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ANNUAL PARISH MEETING 2015: TIME FOR CHANGE

6 May 2015

It was time for change at the Annual Parish Meeting when David Risk and most of the parish council stood down. May 2015 sees the biggest change to the council for years – but we still didn’t have an election. Some things never change, though, with the old perennial of traffic speed through the village being raised again.

Speeding through the village is like our MP: we know he exists, we’ve seen him occasionally with our own eyes but in reality, no one can prove to an outsider that he is real.

We’ve all seen cars, vans, lorries and that irritating scooter speeding through our village (the scooter only downhill, of course) but when monitored, the result is that very, very few people are over the limit.

Nevertheless, the village voted again last night instructing the council to borrow an SID – a speed indication device – which will do what it says on the tripod, show people their speed.

Easton has a speed gun and we will approach the council there to see if we can borrow it. We will need some vigilantes later this year to operate it. We’re also going to ask Christian to run a speed check - preferably in term time and preferably during the morning or evening school runs.

A sign of the times: remember when we used to lose power whenever there was a breeze and the crackly telephone lines and being snowed in and we were happy with a bus that came twice a week? Well, the new problem is broadband speed. We‘re in bits because we are not getting enough of it. We are at the bottom of the list for high speeds because we get some; if we do nothing then we will probably stay at the bottom of the list. However, if we go for a temporary solution we will definitely be at the bottom of the list. This is why we elect councils to make our decisions for us.

We have a plan, though. Someone had the email address of the MD of BT Openreach and we’re going to let him know what he has to do. We are Brandeston after all.

Compared with Brandeston, Kettleburgh is a law-abiding, peaceful village. The crime rate there is half that of Brandeston. The Churchills are lucky they live the right side of the border and I suspect they don’t worry about locking up. We in Brandeston, however, daren’t go out at night because of the crime wave. Actually there were six crimes in Brandeston and three in Kettleburgh.

Mark Hounsell, our former parish clerk was presented with a tree for his 16 years service; Sue Thurlow received a framed certificate of appreciation for her long service; David Risk, our longest serving member with 25 years’ service received …. nothing. We did, however, give him a surprise tea party five years ago to mark 50 years association with the parish council.

Some of the outgoing council, parish clerk, district councillor and county councillor.

The Street Resurfaced - 24 August 2010

After the horrors of the potholes from last winter, The Street is looking good again after three days of resurfacing. There were some problems last Friday when the owners of parked cars couldn’t be traced but a change of plan allowed the workmen to continue. Did anyone know The Street was going to be resurfaced last week?