Nicola Barker - Burley Cross Postbox Theft

I was still relatively new in Burley Cross at the time. Little did I realize that my perfectly innocent involvement with this entirely reasonable scheme would bring me up against an ego of such extraordinary magnitude! Well, I certainly found out soon enough! And I’m still finding out nine years on!

But enough of LT and his ridiculous hobby-horses…

Thinking forward into the New Year, there are several, fascinating ‘live’ issues I’m currently grappling with which I don’t doubt will be of interest to your paper. The first relates to our ongoing problems with the public toilets at Burley Cross. Tom Augustine (a founder member of the BCPTW, whose wife volunteers at the Gawkley Wildlife Refuge) has lately come up with an ‘animal safety’ angle on the story which I think may well warrant a small article (especially in the approach to the warmer summer months). I can pass on his number to you if you don’t already have it (send me an email. I should be back online within the next day or two).

It has also come to our attention (at the BCRSC) that Wincey Hawkes has begun accepting coach parties at The Old Oak again. She insists on doing this full in the knowledge that there is insufficient room for the coaches to turn in the designated space. The resulting damage to grass verges is appalling (I have seven or eight excellent photographs — all of publishable quality — which I can send to you via email early next week, if you’re interested).

The verges are obviously only the tip of the iceberg. As always, my main beef with Mrs Hawkes is the serious threat her irresponsible actions present to pedestrian and road-user safety alike (there’s actually more to this story, which I’ll be more than happy to go into at greater length, off the record).

Thirdly (and finally), I am working on something pretty startling at the moment relating to manhole cover theft in the UK by the Chinese. This is something that I think may well blow up in the Wharfedale area in a very big way in the New Year — in fact, I’ll all but stake my reputation on it. I’m presently in close communication with the local constabulary and Liam Holroyd MP on the matter. If you can manage to keep the issue under your hat for a while I’ll definitely have something ‘solid’ for you within the next three or four weeks…

I thoroughly enjoyed your piece in Friday’s paper about the current problems with the big cairn on Farnhill Moor. You opted to take a ‘lighter slant’ on the story. I can fully understand why you felt the need to (the week before Christmas etc.), but I do think there are some pressing, underlying angles to this scenario — both criminal and environmental — which I may want to take up with you at a future date (didn’t have the opportunity to write a letter on this occasion, although I may yet, if I can somehow find the time next week… In fact, on further consideration, I think I probably shall).

And while we’re on the subject: ‘POC-“ATCHOO!”’??! So let me get this straight: you elect to give a front-page, banner headline to the ‘scoop’ about a man who pulled a seven-pound carp out of the Kidwick Reservoir (where fishing is illegal , incidentally) because it coughs up a small, plastic Pokémon toy (‘At-choo!’ for your information, is the sound of a sneeze, not a cough), yet three whole weeks later, there still isn’t so much as a mention of Barbara Simmonds’s fascinating talk to the sixth-formers at St Hugh’s on the wider implications of the excavation work at Hamblethorpe?

Why?

A Pokémon toy?!

An inappropriate pun?!

Whose brilliant idea was that?!

Most disappointing, Trevor, old man.

Baxter

PS Am reduced to using snail mail due to a pesky virus on the Mac.

A dispatch from the desk of:

Baxter Thorndyke, Cllr

The Old Hall,

Burley Cross

20/12/2006

Sir,

In February (WG, 12/02/06) Lance Tunnicliffe OBE kindly provided readers with a step-by-step guide on ‘How to be a Green Valentine’.

Included among his many, novel suggestions for Wharfedale’s environmentally inclined lovers were ‘making your own card’, ‘not going out for a meal but staying at home and eating by candlelight’ (for the record: sober lighting would certainly be de rigueur if I’m the designated cook for the night), ‘turning off the TV and passing the time by playing a few hands of rummy’, ‘just talking’ (a perfect way to ruin a romantic evening I’d have thought, especially if — by a cruel twist of fate — there happens to be a match on), ‘going for a moonlit stroll’, (a little risky if you live in Moss Side or next to Beachy Head), ‘sharing a bath’, and even (a course that could well prove fatal for Inuits) ‘turning down the heating’ and ‘snuggling up on the sofa together to keep warm’.

A few weeks later, in March (WG, 18/02/06), we found Mr Tunnicliffe OBE focusing his considerable mental apparatus on yet another social and cultural institution: Mother’s Day, and the ‘questionable tradition’ (his words, not mine) of ‘saying it with flowers’.

This tradition is ‘questionable’, it transpires, chiefly because of the ‘tragic, even criminal conditions’ endured by workers in the third world flower industry. To illustrate this point, Mr Tunnicliffe went on to describe (in almost excruciating detail) the thirty or so flower farms surrounding Lake Naivasha in Kenya (suppliers of the excellent — my word, not his — £2/dozen roses offer at ASDA), where not only were workers earning, on average, a ‘pitiable’ £45 a week (‘and remember, many of these poor wretches will be women, most of them mothers’), but where a combination of ‘polluted run-off’ from pesticide use and ‘water depletion’ (from, well, watering) were lowering the levels of the lake ‘to a dangerous extent’, culminating in (brace yourselves) ‘Hippos slowly frying to death in the punishing heat, simply in order that pathetic, Western cheapskates might have the opportunity to buy their beloved mothers a bunch of cheap roses out of season.’

In April (WG, 2/04/06) Mr Tunnicliffe OBE weighed in against Easter (‘Did Jesus die on the cross and rise again to bring the world the gift of eternal life, or simply to provide greedy, clinically obese Christians and their spoilt progeny with the opportunity to gorge and binge on irresponsibly packaged chocolate eggs?’).

It transpires (according to the researches of our fastidious correspondent) that your average chocolate Easter egg consists of approximately 45 per cent packaging.

You might be forgiven for thinking that this is good news for the ‘gorgers and bingers’ among us, i.e. fewer calories (you can’t eat the packaging), but it isn’t. It’s actually bad news — very bad news — because (as Mr Tunnicliffe is only too keen to inform us) ‘the buffoons at Wharfedale Council’ haven’t seen fit to provide adequate numbers of foil and card recycling bins in the borough.

In November (WG, 1/11/06) we find Mr Tunnicliffe OBE working up a sweat over the negative implications of Fireworks Night. These are (as you have doubtless already guessed) manifold, and include ‘noise stress’, ‘the danger of smoke and gunpowder inhalation to asthmatics and people with chest problems’, ‘fires’, ‘serious accidents, even death’, ‘the threat of copper and other metallic compounds entering the soil, crops and water table’, and last — but by no means least — the ‘stress imposed on birds and other animals’ (who, according to LT OBE, ‘experience Fireworks Night as the start of a terrible — and potentially infinite — war’). I could easily go on, but I’ll spare you.