George goes herding ducks down on the farm

NICK and Ruth Strange held a very successful open day at their Beech Hayes Farm yesterday, which allowed an opportunity for Julia and I to take our son George to see exactly where his bacon comes from.
Nick is Churchstanton's parish council chairman and Julia has been buying a meat box from the farm via the food co-operative which runs at the Rockwell Green Christian Centre.
So it was really interesting to have a look around and to show George the source of the meat he eats.
There was lots to see - and lots of other people went along as well, so I would guess Nick and Ruth must have been really pleased with the way it went.
George tried his hand at duck and geese herding - as you can see from the photo above - that is, until the geese started herding him instead!
We saw the Gloucester old spot pigs which they are well-known for, and the lambs, ducks, new-born chicks - some of which were hatching in front of George's eyes.
No, we didn't manage to do the quiz in full, despite cribbing one of the answers from another visitor.
I thought I knew my beech leaves from my ash leaves and so on, but when put to the test I failed miserably.
Ross Henley, our local county councillor, gave a nice speech to visitors about the importance of local produce and the need to support local producers.
Our only disappointment was not having more time to spend on the farm, as we were due to do a car boot sale in the afternoon as we continue to try to slim down the stack of bits and bobs in our attic.
As it turned out, the car boot sale did not do too well - or, at least, our bit of it didn't, as we only raised just about enough to put the Mazda through the car wash.

From Gay Pride to hippies to Pitminster straw boater all in one day

IT was a day of contrasts on Saturday for myself and my wife Julia, as I attended the annual Pitminster and Angersleigh Playing Field Association fete.
While Julia was in Plymouth for the day helping one of our clients - they organise the South West's largest Gay Pride event - I started the day at the Sunrise Celebration festival over near Tintinhull, the organisers of which are also our clients.
Having spent a few hours surrounded by several thousand people from the travelling and festival-going communities, many of whom would be described as hippies, it was a quick change of clothing and a dash across to Blagdon Hill for the annual fete, complete with straw boater.
Yes, there are hippy-types on the Blackdown Hills as well, but the Sellicks Green playing field didn't have the organic loos or the yurts or the tipis or the windmill-powered generators or the horse-drawn transport of the Sunrise Celebration.
The only thing that all three events had in common was the sweltering heat and brilliant blue sky which prevailed all day.
The Blagdon fete was a brilliant event with just about everybody in the community near and far seeming to be there.
What impressed me most was learning afterwards that something like £5,000 was raised from the fete and will be used by the charity to help maintain the playing field for the benefit of everybody.
An amazing result for a small rural community, which demonstrates how there is such a strong sense of community spirit here.
It was good to see the plans on show for the proposed new community hall and I was pleased to able to introduce the committee chairman Duncan Meikle to our Conservative Parliamentary candidate Mark Formosa when he joined me at the fete.
We enjoyed seeing so many different stalls and events being held at the fete, with Mark showing a keen interest in the dog show because he is a dog owner - while I have two cats.

• The images above show a group of Sunrise Celebration festival-goers taking part in a drumming session, and the Pitminster fete programme.

Voting no to unitary authority and trying to save our rural Post Offices

IT has taken a lot longer than I expected, but I now know on which panels I will be serving at Taunton Deane Borough Council.
I have been appointed to the Housing Review Panel, and to the Health and Leisure Panel.
At the same time, I have the right as a councillor to attend and speak at any other panel or committee which is held, and I am told that is often difficult to tell at meetings who is actually on a panel and who is not.
So, while it looks like the two areas of housing and health and leisure will be my specialist subjects, I will also be able to personally raise any other topic on behalf of the people in the Blackdown ward.
In addition, there are a lot of outside organisations to which the council appoints representatives and I do not yet know on which I will serve.
It is a little like being a phoney councillor at the moment, as I have the title – yes, it is official now the annual meeting has been held (although again I missed it due to work commitments).
However, I am on the case and have already attended the parish council meetings in Churchinford and Pitminster and introduced myself to the parish councillors.
I have also attended the launch of the Keep Somerset Local referendum campaign. You will be receiving a postal ballot during June in order to vote to say whether or not you think it a good idea for the county council to abolish Taunton Deane council and the other councils in Somerset and create one huge authority which will decide everything across the county.
I shall be voting ‘No’ in the referendum, not just because I want to hang on to my seat at Taunton Deane, but because I don’t want to see my council tax bills continue to go up just to fund the tens of millions of pounds it will cost to reorganise.
I also fail to see what Minehead has in common with Frome, or Wellington with Burnham-on-Sea, or Otterford with Dulverton when it comes to deciding planning applications, building affordable housing, etc etc.
You will hear the line from the county councillors that it won’t be like that because they will set up area panels to decide local issues. My response is that we already have an area panel – it is called Taunton Deane Borough Council.
I have also asked our area county councillor for an early meeting to discuss the traffic concerns in Blagdon Hill.
I put it to him that it was up to the county council on which he serves to actually do something about the speed of traffic and weight of heavy lorries using the road through the village, as they are the highways authority. He agreed.
I also put it to him that, given this is a situation which has existed for some years, I was mystified as to why the county council continually refused to do anything about it. He also was mystified – so if he as a county councillor doesn’t know what’s going on, what hope do we have?
I will keep banging my head against the county council wall on this one, and, as some people will testify, I have a thick head, so eventually we should see some cracks appearing – in the wall I hope.
I think some parish councillors may have been a little surprised at my approach to parish affairs.
Now the election is over, I believe we should all be working together regardless of politics in order to achieve what is best for the community, or at least what the community desires, and no, the two things are not always the same.
One area which is topical at the moment where elected representatives believe they know best is the subject of Post Offices.
The Government is telling us that we don’t need 2,500 of the Post Offices we currently have.
In Taunton Deane, that means closure looms in the next 18 months for probably six more Post Offices.
Communities will say they need their Post Offices and on this one I totally agree. It is not a question of how much it costs to keep a Post Office open, it is a question of how much a Post Office is valued in a community.
We only have two Post Offices in the ward at the moment and I will be visiting both of them shortly to discuss with the Postmasters what measures the borough council can take to support them.
It was a subject which came up on the doorstep while I was campaigning and my feeling is that we need to approach it in the same way as we approach farming, where we encourage diversification.
Don’t ask me what POs can diversify into, as I don’t have a definitive idea, although I have one or two small suggestions which may help.
I have been listening to Mark Formosa, who is the Taunton Deane Parliamentary candidate for the Conservatives, and he has a lot of good ideas on this subject and has been campaigning on it for some time.
If anybody has some solid suggestions to put forward, I will certainly be interested to hear them.

History will remember my declaration day

I HAVE finally signed my declaration of acceptance of office, and it is a day which will be remembered in history.
At the same time as I was starting my political career at the Deane House, Tony Blair was announcing he was quitting as Prime Minister.
Needless to say, my news was promptly buried under the weight of media coverage of the Prime Minister’s announcement.
Other than a couple of small lines of print in the Somerset County Gazette and the Wellington Weekly News, I suspect my election has so far gone unnoticed by the big wide world.
I notice the County Gazette’s latest attempt to be seen as trendy is to report the news on its website in Polish, and I can’t help wondering if they have covered my story in this section.
I’ve searched for ‘Typowy Anglik Cierń jest wybierany’ but not yet found it, so probably not.
Presumably, the Gazette will also soon have Portugese, Bulgarian, and Romanian sections in order to fully reflect the extent to which Tony Blair’s EU-loving Government has undermined the ability of English citizens to find work in their own country.
A day after signing my declaration, I attended what was called a ‘Welcome Day’ at the Deane House.
It could have been titled a ‘Serves You Right Day’, after we were deluged with presentations, paperwork, and statistics in a marathon session – all this on top of the numerous email reports I have been receiving.
My briefcase was so full of paperwork by the end of the day that I could hardly close it and carry it back to the car.
I have quickly decided that one of the important skills in being a successful councillor is not going to be deciding what to read, but deciding what not to read.
With a day job to do as well, it is not humanly possible to get through everything that is presented to you.
I am not the fastest of readers at the best of times, and have been known to take the best part of a year to read a paperback.
It is going to be a case of feeling my way gently, starting with my choices of the panels on which to serve.
I will be deliberately restricting my choices to two panels, and only stretching to a third if absolutely necessary.
And I am ruling out the planning committee as I appreciate how much time commitment is needed to do this role justice – more time than I have available.
I have already received notice of four planning applications which have been submitted in my ward in my first few days in office, on top of actively investigating the circumstances of a particularly controversial application for gipsy pitches.
Being a planning committee member could be a full-time job in its own right and I will be full of admiration for anybody who serves on it.

When a councillor is not a councillor - yet

AFTER nearly a week of being the Taunton Deane councillor for the Blackdown ward, I have discovered that I am not your councillor even though I have been elected.
And, until I sign my declaration of acceptance office, I cannot become one.
Even after I sign my declaration, I still will not be a councillor for several more days.
This is because, technically, my predecessor remains the ward’s councillor until the council’s annual meeting on May 16.
I was supposed already to have signed my declaration, but the council suddenly cancelled the appointment while I was en route to Taunton.
It has now been rearranged for Thursday, May 10, exactly a week after you all went to the polls to show your support for me.
If I do not sign the declaration in time, I will not be allowed to attend the annual meeting.
I am not sure at present whether or not I can attend the meeting anyway, as I am working away and will find it difficult to return in time.
For those who are interested in these things, an analysis of the election results has been carried out and I am pleased to announce that all the hard work put in by the Conservative team on the Blackdowns over the past months and years resulted in us increasing our share of the vote to 63 per cent.
There was a 7.2 per cent swing in voting away from the Lib Dems toward the Conservatives in the Blackdown ward, which was the second highest swing in the whole of the Deane.
Although turnout in the ward overall was slightly lower - a fact which I attribute in large part to not having enough parish councillors in any of my three parishes to warrant an election and generate greater incentive for people to travel the sometimes several miles to a polling station - it should be heartening to us that we are continuing to build on the staunch Conservative support which exists on the hills.
Please note, if you previously read this posting and my comments about the Mayor-making ceremony, I have now deleted these references as I have since been informed that I was wrong. In essence, I was given to believe that the public could not attend unless they were a guest of a councillor. I am now told the public can turn up unannounced and attend, even though the ceremony is taking place in a Royal Marines base with all the attendant security. I apologise if, unintentionally, I have misled any readers.