Nicola Barker - Burley Cross Postbox Theft

Do spare me a brief thought as you enjoy your festivities…

[Poignant. The life of an outlaw is certainly a lonely one.]

God bless you,

[And you, my dear friend, ‘Lokele’. Enjoy these final, few hours of liberty, while you still may… See you in court! R.S-T.]

******

A dispatch from the desk of:

Baxter Thorndyke, Cllr

The Old Hall

Burley Cross

21/12/2006

Trevor Ruddle, Ed

The Letters Page

Wharfedale Gazette

Trevor,

See if you can fit this into your letters page next week, will you? Somewhere prominent — first letter would obviously be ideal (there is a Christmas theme to it, after all).

As I’m sure you can imagine, I’m literally flat-out right now, bogged down with the usual, heinous combination of personal, charitable and professional obligations (not least hosting the BCRSC annual Christmas Fund-Raiser on Monday — we’re roasting a whole suckling pig this year; should definitely be worth sending down a photographer — and putting the finishing touches to a groundbreaking paper I’m due to deliver to The Royal Society of Anaesthetists in Birmingham — early Feb. — on ‘The Physiology of Hypothermia’), so the prospect of throwing away yet another precious hour of my valuable time in responding to the ludicrous opinions of that idiotic blow-hard Tunnicliffe (WG ,19/12/06) was not one I especially relished, I can assure you. Yet respond I must .

I know you’re just a local rag — and he’s an OBE — but why do you persist in publishing his inane drivel every week? The man’s a clown — a scourge (or ‘a pea in the shoe’ as I believe I heard Julian Moxham call him in open session at council on Friday).

How old is he, anyway? Eighty-seven? Eighty-nine? Isn’t it about bloody time he retired from public life? Put his feet up? Gave the good people of Wharfedale a much needed break from his endless, sullen preachifying?

I saw him staggering around in Ilkley Tesco’s car park on Wednesday afternoon clutching an organic cauliflower in one hand and a bottle of Ruddles Ale in the other. Seemed lost. Or half-cut (can’t quite decide which). Is he still following that bizarre raw-food diet he keeps banging on about? If so, can alcohol really count as ‘raw’? (Surely there’s a measure of heat involved in the brewing process?)

The man’s hardly an advert for it (raw food or brewing). He’s just a withered husk. He looks like the hollowed remains — the vile, yellowed carapace — of something an insect has recently hatched out of (a small, white maggot springs to mind).

My wife, Tammy, blanched when she saw him (she was with me in the car at the time). ‘I almost feel sorry for him,’ she gasped. ‘He looks revolting! So grimy! So thin! Like a mouldy old piece of horseradish!’ (And Tamm — as you know — doesn’t have a bad word to say about anybody, due to her deeply held religious beliefs.)

I’ve a strong suspicion he’s entering his second childhood (he displays all the radicalism of youth and yet none of the sense — or temperance — of maturity!).

What on earth was the Queen thinking giving an honour of such magnitude to a wretch of his stamp? So what if he ‘helped to design the wind turbine’(as I read in Who’s Who Online, recently)? ‘Helped’ to design it?! How wonderfully nonspecific! (What did he do, exactly? Man the tea trolley? Refill the office photocopier at a critical juncture?!)

‘Helped to design the wind turbine?!’ Well, it’s hardly a cure for cancer, is it?!

The sooner that rancorous, bile-ridden old canary topples off his artfully recycled perch the better, as far as I’m concerned. I’m as green as the next man (greener!) but his holier-than-thou attitude gives environmental causes a bad name.

If you ask me, he’s never been quite the same since he was forced to quit BC. Selling Rombald House and moving into sheltered accommodation in Ilkley was obviously a severe blow to his fragile self-esteem (he was always at the heart of what I liked to call ‘The Old Guard’ in BC — thought he ruled the roost when I first arrived there!).

People generally like to pass him off as ‘eccentric’ (because of the title, I suppose), but I was never under any illusions about the real nature of the man. He was always a nutter. Very, very controlling (the way these ‘idealists’ — these ‘men of principle’ — so often are).

And — to be fair — he’s never much liked the cut of my jib, either (probably sensed, from the word go, that I wasn’t especially eager to buy into his whole ‘left-leaning, aristocratic schtick’).

I remember him starting the most ridiculous quarrel with Tamm and I pretty much as soon as we first stepped foot in the village (July, 1998). I’d begun legal proceedings to try and alter the public right of way which — at that time — ran alongside The Old Hall (tourists were using it as a temporary latrine — and worse. It was horrendous. I’d wander out into the garden and find my hydrangea festooned with used condoms — male and female).

The way Tunnicliffe overreacted to the situation you’d think I’d actually suggested redirecting it through his own living room! So what if the new route ‘trimmed’ a few feet off the back end of his garden? After I’d inspected the original deeds it became glaringly obvious that he’d ‘accidentally’ extended the boundary of his property on to the adjacent moorland by a distance of some five and a half metres!

I wouldn’t even mind, but his back garden was already enormous and completely overgrown. He was forever banging on about ‘promoting biodiversity’, and was an early proponent of that whole ‘grow your own wild-flower meadow’ racket (I always saw this silly fad for what it really was, i.e. a feeble excuse for not bothering to maintain your lawn. ‘Gardening for Squatters’ is Tamm’s hilarious take on it!). He was always a lazy old sod. His late wife, Melody, was apparently the green-fingered one.

Of course Tunnicliffe didn’t have a leg to stand on, but he still fought the decision, tooth and nail. He cost me a small fortune in solicitor’s fees.

Then, no sooner had the issue been resolved than he started doing everything humanly possible to put the brakes on Tamm and I cutting down this half-dead yew in our front garden (which completely blocked the view from our dining room window).

Started up quite a little campaign (even a petition)! What a ridiculous carry-on! The way they harped on about it you’d think the damn thing (which had been self-seeded from a tree in a neighbouring garden) had been planted by Great Queen Bess herself, then celebrated in a sonnet by William Shakespeare! It was an absolute farce .

The really ludicrous part of it was that I’d always been universally derided as a bit of a closet ‘tree-hugger’. I was BC tree warden for three years (started the BC Befriend a Tree movement at the local primary school). At my strict behest, Tamm only ever buys household paper products from ‘managed sources’. I’ve been a member of the Woodland Trust since 1986, for heaven’s sake!

Of course it can’t have been a coincidence that around about that time I was chairing a committee on the council (aimed at making the local moorland more ‘walker-friendly’) when a committee member (I forget who, off-hand) idly raised the idea of changing the name of Tunnicliffe Bridge into something slightly more ‘directional’.

When LT found out about it (heaven only knows how) he absolutely flipped! I’ve never seen anything like it! He was apoplectic! I mean it’s not as if it’s even a proper bridge — just a couple of large stepping stones crossing a small beck! And given that the main, practical function of that ‘bridge’ was to take walkers (principally tourists — not local people, by and large) to the Cow and Calf stones, it only made common sense for the bridge to take on the name of the famous site it led to (and was directly adjacent to!).