Fighting back. One pie at a time.

I was worried for a second.

If we had scraped together just one more candidate for the Tillington Parish Council election a couple of weeks ago, there would have had to be a vote to decide which nine of us could serve. Imagine the potential for lasting shame in that eventuality: limping in tenth in a nine horse race, with an electorate so small you could fit them all in the village hall and still have room for a pre-loved Bring-and-Buy sale. It would be an adult version of ‘captain’s pick’ on school sports teams, with the last one standing being the complete social outcast.

‘Poor Roger,’ they would say, ‘he’s never been quite the same.’

I was a parish councillor for five years, twenty or so years ago, but then something happened, or didn’t happen, and suddenly I wasn’t. I think I must have been very annoying, or maybe banged on a bit too long about cricket, or footpaths, and then one day I was surplus to requirements.

Then last year, after a fifteen year break, I was mysteriously asked back on. Fran the nurse said it was because I would be invaluable as a village ‘lifer’; Charles the farmer said it was because if I didn’t, ‘someone worse’ might do it, only the word he used rhymed with the thing you use on the ocean floor to stop your boat moving.

And now I’m back, it’s like Groundhog day. I have found out that all the things we discussed back in the late nineties are exactly the same things as we are discussing now. Motorbikes speeding on the A272, benches decaying in the cemetery, a drinking fountain at the pavilion, and the Upperton Cartshed. The great unanswered cosmic question of 21stcentury life round here is ‘what the hell are we going to do with the Upperton Cartshed?’ The power devolved to us from a grateful national government via a grateful county council is so pitifully small that it wouldn’t allow us to buy a bag of jelly babies without doing a full risk assessment and raising the money via a bottle stall, but still we plough on.

And we gather every eighth Monday evening, tonight included, in the little side room of the village hall, (yes, just like they do in the Vicar of Dibley), and we work through our own groundhog moment, one eye on the long agenda before us and one on the pie we are fervently hoping will be piping hot for us when we get back to our individual houses. By managing our own expectations, we might not be able to reverse global warming single-handedly, but we can at least be part of the solution.

And here’s the thing. We actually get things done round here, and we do it by consensus and someone’s hard graft. OK, we don’t change the world much, but we make it incrementally a tiny bit better. Twenty years on, we really are dealing with ‘the motorcycle problem’ in an imaginative and thought-through way that we think really will make a difference, and it will cost us most of our annual income; we have replaced the rotten bench on the hill up from Tillington, so that people like I was 40 or so years ago can have a cuddle on it in front of a lovely view; finally, and for the first time, there actually is a water fountain by the pavilion that thirsty people can drink from. We’ve even won a priceless victory against the bureaucratic machine on the Upperton Cartshed.

Unsophisticated people we may be, making quiet progress in a tiny, local way, in 12,600 parishes across the land. Big-shots at Westminster could do worse than come and sit alongside any one of us one evening, just to remind themselves what public service actually looks like when you strip away the machismo and the egos.