Oh 2018, how bountiful you have been for this column, how full of oddity and absurdity in the NG9 area. Yet all our lols this issue can be traced back to one place: that place up Foster Avenue.
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Yes, Broxtowe Borough Council, where the lions really do seem led by the donkeys (apologise to any Equus africanus asinus readers out there). Staff are trying to do a good job under increasingly difficult circumstances, notably the scandal we mention on the front page, while the clueless councillors who set budgets and policy flap around like startled hens.
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That’s the last farmyard reference, we promise.
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Top of the list of absurdities we find the defence given to knock down our Town Hall. As transparency, accountability and democracy are ground down among our elected members, the symbol of these values, the 80-year old Town Hall, looks like it too will be beneath the bulldozers soon. It’s almost too clunky a bit of symbolism: any novelist worth her salt would baulk from such ham-fisted metaphor. Is Beeston beyond satire?
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“People in Eastwood don’t know where the Town Hall is” says a Councillor at a meeting, to justify getting rid of the very building they’re debating in. As an opposition councillor is quick to point out, being unacknowledged by someone in the far north of our borough is not grounds to get rid of stuff. “That’s it lads,” says the Chinese Government. “We better tear down the Forbidden City. Reduce the Terracotta Army to dust. It seems that Mrs Scroggins of Plumptre Way, NG16, seems to have overlooked our existence!”
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Our MP weighs in “There are no plans to demolish the Town Hall!” she thunders in her newsletter, written hastily in the back of the Uber whizzing her between London TV studios. “FAKE NEWS”. Now, we know Anna doesn’t really get involved in stuff in Broxtowe due to the demands of life in the Leicestershire countryside, but, as each one of the thousand plus respondents to the public consultation would have seen, demolition was, errr, the third option. Fake Soubz?
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“I got married there,” a sprightly elderly lady tells me while I’m manning a Save The Town Hall stall. “A long time ago,” she adds. “That must have been lovely, to marry in your home town,” I reply. “Well, it were convenient,” she replies, wistfully. “He had to get his suit back by 4, and it were near the pub.” Ahhh, Beestonians, how I adore you.
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So don’t let the councillors sell what is ours, don’t let them ruin a bit of Beeston’s heritage. We need to take the bull by the horns, refuse to chicken out, don’t duck responsibility’, not look gift horses in the mouth and resist until the cows come home.
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No, I’m not sorry.
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