Bourne Diary - June 1999
by
Rex Needle
Saturday 5th June 1999
Amid all of the column inches in our local newspapers devoted to the annual change in the mayoralty of Bourne, one remark stands out and will remain with me for the next twelve months.
Our newly elected first citizen, Councillor Mrs Marjorie Clark, the oldest serving member of the town council and called to office for the second time in her long civic career at the age of 80, said: "Hopefully in the next year, we will be able to sort out something regarding the empty shops which are a dreadful mess."
The shops to which she refers are a disgrace to the town, an eyesore that greets everyone who walks down North Street, visitors and residents alike, and despite continuing criticism of the dilapidated appearance of these properties as the months go by, nothing has been done. You may well ask yourself why our elected representatives are bringing up this issue now but it appears obvious that this was one of the big talking points while they were out there in the streets seeking our votes for another term in office and so perhaps they are now at long last taking notice.
The retiring mayor, Councillor Don Fisher, also had something to say on the subject when speaking of his twelve months in office: "I have enjoyed my year and I hoped to see some of the shops in the town which have been boarded up open again." Why did he not do something about the ghastly appearance of these derelict buildings in the meantime? He must have known that this problem is a major issue in the town, indeed he has admitted so, and it has also generated very strong views in the Bourne Forum on this web site. The people have had enough of it. Something must be done.
The last time I raised this matter was in September 1998 when my criticism of these empty shops was reported by the Stamford Mercury newspaper which also quoted the then mayor, Councillor Fisher, saying that nothing could be done because they were privately owned. This is nonsense. South Kesteven District Council, of which he is a member, has powers under existing planning regulations over the changes and external aspect of all building and if private owners ignore instructions to remedy faults and carry out repairs, then the authority is entitled to do the work itself and send them the bill. If these properties in North Street are in a sales limbo, blighted by their very appearance and creating a blot on the street scene, that is the course of action the council should take. How long will they wait before taking such a decision?
Bourne Town Council must make its voice heard on this issue and there are sufficient members who also sit on South Kesteven District Council to ensure that something is done. These councillors have asked for and got our votes and now is the time for them to keep the promises they made at the hustings, that they will faithfully serve the people who put them in office. We would not expect them to think that it is more important to be elected than to serve the community and to disappear from view for another four years until they again need our vote. We want them to deal with those matters that concern us most. This is one of the most important. We ask them to help clean up those parts of our town centre that have become a public disgrace. The tourist season is getting underway and the image of Bourne as an attractive market town is at stake. Whatever do our visitors think of this eyesore and what is their opinion of those administering our local affairs who allow this to happen? The answers to these very valid questions are uncomfortable and therefore it is all the more important that this problem is addressed as a matter of urgency.
I also note that some of our councillors have been getting hot under the collar about the possible loss of car parking spaces in the town as a result of the £25,000 cash boost from developers involved with the new Sainsbury's supermarket currently under construction in Exeter Street. The money will be spent on improving the area around Burghley Street, with trees and other enhancements, but this is likely to cost valuable parking spaces, two at least, and very strong views were expressed about this at the last meeting of the town planning committee.
Indeed, one of them, Councillor Derek Hedges, said it would be a travesty if the town lost any car parking spaces and furthermore it should fight to keep them. "Not one single car parking space should be lost", he said vehemently.
But if our councillors are really concerned about the loss of car parking spaces in the town, then why did they not heed my observations about the Burghley Street car park in this diary on 30th January 1999? The huge blue metal container for waste paper that is permanently sited there is always dumped at a most inconvenient position, effectively putting four car parking spaces out of action. This car park is the busiest in Bourne and every space is a valuable one, especially at peak periods, and we can ill afford to lose four of them at the whim of a lorry driver who cannot be bothered to lower the container back into a more suitable position when he has made his collection. I appealed then to our mayor to intervene with the companies that control these recycling facilities to ensure that they either maintain them in a correct and orderly manner or hand them over to someone who will but to no avail. Nothing was done. Nothing has been done. The mental energy generated in committee about something that has not yet happened, i e the possible loss of two car parking spaces, would have been better devoted to the problem that is still with us. There are times when I think that our councillors are living not in Bourne but on the planet Venus.
There was a time when buttercup meadows were a familiar sight in the countryside but there is now no place for them in areas of intensive farming such as that around Bourne where they have been killed off by the repeated use of herbicides. The buttercup (Ranunculus acris) however is one of nature's survivors and remains one of our most familiar summer flowers because it can be seen flowering at this time in some fields and more especially along roadside verges, springing from dormant roots and spreading over the springing turf, eager to set seed before they are overshadowed by tall, lush grasses. They are a sign that the countryside is coming alive and not even late frosts will stop the new growth. The rich yellow of the cup-shaped flowers is associated in folklore with the yellow butter that comes from the cattle that grazed the pastures and a favourite trick when I was a boy was to pluck a buttercup and hold it under a friend's chin and if it reflected the yellow colour on to the skin, which it invariably did, then this was declared to be a sign that they liked butter. Who would have thought that the day would come when the simple buttercup would be exterminated wherever possible by agro-chemicals? Ah, those halcyon days of youth and innocence.
Saturday 12th June 1999
One of the main causes of the mounting traffic congestion in Bourne is that so many drivers flout the law. We are becoming an increasingly rebellious society when it comes to our vehicles and soon after midday on Friday of last week, the town centre almost came to a standstill because of cars and lorries deliberately parked on double yellow lines and in spaces where they should not have been, and that included the middle of the road in some cases. Traffic queues built up on all of the approach roads into the town centre and by far the worst blockage was in West Street where a milk float had been left half on and half off the pavement, causing a ten-minute hold up because several articulated lorries were denied free passage. At this moment when our town was in danger of grinding to a standstill, there was not a policeman or traffic warden in sight, but is there ever?
An increasing number of drivers appear to think that the rules and regulations governing parking apply to everyone except themselves and as a change of attitude by these selfish people is quite unlikely, then the situation will continue and even worsen as the fight for parking spaces becomes more intense when the new restrictions come into force as a result of the new Sainsbury's supermarket. Stretches of Exeter Street, West Street and North Street will all join the existing no waiting zones and drivers that have found a free parking space at the kerbside in the past will have to go somewhere else once the necessary orders have been issued by Lincolnshire County Council and you do not need to be an expert in mathematics to calculate that Bourne's total number of official car parking spaces, already overstretched, will become totally inadequate.
A new syndrome that could well be termed parking rage is already evident and frayed tempers, harsh words and black looks abound as drivers jockey for the available spaces at peak periods. A taxi driver with a local firm recently blocked in two lines of vehicles in the Budgens car park one Saturday morning by leaving his taxi between them while he went off and as I was one of the owners who was inconvenienced by his anti-social conduct, I pointed this out when he eventually returned but he replied with a mouthful of obscenities. How long before drivers come to blows?
Parking overnight is another problem entirely and an effective law, though one practically impossible to enforce, might decree that no one could own a car unless they had a garage or a space to park it at their place of residence. Home owners have no legal right to park a vehicle outside their home and it is an offence to park on the pavement yet even the quietest and most attractive streets in our town become littered with cars after 6 p m in the evenings and at weekends, with two, three and even four cars and vans parked outside some houses and it frequently becomes an obstacle course to walk down the street. There are also many places in residential areas where transit vans are parked on the road while their drivers are at home, causing not only an obstruction but also a dangerous traffic hazard and an impossibility for the emergency services such as the ambulance and fire brigade to negotiate were they to be called out, and in one road two articulated lorry units, a caravan and even a JCB have become a feature of the street scene.
There was a time when government thought that new motorways would solve our traffic predicament but the loss of our countryside and the defacement of our rural landscape became too high a price to pay and so they concentrated on by-passing our towns but so many communities are calling out for relief roads to be built that the public purse is unable to cope and as a result, many such projects were struck off the Department of Transport list last year and it is doubtful if Bourne will now get a by-pass in the foreseeable future.
We can therefore discount any help from central government in alleviating the current difficulties caused by the car in Bourne and the only solution that our local councils can offer is to throw down more yellow lines and reduce car parking spaces as traffic flows increase instead of finding more off-street sites to cope. We must then put up with the system as it is because without any apparent law enforcement, the only other solution is in our own hands, for drivers to exercise more patience and magnanimity, forget their own selfish motives and observe the rules of the road when out and about behind the wheel and when parking, do it without disrupting the entire town or offending the neighbours. If this were to happen, a new climate of tolerance for the car would be created but then pigs might fly.
Wild roses proliferate in the Bourne area during May and June. They are all around us, in the woods and in the hedgerows along the roadside verges, and they look so fragile yet some have the most delicate and exquisite scent. I spotted these on a narrow country road near Hanthorpe village while out driving and here they are in all of their glory but it is dangerous to pick them because they are protected by razor-sharp, hooked prickles that can tear into the skin of the unwary.
There are several species but the most familiar is the dog-rose (Rosa canina). This wild ancestor of the garden rose was the symbol of the Tudor kings of England but it is thought to derive its name from an ancient Greek belief that it would cure a person who had been bitten by a mad dog. The flowers can be shell-pink or white and their stems arch and scramble in the hedgerow and twine their way around the trees in the woods. When the petals fall, red berry-like fruit or hips form and these can be made into jelly and syrup because they are rich in Vitamin C. During World War Two, when nourishing food was scarce, the government sent us kids out into the hedgerows to collect them and in 1943 alone, some 500 tons of rose hips were amassed in this way and processed to provide children with rose hip syrup as a supplement to the meagre diet that resulted from food rationing. Today, this vast natural commodity is left to the birds. Even if the authorities decreed that rose hips were necessary for the nation, it is doubtful if they could persuade many youngsters to get out from in front of their television sets to pick them.
Saturday 19th June 1999
Bourne is a small market town with a population of around 12,000 and yet it is well endowed with local newspapers but whether these newspapers serve us well is another matter. I have been taking a close look in recent months at the five that circulate in our area and I find their coverage as varied as their advertising for it is quite obvious that most, in varying degrees, put revenue first rather than to inform their readers about the events in their community which in past times was seen as the first duty of such publications.
Advertising is necessary for a newspaper to survive because this revenue meets the bulk of its costs while the cover price in most cases is eaten up by circulation expenses. But publishers should not lose sight of the fact that although they must attract advertising, it is the editorial that sells a newspaper, the sugar coating on the commercial pill, and if the column inches devoted to local affairs are cut at the expense of advertising, then we must question the validity of the publication.
This is the main criticism of the Stamford Herald and Post, an advertising publication masquerading as a newspaper, full of syndicated features and token stories from the locality with little effort being made to tell us what has really been happening in our town in the past seven days. It is actually based in Peterborough and one glance through its thirty or more pages each week will reveal that its heart in not with the church groups or the voluntary organisations, the scouts and the guides, the schools, the youth clubs and the charities, but with the estate agents and the second hand car salesmen who take page upon page in an attempt to sell their wares. This newspaper is also given away free, popped through most letter boxes each week whether we want it or not, and so I suppose we cannot grumble about something we do not have to pay for.
The Lincolnshire Free Press is an old established newspaper and part of a large publishing group but it based in Spalding and is therefore mainly concerned with events in that town and district although it likes to keep a foot in Bourne. Its pages usually carry several stories from the area but it is hard to shake off its Spalding provenance and there is no attempt at a complete coverage of our affairs. Property sales fill the bulk of the advertising pages and there are many who buy it while house hunting.
The only evening newspaper that circulates in Bourne is The Telegraph although this is purely a token appearance as far as local coverage is concerned. Stories of people, places and events from the district are rare but it is very lively and extremely readable and as it covers a large catchment area around Peterborough of which Bourne is a part, then it is a welcome addition to our regular digest of news. But do not look here for a wedding report of the girl next door or for details of a funeral or garden fete because The Telegraph is very selective in what it prints and the mundane takes second place to the sensational. You will not find mention of hatches, matches and despatches in its editorial columns although like all newspapers, they will be happy to carry such announcements for a price in their public announcements section under Births, Marriages and Deaths. This newspaper is based in Peterborough and as a young reporter in the early 1950's, I worked for its embryo publication the Peterborough Evening Telegraph, then just a two-page slip edition inside its big brother which was published in Kettering but The Telegraph has grown up since those days and is now a very professional regional evening newspaper by any standard.
By far the biggest weekly to circulate in Bourne is the Stamford Mercury, a local edition of Britain's oldest newspaper founded in 1695. Recent issues have been around eighty pages and although little editorial extends beyond the centre fold where human interest collides with commercialism, its size is trumpeted from the masthead with slogans like "Bourne's Biggest Weekly Newspaper" and "More than three times the size of some ordinary weekly papers", the latter an obvious reference to their more puny rival but then bigger is not always better as we shall see. But it is produced in Stamford and this is evident because there is a very strong bias towards that town, something that is always reflected in the Letters Pages, although the news coverage for Bourne is excellent, including that from the outlying villages, and the layout extremely good with many pictures, some of them in colour. Overall this is a most presentable newspaper and one that we in the trade would call a very good read.
And so we come to The Local, an oddity when it was launched as the Bourne Local ten years ago in October 1989 and one that I thought would not survive. But I have been pleasantly surprised because this is a newspaper that clings to the old values of district reporting, where people matter more than events, and so we find it full of names, wedding guests and mourners at funerals, club officials, prize winners, footballers, cricketers and anglers, mums and dads and children, people, people, people. I started my career in journalism on a weekly newspaper and the edict from my editor was that every name used was a reader who bought a copy of the newspaper and so we should mention everyone and it was a perilous mistake to leave anyone out.
The Local may only be a mere twenty-four pages but it is punching its weight and in the short time it has been on the scene has earned its place on the news stands and is a favourite in many homes. It certainly gives the most comprehensive coverage of weekly events in and around Bourne and were more advertising to come its way, it could afford to expand in size. The newspaper has far more local business and classified advertising than any of its competitors and yet no estate agents appear to use its columns and fewer second hand car agencies than in the others but then an independent publication such as The Local cannot compete with the syndicated rates and circulations offered by its competitors and their companion house publications. If these advertisers were to overcome their misgivings on this score, they might well discover that The Local would take their product into far more homes than they realised and Bourne would find itself with a sizeable local newspaper that feared competition from no one.
What then would I tell a visitor to the town who asked which was the best newspaper to buy, the one that would accurately reflect what was going on in our community? I would most certainly recommend The Local, because it is crammed with the minutiae of life in a small town and one issue would mirror a week of our activities. But in addition, I would suggest buying the Stamford Mercury for its professionalism and extensive advertising. I would also say unequivocally that there was no need to read the other three and in time, if The Local is given a favourable wind, perhaps the Stamford Mercury may also become redundant.
Saturday 26th June 1999
I make no apology for returning to the subject of car parking in Bourne because it has been uppermost in people's minds this week as work progresses on installing new roundabouts in North Street and West Street to cope with increased traffic flows from Sainsbury's supermarket which is due to open this summer. Naturally we have not been consulted about these changes although Lincolnshire County Council, the highways authority, is inviting written objections to the proposals and to the accompanying no waiting restrictions but this is merely window dressing because the deed will be done before the envelopes containing any comments are even opened although this web site and the local newspapers have received sufficient evidence that the people of Bourne are not happy with what is being done.
The supermarket has contributed £25,000 towards the scheme and so it is going ahead. Corporate Britain has spoken. In the words of the county council when questioned about the protest that is slowly gathering a head of steam over the roundabouts and accompanying yellow lines: "Sainsbury's has paid for these improvements and they will go in." So much for public consultation but we must ask ourselves whether road improvements in our town are only made as a result of such beneficence.
Why is it that alterations to the traffic system in Bourne are only deemed necessary when someone else offers to pay? Perhaps if Budgens had made a similar contribution to the public purse in the interests of road safety when they opened ten years ago, we would not have the traffic chaos and danger that builds up daily in Meadowgate. But why must we wait for handouts from big business to pay for those improvements that are part of the county council's duty to finance from the money we give them each year through our council tax? We should be quite clear that this gift from Sainsbury's is not purely philanthropic. It is not a charitable gift or even a munificence inspired by public spirit but a business investment that is intended solely to increase the expenditure at their store by ensuring the smooth flow of traffic in and out with each vehicle bringing in more revenue and the faster the turn around the better.
The new generation of yellow lines will cost the town between fifty and a hundred kerbside parking spaces. That will mean fewer customers for the established shops because most of these spaces are taken up by casual callers, the car parks being filled very early on in the day by workers from the town centre banks, shops and offices whose vehicles remain there for the entire day while shoppers seek in vain for somewhere to leave their cars. If we are to lose a hundred spaces, a monumental amount for a town like Bourne, why cannot they be retrieved by the purchase of the North's Garden Centre site in Burghley Street that is still standing idle a year after it was vacated? That would solve our current car parking problems in Bourne at a stroke because the site would easily accommodate one hundred cars. Must we wait for yet another benefactor? Once again, the voices of our local councillors on a subject of major importance to the people who put them in office are silent.
Bourne seems to have more than its fair share of redoubtable women whose time is spent on championing the cause of our small town. I wrote recently about Mrs Lesley Patrick whose endeavours saved the outdoor swimming pool and of Councillor Mrs Marjorie Clark who has taken on another year as mayor at the age of eighty. But another lady who is happy to give her time and effort to others is Mrs Betty James who has recently bowed out as a columnist for our local newspaper after a ten year stint of chronicling our affairs.
Retirement usually generates a reduced workload but Betty is not one to rest on her laurels and so she is becoming a concert impresario for the benefit of Bourne by bringing that remarkable piano partnership of David Nettle and Richard Markham to the Corn Exchange for a recital next summer to celebrate the millennium. Nettle and Markham are a latter-day Rawicz and Landauer and have been playing together for twenty years. Their instrument is a unique double grand, the only one in the world with a keyboard at either end, and they have delighted audiences at prestigious venues in fifty countries. Now Bourne is on their itinerary. The hall is booked for 16th June 2000, just a year away, and Betty and her husband Jim are planning to host a series of lunches and suppers to help finance the venture with all proceeds going to the Bourne Arts and Community Trust.
The enterprise, industry and dedication of these ladies is a credit to our community because the work they are doing is of real benefit to Bourne. They do it willingly and selflessly and without a thought of reward. Our busy ladies do us proud.
The countryside this month is full of elder flower, small and creamy-white and one of our most prolific blooms at this time of the year. The flat-topped clusters have a bitter sweet fragrance and although many people profess a strong dislike of the smell, the elder (Sambucus nigra) is generally beloved by all who see it because it is one of the most familiar and attractive features of our hedgerows while its olde worlde associations have won a place in the hearts of English people.
It has been said with some truth that our summer is not here until the elder is fully in flower and that it ends when the berries are ripe. The word elder comes from the Anglo-Saxon word oeld or fire, the hollow stems of the young branches having been used for blowing up a fire. The soft pith pushes out easily and the tubes thus formed were used as pipes, hence it is often called a pipe tree and as young lads of my generation knew they were also perfect for use as pea shooters or pop guns.
A wealth of folk lore, romance and superstition surround the elder, the most familiar tale being that the Cross of Calvary was made of this wood and in consequence it has become the emblem of sorrow and death. But despite these traditions, the elder has a firm claim on the popular affection for its many sterling virtues and its uses are manifold and important. The wood of old trees is white and fine and polishes well and has many uses for such articles as skewers and pegs. The leaves when bruised and worn in the hat or rubbed on the face will keep the flies at bay while the bark, flowers and berries are all reputed have numerous medicinal uses and the recipes for such culinary delights as elder flower vinegar, elder wine, elderberry jam, chutney and ketchup, are legion and still produced in many country kitchens.
Our hedgerows at this time of the year are abundant in their bounty and they are also a delight to behold.
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