouble! Today's party day, and Alice wants a
sleepover. The easiest thing to do is simply cook a lot of good food - home-grown pizza
(without the big piles of cheese you find on the frozen variety), salad and dips, and
so on, and stand well back.
Believe it or not, teenagers do eat healthily, as long as you don't study them while they
do it. We've seen it before at previous parties; parents who swear blind that their
little darlings are fussy eaters proved wrong. It's far more likely to be the parents
projecting their own prejudices and bad habits on their offspring. As for ours - I
do think they're more likely to become radical veggies than burger-and-chips addicts,
especially as there seems to be a run of tv programmes about the excesses of the food
processing industry. A close-up of mechanically recovered meat machines
5th September
Sometimes what you think has been a successful campaign just results in more work down the line. Earlier in the
year we finally saw the new, accessible coaches go into service on the X5. I love them; not just because they're
more comfy, but the little extras like free wi-fi mean a trip across to Oxford for work is no longer dead time. It's
a real pleasure to clear my email backlog before getting back to the office - and if it's a really quiet day then
I can catch up on Twitter and keep in practice with a few hands of bridge.
No doubt a lot of others seem to think so, too, as the coaches are now regularly well loaded, to the point where they
are leaving people behind. Three times in the last fortnight I've seen them go through the Eatons displaying "sorry, full"
on the front. That might not seem like a disaster when the next one is only half an hour behind, but
the wasted time comes with the added worry that it might happen to you on a day when you really can't afford to
be half an hour late. And before you know it, a bad reputation has spread and all the good work of the past is
undone. Quite simply, we need more. Now, whether this is simply upping the X5 to every 20 minutes, or parallel
local services, I don't mind (and the latter would certainly get round the awkward wheelchair lifts) - but the
experience east of the town is not good; the Citi 4 takes so long to visit the villages east of us that even if
it started off just behind a full X5 coach, it would be overtaken by the following one before it reached Cambridge.
So, it's back to the drawing board for press releases and photo ops, and trying to get operators and County to talk to
us. It would be nice to catch a coach in the act - but will one do it when I have my camera ready? No chance.
31st August: Free food
August bank holiday - time to recuperate from the weekend and start gathering the harvest in (remember my resolutions
back in January?) There's potatoes to dig in the garden, a steady stream of yellow cherry tomatoes still coming, and
then there's a free resource noone seems to notice any more. Fruit on public land. It's looking like a bumper year, too,
and the early falls are littering the streets, demonstrating that noone is watching as it all goes to waste. Well, it
won't when we are out with our baskets. Strictly such fruit is fair game, but I
feel a bit uncomfortable taking more than we can manage for ourselves. Nevertheless, the clan come home with ten pounds of
cooking apples, three pounds of elderberries (and they are certainly a lot of work to separate out the ripe ones from the
green, inedible ones!), a couple of pounds of blackberries from outside my office, and three pounds of Japanese quinces -
hard as rocks when raw but they boil down to juice wonderfully.
One of the best investments I made with my birthday was a large stailness pan, and stands and nylon bags - it's made
the process of packing up our harvest a dream. The best apples will keep; the bruised ones are now Apple and Mint Jelly.
The quinces and our home-grown chillies are now Hot Quince Jelly. Then there's Elderberry Jam, and an experiment with
Elderberry Cordial - a bit of a failure, I think, as it's too gloopy and tastes like watery jam! And a crumble to come.
Our kitchen now has jars everywhere - so we should be all right until next year. Sam is busy writing out the labels,
and we have a couple of volunteers for the tasting.
It's sad that so much is left to rot, though, at a time when making the most of our resources has become a big
issue, both financially and environmentally. At Tesco's prices I'd have made about £15 clear profit, as well as the
personal satisfaction of eating my own creations. And that's from a reasonably small patch; the elders on Nelson Road
are still covered in ripe berries above my arm's reach; I haven't even searched out all the brambles I know of. What it
has made me consider is experimenting more - and perhaps trying to blag fruit and veg that's on the turn as cheaply as
I can and quickly preserving it, rather than letting it end up in landfill. Watch this space for the recipes...
29th August: ...and the big day arrives
There are few monents when you really hold your breath as a councillor. Most problems can be worked round,
but every so often you're faced with something new and there's the possibility that everything will fall flat
on its face. And outside events are just such a moment. All the fundraising with car boot sales and sponsorship
was done, programmes and publicity out there, now would the crowds come? A day of bad weather could kill the
festival stone dead, for example.
A couple of car-booters seemed to have missed the point somewhat, and had left muttering about lack of punters
half an hour before SunFest had kicked off. But, proceedings underway, the local bands started making the most
of the sunshine, the kids drifted in for fairground rides, the Raptor
Foundation's owls were in place and looking adorable, and people started drifting in.
At this point two of us set off, like on an Apprentice task, armed with programmes to sell. I think I bagged the best
pitch, at the bridge end of the Market Square, and - having never sold anything on the streets before - started grabbing
people and hoping. At times it was disheartening with the number who made eye contact as if to say "don't bother talking
to me", but the pounds steadily accumulated. And it was quite a surprise how many were visitors who knew little of what
was going on on the meadows, and welcomed being pointed towards the goings on. Of course we were fighting upwards
from the low point of 2008, though oddly a few didn't realise that there had been no parade that year; sometimes the
news just doesn't sink in.
Eventually the crowds built up for the Carnival parade - but this year with no elevated gallery seating for
councillors, quite rightly in my opinion; those who cared were amongst the crowd enjoying the show, those who didn't weren't.
It was difficult to gauge the level of support as this year the route was substantially longer and people spread more thinly,
but the charity buckets were jingling and it was clear that a good time was being had by all.
By 4pm the parade had passed, a tour round the stalls revealed everyone happy with the numbers passing by, and my feet
were absolutely killing me. Six hours on my feet... but when duty calls... and there were still a few people after programmes.
And a whole day still to come.
Postscript: when all was said and done, the weekend was a huge success. Plenty of compliments, no complaints, and
after a lot of hand-wringing over the Council providing £2000 support, in the end we made a surplus of £3500, setting us
up in a strong position for 2010. It would be over-egging a lot to say the whole town had come together, but there were
plenty of people whose sense of community spirit got fired up a bit. A very positive step in the right direction.
26th August: countdown to SunFest...
August is typically a quiet month for council because of the difficulties of getting
everyone together at once. That allows time for putting together SunFest, a weekend
of entertainment down by the river and including the resurrected Carnival. 2008 was not
an event to be remembered particularly, being put together very hurriedly after the volunteers who had
run the previous sixty simply couldn't coax enough life out of the town for one more - but the experience
galvanised us into organising something really worthwhile. I shouldn't give away spoilers as
I shall be selling programmes (each including a ticket to the Grand Prize Draw) over
the weekend... but it's a full weekend's worth, for the first time ever, and with a lot
of local talent on display.
Of course there will be no cash in my purse, the kids will have their pocket money
with strict instructions not to bother pestering me for more. Given how generous their
other relatives are, I ought to be going to them for loans!
22nd August: Back from holiday
Back with a vengeance! I'll have to write up more about our travels, but two weeks away
in beautiful scenery, plenty of new things to do, and nothing to have to do have left
me properly refreshed. Of course getting home is daunting - you know there will be a full
email box at home and another at work, undoing all that effort made trying (and failing) to
get to the bottom of the pile before going away, a big pile of letters to be opened,
papers to be read, and a garden which thankfully did not stop its progress while we were
away. Which to tackle first? Well, if I start on the tomato bushes - guess who was too busy
when it came to pinching out the tops? - I can have a very nice snack as I go, so not
a hard choice. This year we're growing two cherry varieties, one red one yellow, and the
ten survivors produce a bowlful every other day. Wonder how their siblings which got sold in
the spring are getting on?
The harvest continues with wonderberries (a bit of a disappointment - too much pip and not enough
juice in the berries), the sage is resurgent now freed from its pot, rosemary and
lavender are in fine form, and the chillies are ready for drying. These little wonders are
seriously hot, so I will have to dissuade Sam from displays of bravado eating them!
On the down side, in my absence some of my potatoes grew very tall and flopped over on top
of the netting covering my cabbages, putting them in range of outsiders. And so like squishy
green homing missiles, the caterpillars have invaded and reduced them to stalks. Nice
one, destroying your own food source by eating it all at once...