The schools have broken up and council-related meetings are about to stop for the summer.  I am about to go off on holiday for a couple of weeks.  Time to reflect.

Sad things have happened in the past few weeks.  Alan Spratling, long-time Lib Dem councillor – 25 years up until he stood down in 2008, former Leader of the Council, has died of cancer.  Paddy Higgins, 16 year old son of a teacher at the school my son attends, where I am a governor, died on holiday in Newquay.   Makes you hug your own children closer.

At the end of July our political assistant, Margaret, is retiring.  What will I do without her wisdom, organisational skills and humour? 

But other things are carrying on, most notably, the issues at the traffic lights by Sainsburys, including people who turn the wrong way in and out which have been the subject of complaints for 5 years.  But now a new twist – for the last couple of weeks the queue for the lights in Robin Hood Lane is now there from dawn to dusk 7 days a week, instead of just at peak times Mon- Fri.  Just had a call to say the engineers are still investigating.  Wonder if that will be fixed by the time I come back?

And on the national stage, same old, same old.  I thought there was a chance of some serious constitutional reform, following all that duck house and flipped mortgage outrage.  But it seems the two major parties have been busying themselves kicking it all into the long grass.  And I had hoped that the credit crunch would mean that we could have some reform of the financial sector and get some green policies in place.  Silly me.  We’re back to bankers’ bonuses already.

I think I might need a holiday…….

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