Who was Guy?

The best we can say about the poem 'Remember Remember' in this month's Cranfield Express is that the writer should relocate to Northern Ireland circa 1968. The Orange Order would love this kind of pompous celebration of protestant ascendancy and catholics being hung, drawn and quartered after vicious torture. Catholics were seen in the late 1500s as the terrorist threat and it is true that if Fawkes and Catesby had been successful it would have been Britain's 5/11. On the basis of that one attempted outrage an awful lot of intolerance has been built, however.

So we should be grateful in some respects to Ms Cook for reminding us of what Guy Fawkes night is all about - a complete historical irrelevance in age when we have other more serious issues to hand.

Infrastructure Planning Commission

I received 30 copies of the Covanta application registration form this morning for Budgens and the Coop. The process for interacting with the application is pretty clumsy and you wonder why. However I thought the present government promised to get rid of the IPC. So why is it still here? Localism should mean local planning decisions.

Update

American founding father Benjamin Franklin said there were only two certainties in life – death and taxes.

For the parish council, this translates as maintaining the village cemetery, tucked away in Rectory Lane and setting the budget every year.

The two are linked, like all parish council services, but there are ambitious plans for the cemetery in the future. That will require money (or ‘resources’ as they say in government) and that means careful budgeting.

With the village set to grow by say, 20 per cent, with the Home Farm – and who knows what other – development, parish councillors have been thinking about capacity in the existing cemetery, opened in the early 1990s. Interment of full remains (as opposed to interment of ashes) on the north side will soon be moving into an earlier extension which is due to be tilled and reseeded. An extension road was also constructed several years ago to allow access for hearses and mourners.

To ensure there is enough space, in the long-term, the Parish Council is hoping to buy some adjoining glebe (Church of England) land to the north of the cemetery. At time of writing we are still waiting to hear if the Diocese of St Albans has accepted our offer. If we are successful, however, the land could mean a chance to meet another need in the village – at least for a few years.

There has been a big interest in allotments in Cranfield and the council has had enquiries from quite a number of people. The new land, if a sale is agreed, would offer a medium-term location for allotments. This, in my view, would be only the start for a search for suitable allotments sites. The interest in freshly grown food from an identifiable place is now starting to link in with concerns about the economy, world food prices and massive damage to the global environment by, for instance, green beans flown in from Kenya.

Apart from that, gardening is a great way to stay active without busting a gut in a sweaty gym. So it looks like a win-win-win situation.

We are inviting an allotment expert to a forthcoming meeting to check out the practicalities (maximum permitted size of sheds, are dogs allowed? etc). For more information email me on broadgreen68@btinternet.com or tel 01234 757689.

If all goes according to plan – big ‘if’ – parish council land could both feed parishioners and then bury their well-nourished bodies, eventually. Now that sounds like recycling.