I was sat in a youth hostel on the Isle of Skye with John Lennon, Bruce Lee, Jim Morrison and Mr Blobby discussing how ridiculous conspiracy theories actually were. “Of course, i never shot JFK!” said Mr B “…. that was the lizard people.” It had been a long drive….

Continue reading “Did You Hear The One About….”

In the 1957 film ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’ Alec Guiness played the role of Lt Col Nicholson a British army officer who stood up to his Japanese captors and for his defiance was locked in a tin box to suffer the tropical rigours of the Burmese jungle in intolerable sweltering  conditions. Now I’m not equating my visit to the National Association of Local Councils Conference in London to deliver a speech bigging up our town on the hottest day of the year to that. But it was quite warm.

Continue reading “Hot Enough for June”

It was when i found myself still up at 3am watching Uzbekistan v Colombia that i wondered whether in fact my body clock had totally stopped working and the talking badger on my sideboard was probably best ignored. I mean yes Abbosbek Fayzullaev did have a great game but well i don’t pester him about badger related topics at that time of night so give it a rest with the Uzbeki football comments!  And then i was up again the same time the next night…but this was something far more important. The Andy Burnham by election!! (oh, and the Mexico v South Korea 2am kick off)

There are some big questions to ask these days.  Why is everything so expensive and why is there so little money to go round?

At the same time, it’s just been announced that Elon Musk has just become a trillionaire.

If only there was some connection…I looked at my cake. I had to save 3 quarters of it for Big Dave who was coming round tomorrow. Still the other 10 of us could share the remaining quarter. Continue reading “Hoping not Hating”

It’s the 1^st of August 1990 and it’s my first council meeting. It’s the time of Margaret Thatcher’s Poll Tax and people weren’t happy. In fact the Bridgwater Anti Poll Tax Union joined me at my first meeting and occupied the council chamber flying flags that said, ‘Break the Law Not the Poor’.  The Tory councillors fled the chamber. They knew they couldn’t justify such an unfair tax and 3 years later it was abolished.

Continue reading “Generation Occupation”

A constituent came up to me once and asked, “When’s rubbish day, Bri?”. Before I could answer my mate Dave said, “Every day’s rubbish day in Bridgwater!” Of course, what he meant is that here in Bridgwater we have a big problem with rubbish. Not do we just have seagulls who fly upstream and think the houses along the riverbank are cliffs, perch on them and then love to swoop down on poorly bagged bags of rubbish, but we have a peculiar wind system in the town that rolls and blows and swirls around the flat streets and disperses the debris to all the unwanted nooks and crannies that you can’t quite get to. And that’s before we get to the waste simply dropped by thoughtless idiots or the latter-day thought-out equivalent, ‘fly tipping’. So, I decided to go out with the Town Council street team and see for myself how they were coping.

Continue reading “Remember You’re a Citizen”