Mopping up

 

We have a small number of patches in Whickham South and Sunniside to deliver with our latest Focus newsletter. I delivered one of the Whickham patches this morning, and picked up casework about ash die back disease (lots of ash trees in the area are now suffering from it.)

Back together

 

The Sunniside History Society met in person last night for the first time in 19 months. It was great to be back. It will take time to build ourselves back up to 60 members attending each month but 35 attended (both in person and online, more than I expected. Good talk by David Goldwater on the most recent excavations of the Roman town and fort of Vindolanda in Northumberland, just south of the Roman Wall.

Pot of gold?

 

I took this at about 8am this morning on the way to feeding the animals. A rainbow over Sunniside. Sadly, there was no pot of gold at the end of it. Instead, in Johnson's Brexit Britain, there's no gold (no lorries to deliver it) and it was all a myth anyway. But at least the rainbow looks nice.

Securing our supplies

 

The current fuel crisis was anticipated by us a few weeks ago when the HGV driver shortage first started to hit the headlines. We did not rush out to buy petrol and diesel but given our dependency on manufactured feeds for our poultry, we doubled up the quantity of pellets and wheat we bought and have borrowed a friend's shed to store the feed. Fortunately, we don't need to buy in feed for our goats and sheep as they are grazing and we have also collected about half a ton of apples as winter fodder.

Our stockpiles also stretch to fuel for the house. A friend has been supplying us with firewood - enough to get us through to May 2022. It has cost us half a lamb, a fair exchange in the world of self-sufficiency. 

Meanwhile, our solar panels continue to provide electricity to the house and surplus energy goes onto our battery. The drawback is that the panels and battery only work when the grid works. A power cut would stop the electricity supply in its tracks. Fortunately, we have another back up plan. We don't need much electricity on our smallholding, but what we do use is generated from an off-grid solar panel and battery

Our food supplies are also secure. We have 4 freezers full of food we have grown and we still have a potato crop to bring in from our smallholding. We also have a couple of hundred jars of preserves in our garage.

When I was candidate in Blaydon in the 2017 general election, Labour attacked me for growing my own food and being self-sufficient. Labour suggested that someone who was living the "good life" was not a "serious" contender. It seems that Labour were content with people being reliant on complex and long supply chains and anyone who wanted to be more sustainable was to be derided. I don't know if the individual who attacked me on behalf of the Labour party has had his smug grin wiped off his face by recent supply issues but I make him an offer - come and join us in the world of self-sufficiency and sustainable living. And discover just how seriously we need to act now to save the planet.

RIP Kevin

I visited The Whinnies Community Garden in Sunniside yesterday. The news I picked up there was not good. Kevin, one of the volunteers who had worked so hard to make the garden a success, had passed away. It was a shock as he had always appeared to be in good physical health. Sadly a heart attack and stroke had taken him from us.

RIP Kevin. 

Celebrating Vic and Sheila

 

In my role as chair of Sunniside History Society, I attended an event at the Tanfield Railway recently to celebrate the lives and contributions of the steam railway and the History Society of Vic and Sheila Gascoigne. We also donated £100 to the Tanfield Railway to help ensure this great historic asset continues on our doorstep. Vic and Sheila both passed away last year and this was our opportunity to remember their work. Both will be missed.

Skin of their teeth

There was a time when the Labour vote in Sunderland was weighed rather than counted. Those days are now gone. In recent local elections Labour's losing streak has seen a whole strong of seats lost to a variety of opponents. Labour's decades of one party rule is being replaced by multiple parties. Quite how long Labour's majority there will last is an interesting debating point.

One seat that Labour have managed to retain in recent elections is Hetton. They also held on in a by-election yesterday though with only a slender majority of 27, down from 704 in May. The Lib Dems went from 6th place on with 63 votes to 2nd place. With such a slender skin-of-their-teeth majority, Labour will now find that another ward is vulnerable after decades of taking it for granted.

So well done Sunderland Lib Dems and good luck in the battle for Hetton in May next year.

One final thought - Labour are spinning that their conference this week was a success. That didn't help them in Hetton.

Well done Peter!

 

My friend and colleague, Cllr Peter Craig, has been awarded the British Empire Medal for services to the community. He was presented with his medal recently. I was there to take the photos and video.

Cardboard, terrible acting and a great story line

 

Tonight, while sitting down to have my dinner on the settee, channel hopping took me to the Forces Channel which was broadcasting Blake's 7. That takes me back to the late 70s. Unconvincing special effects, cardboard props and terrible acting. I loved that programme then and was delighted to see it again tonight!

Checking the technology

 

An interesting meeting partly spent in the concert room of Sunniside Social Club tonight. This is the venue where, before the pandemic, we held the monthly meetings of Sunniside History Society. Since then, meetings have been online but next week we return to having physical meetings though we are retaining the opportunity for people to attend the meeting via Zoom. Tonight was all about testing the technology and the new projector. To our surprise, we got everything to work!

On Wednesday next week at 7pm, David Goldwater will be talking about the latest discoveries at Vindolanda. All welcome.

Not panic buying

 

No panic buying from me! I got £20 worth of petrol for our Nissan Note today though the limit was £35. I rarely have the tank more than half full. I wasn't going to do anything different today.

Saying goodbye to Kathy

 

Kathy King, former Liberal Councillor, passed away earlier this month. She was a real character who added colour to council meetings and was a great advocate of the people of Birtley in Gateshead who she represented. Local politics without her will be duller. She will be missed.

Kathy's funeral was yesterday and I attended the service at St Joseph's RC Church, Birtley. A good crowd was there and I was pleased to see the mayor attending as well.

Word on the streets

I went to Whickham this morning to deliver my latest Whickham South and Sunniside Focus. Unlike the past two weeks, today we had sunny weather, bringing people out into their front gardens. This always slows me down as I end up stopping to talk to residents. So, the issues raised today by people with me included some recent casework, the latest news from my smallholding, where's my wheelbarrow and libertarian policies. Quite a selection!

400 focuses meanwhile were delivered.

Dog Show

 

Well done Friends of Chase Park and all involved in putting on the dog show at Whickham Chase Park on 21st August 2021. There was a great turnout despite the rain! And lots of prizes were won.

Not predicting the unpredictable

Politics is sometimes bizarre.  Labour's Martin Gannon has called on me to resign today because I did not predict the Covid pandemic in 2018.  Yes, you read that right!  But if Martin knew what was coming, why didn’t he say anything?

Some background is in order. There have been long rumblings from within the Gateshead Labour party about my blog. This is nothing new. It seems that a fair proportion of my readers are the comrades of the local Labour party! Sadly, I’ve just not had the time in recent months to update the blog on a regular basis. The brothers and sisters have therefore had to delve back in time for a good read.

 

Labour Deputy Leader Catherine Donovan seems to have started the ball rolling by referring to a post “from about two years ago” at the full council in July. Catherine is someone on the Labour side of the council chamber who I like as a person but whose politics are far different from my own. She suggested I had written that a pandemic “would never happen”. I searched my blog posts from the 2^nd half of 2019 and found nothing that reflected this.

 

So after a number of emails that were pinged between us, I eventually got a reply as to when the post in question was written. Not “about two years ago”, but rather, it was nearly 3 and a half years ago. So, not on the eve of the covid pandemic but April 2018, nearly two years before the covid pandemic reached our shores.

 

And yes, it was a post about pandemics, or rather, about planning for them. The matter was discussed at a committee meeting in Gateshead and my point at the time was that this was a waste of money. My thinking was influenced by the fact it was 100 years since we had had a pandemic and we had in the previous decade lived through scares about ebola, MERS and swine flu, which though serious as outbreaks, were nowhere near being pandemics. So, I reasoned, why spend resources on something that looked very unlikely to happen at the time.

 

Okay, so as far as predictions go, I got it wrong. But no one in 2018 was predicting a pandemic unless they happen to be endowed with magical powers in 2021 to see everything through the benefit of hindsight. It seems the Gateshead Labour party has developed such powers! A quick look at their raging comments on Facebook and you would be under the impression that Labour had cracked the challenge of time travel. The trouble is, I didn’t hear anyone in the Labour party (or indeed anyone else on the planet) predict in 2018 that within two years we would have a pandemic on the scale of 1918-20.

 

I’d rather be in a position of making predictions that don’t come about than being wise only after the event.

Planted

 I joined other volunteers from Planting Up Whickham on Sunday to help plant up the flowerbeds. Here are a few of the photos I took.

When poor is good

Oppositions are normally expected to win seats they are defending comfortably. What went wrong with Labour in Batley and Spen? A 7% drop in their share of the vote compared to the general election (and Labour's share was down 12.7% compared to the 2017 general election). A majority slashed by 90%, down to 323. In a sign of Labour desperation, Labour were spinning this as a great result. In reality, it is a demonstration that Labour are in serious trouble. 

When Starmer became Labour leader, my assumption was that he would be a voice of reason who could pull together a shattered Labour party after the lunacy of the Corbyn years. I was wrong. His leadership may not be questioned in the immediate future but his hold on it may be under threat once the Batley and Spen dust has settled. Starmer may well survive a future challenge but his party under his leadership is failing in its principle task - to be the opposition to the government. 

Delay to removing barriers

 

Gateshead Council were planning to remove barriers that had been installed in various town centres throughout the borough. It was dependent on the government's announcing of the end of covid restrictions. As this is delayed, implementing the plans are on hold. We now await the government's next announcement about ending restrictions on 19th July.

RIP Andrew

 

In May, my brother Andrew lost his short battle against cancer. Yesterday was his funeral at Mountsett Crematorium near Dipton, Durham. We were restricted in the number of mourners able to attend but we ensured he had a great send off. RIP Andrew.

What's in a name?

 

This is a great illustration of the one-party state mentality of Labour in the North East. Martin Gannon, Labour leader of Gateshead Council, doesn't like the fact that the Sunderland Echo carries lots of stories about the local Lib Dems. With what appears to be an example of too much time on his hands, Martin fired off some shots via Twitter over yet another article in the newspaper about the Lib Dems (this time a call to add Sunderland to the name of Newcastle airport.)

Such unadulterated coverage in the press of political opponents has rather wound Martin up. He has suggested instead that the newspaper be renamed "The Lib Dem Voice-piece"! Surprisingly, Martin has not been so dismissive about the occasional anti-Lib Dem stories fed by Gateshead Labour members to the Newcastle Chronicle, owned by the Trinity Mirror, publisher of the Daily Mirror. Nor indeed has he raised any concerns that I am aware of about the Daily Mirror being such a pro-Labour publication.

Nor did Martin, as far as I am aware, publicly raise any worries back in the Blair years (when he was a superfan of Blairism) about The Sun backing Labour. One rule for Labour, a different one for other parties.

I have heard on the grapevine however that Labour are to launch their own newspaper. Rumour has it that it will be called The Daily Hypocrite!