Richard Baum

My fingers are no longer yellow, which is a relief.

Yesterday’s graffiti clean-up resulted in the chemicals reacting with my gloves and turning my digits the colour of daffodils. I have sacrificed much to my party over recent years, including any semblance of a normal personal life. I draw the line at dyeing myself yellow. But thankfully, my skin has returned to its traditional pallid and uninteresting state. And, I suspect, the walls I cleaned have been returned to their graffiti-ridden state. It’s been 24 hours after all. 

Not much earth-shattering to report from the ward today. The daily bloggings of a suburban councillor do get a tad difficult to maintain sometimes when there’s not much going on.

It’s at these lean times that I try to to generate some case work myself. And so the other day I reported that the grass verge on my street had become a little unkempt. The truth is that it’s so overgrown that an entire race descended from Sir David Attenborough now lives in it, and the whole thing needs to be chopped back.

So I told the Council this, and today I received a response, by email. The response I got missed my point entirely, because someone had misinterpreted my original request, thought I was referring to somewhere else altogether, and set completely the wrong bloke onto it. I admire the effort that had obviously gone into the attempted solution to my problem. It was a fairly length email exchange involving not only officers of the Council but also of the Forestry Commission. Alas, they were all chasing a phantom problem, and so I had to inform them that, whilst I appreciated their obvious efforts they had been, I regret to say, pointless. And my doorstep jungle remains.

Not content with failing to solve a problem out of my own front window, I have now waded head first into one outside the front door of a colleague. It seems that Branksome Avenue in my ward (home to, amongst others, my colleague and Holyrood Councillor Wilf Davison) was dug up for street light replacement some time ago. It was, in fact, during the Christmas holidays, and the diggers were probably on quadruple time. Unfortunately it has remained dug up ever since, meaning that nobody can park there and the steet is looking like a sanitised version of a WWI battlefield. I wasn’t tipped off by Cllr Davison, but by a neighbour of his, who has become exasperated at Council inaction. When she told me this I immediately felt overwhelming empathy, since I see more of Council inaction than I do of my own mother. And so I have taken it upon myself to solve the problem. I will keep her (because she’s interested) and you (because I need something to write) updated.

Rick