I don't necessarily support this view, but people should have the chance to make up their minds.   more »

I don't necessarily support this view, but people should have the chance to make up their minds.   more »

I have just been told that you can visit this website to see the drawings that accompany planning applications.   more »

The annual Fun Day is to be on June 10th 2006.   more »

Let's put it on record: December 1st is the Big Sing in Street.   more »

We had a good meeting today in the new council room in the Self-Help Centre in Crispin Hall. The room was fairly crowded with representatives of churches, voluntary groups, local government representatives and others.   more »

Nina Fry as Chairman of Street Parish Council is gathering a representative from each organisation in Street for an hour on Tuesday 18th October to co-ordinate forthcoming events and activities.

Brilliant idea. I just hope that someone from each organisation bothers to turn up.   more »

I see in the Central Somerset Gazette that our Parish Council is leasing space in Crispin Hall, room 20 in the Self-Help Centre, as an office and meeting room.   more »

Seventyfive Street residents packed the Methodist church hall last night to support the Parish Council as it rejected a planning request from a property developer, called, I think, Midshires Estates Ltd, to build 50 houses off Brookside.   more »

This is about the car park in Somerton Road. Here is the local paper's new item.

In brief, the newspaper reports that Mendip Council has done a secret deal to sell the car park to the developers of Holmcroft, the handsome house that I have mentioned several times in this blog.   more »

Who keeps our Parish Council in the world's eye? Answer: The Parish web site.

But the impression the world will get when it visits the site is that nothing is going on the Street during the whole of 2005 except the June Fun Day.   more »

This evening I turned up to the Inauguration of the new Parish Council Chairman, Nina Fry. It was held in Strode Theatre, and well attended, with a number of chains of office to be seen around the necks of mayors and chairmen of other towns and cities. Respresentatives of various organisations were there, some uniformed; and Ann Webb was there as Chairman of the Street Society.

David Tichener was compere, and, with his experience in pantomime, certainly gave the proceedings a light-hearted feel. He introduced and commented on a Power Point show of photos of Street. The commentary was notable for many gibes against Clarks, which caused a little uneasiness. I guess the members of the Clark family who were present are used to this sort of thing.

Schools provided the entertainment, or should I say 'infotainment'. Children from Avalon and Brookside Schools gave us some of the presentation the whole schools gave in a marquee set up between the two schools in March. The children spoke up very well - I could hear it all clearly - as they told of the growing friendships between the Special School and the lowest forms of the Mainstream School. We were told that an application has gone in to the government for �6 1/2 million to amalgamate the schools. The children sang a song written for them by Charlie from Children's World, the organisation which has been working very closely with the schools on preparing for the amalgamation. The photo is poor, taken from a distance in the dark with many heads in the way, but it is better 'n nowt.

Then it was Crispin's turn. I was thrilled to recognise some of the musicians, Fran the Head Girl, Peter on violin, and others. It was interesting, having heard Fran sing Purcell songs and Peter play a Vivaldi concerto, to hear them among their peers, singing and playing a very different sort of music - with equal expertise. The high point for me was the choir, all girls, singing Gospel music. It was wonderful to hear these words of faith coming from the lively group. I have put a photo of them, and of the group that calls itself Haystack, on this blog.

David Tichener read out the names of all the Council Chairmen since its beginning in 1970, and most of them, in person or through representatives, were presented with a medal. David Pipes briefly reviewed his year in office, picking out for special mention a new relationship between the Council and the Chamber of Commerce, and the Council web site, and ending with the suggestion that Street let go its historic designation of 'village' and allow itself to be a town alongside Frome, Shepton, Glastonbury and Wells.

Then came the formal handing over of the chain of office to Nina Fry, who made what she said was her first ever public speech. You would not have known it. She mentioned things to be done, including a skateboard park and a Heritage Trail.

Revd Ian Shadwick, Baptist Pastor, led in prayer for all in authority, including the Council and Nina its Chairman.

Nina (I think it was) said she had been to the Wells Mayor-making ceremony, which went without a hitch; but they had, she pointed out, had 600 years' practice. What improvements can be made next year in Street? There certainly should be a repeat ceremony next year - now that it has begun, it seems amazing that it didn't happen before.

Perhaps visiting mayors and chairmen could be welcomed by name and given a round of applause. The slide show: it was fine that the first one should be very general, but subsequent shows, films or whatever should be more focussed on some current topic, like changes in the look of Street over the past 12 months. I do wonder whether the opening should be a bit formal - the jokes and light-heartedness would be even more effective by contrast. Everyone who speaks must remember that there are outsiders present, and use people's full names. They would not have known the new Chairman's surname if it had not been printed on the programme. And in-jokes and local references should be explained. Should someone write a form of words to be used at the handing over of the chain of office? The US President takes some sort of oath; would something very different but with the same intent be appropriate here? It was great that one of the ministers was asked to pray for the coming year. Keep that bit!

Anyway, it was a good evening. Goodnight!

Avalon and Brookside pupils spoke, signed and sang at the Council Chairman's Inauguration.

Singers and musicians from Crispin School, under the name 'Haystack', entertained the audience at the Inauguration.

Crispin choir members at the Inauguration, singing Gospel songs with feeling, and with gusto. By the end we were clapping along.

Mendip District Council's circular about how they are going to collect our rubbish arrived today.

Some progress, then. Ordinary dust-bin collections once a fortnight rather than weekly, because we won't have so much to put in them once we've separated out the paper, the glass and the tins. And these, the paper, glass and tins, are going to collected weekly.

That suits our household down to the ground. We only put out our wheelie bin once in about 3 weeks anyway. And the black plastic box isn't big enough for the recycling stuff, now that my son has trained us to put everything in the right places.

What I think could be improved is the sanctions on those who don't comply. Let me quote:

What if I don't want to sort out my household waste?

From now on the Household Waste collection services offered by Mendip Dostrict Council will focus on recycling and waste minimisation. The government requires us to do this, we need you to help. .... If you do not want to sort out your household waste you may find that you will not have enough room for your waste in your wheeled bin, as extra waste will not be collected you will have to take it to your HWRC for disposal.

That's an invitation to those who don't care about the environment to sort just the minimum, enough to ensure that their dustbin doesn't overflow. I remember Alistair Cooke in one of his Radio 4 'Letters from America' telling how they sorted their waste, because otherwise they would be fined. That was about 10 years ago, in the Great Polluting Nation. If it's important to save our countryside from being taken over and poisoned by buried rubbish, why ever not make sorting compulsary?

It's the same weak government (I'm not talking party politics - they're all the same) that allows gas-guzzling 4by4s, with their child-killing bull-bars, to clog cities, that is lax in enforcing speed limits, and that bends over backwards to let the rich kill our villages with second or third homes. On a phone-in this week a gentleman from one of the Scottish islands, I think, proposed to a government minister that those who owned a second home should pay double Council Tax on each home, and those who owned three should pay triple tax on all three. The concern was the way houses in the country are being snatched from village people and all housing there made unaffordable for workers. The minister would not even contemplate this financial disincentive to the rich.

Weak, weak, weak. My fear is that the nation will sink to such a state that a dictator will take over. It is not unthinkable. Mussolini was accepted by a very ancient and cultured nation, and made the trains run on time. Far better that our elected politicians show some backbone before it is too late.

'Joined-up government' is a vogue phrase at the moment, and you can see what people mean by it. When the gas people dig up your road one week and carefully make good (we hope), and the water people come a couple of weeks later and dig it all up again, you yearn for some co-ordination.

We came across an example regarding Overleigh, when we were negotiating with Mendip about conservation issues, and then, without warning or by-your-leave, Somerset Country Council sent someone to decide whether to knock down a venerable and attractive wall and widen the country lane so that cars sould rush by, knocking the children, other pedestrians and motorised wheelchair users flying.

Thank God they didn't go forward with the hare-brained scheme. All they did was leave a stud hammered into the tarmac and a number of worried residents. But apparently the Highways Department, belonging to Somerset CC, can do what it likes, without consulting Mendip. Or that's what I gather. I may be wrong.

And then the police seem to have a hand in things to do with parking, too. And the really local people, Street Parish Council, who know what's what in the immediate area, seem to have no effective say at all.

Parking. That's the issue worrying some of us. Pavements in Merriman Road are being lowered and white lines are appearing in the road. Who lowered the pavement? Who painted the white lines? Whose responsibility is it to give permission? And who has an overall view of the needs of drivers, cyclists and pedestrians in Street? If there is anyone with such an overview, do they have the authority to get things done?

There was a time when our town signs - sorry, village signs - proudly announced Free Parking. Then some authority stepped in and compelled us to make the car parks pay. Parked cars appeared overnight along all the roads near the High Street, and my barber lost a lot of customers who could no longer park outside his shop. Now the car parks are filled again and still the roads are clogged with parked cars.

My son in London has over the years done a lot of unpaid work gathering information about traffic flow, bicycle use and safety, effect on local residents and so on, in his part of North London, and his local council has taken notice and changed some one-way systems back into two-way, to general satisfaction, and even bankrolled schemes for cycle storage to encourage fewer car journeys and more healthy cycling.

Perhaps it takes private initiative to get the facts, present them to all the local authorities, and then knock the heads of officials together until they come up with some joined-up government regarding cars in Street and what to do with them.

Meanwhile, Merriman Road is continuing its chaotic changes.

I know it's not fair to do this, but I've been exploring the Parish Council's Street On Line site with a cynical eye   more »

An informal chat after this afternoon's meeting of the Street Society Committee brought together a number of ideas   more »

I remember listening to bands playing on the bandstand in Merriman Park.   more »

Once there was a shelter for those who wished to sit in Merriman Park.   more »

Street Parish Council held an open meeting this evening, as mentioned in a previous blog. I didn't count the number of Street residents who turned up, but it was more than the Parish Council expected - more than the number of chairs put out, and more than the copies of the relevant papers available.   more »