Saturday was a good day for doing this as there were a few things happening and also a few to prompt some discussion. My first stop was the library as I needed to go to the post office to send a parcel back for the other threequarters. It was the last day before the office shuts for just over a week for renovation ahead of re-opening on October 24th.
Postmaster Kevin Salmon has stayed on to see the post office through a rather rocky period due to lockdown and uncertainty. Now a local charity, Hethersett Hearts, has ensured the future of the post office and it will have a permanent home in the library. Kevin has now officially retired but we owe him a big thank you for keeping it all together. Many villages have lost their post office. Thankfully ours is not one of them.
From there I went to check out the chemists. I had heard it was shut again and so it turned out which is really disappointing. I came home to find that on Friday the doctors' surgery was only responding to emergencies. So, I delved into this a bit more via social media. Apparently, the surgery has had lots of abuse from people who can't get appointments. In a long article the Humbleyard Practice which Hethersett surgery belongs to explained at length that it is stretched to breaking point.
But the other side of the coin is that residents can't get to see a doctor which is extremely concerning. Add that to the present situation in hospitals and it just poses one question for me. Why is wholescale development still going on when the services are stretched to breaking point? I have never known a situation like this. The four-day week and power cuts of the 1970s were bad but I don't think they had the devastating effect on our lives that this all has.
I talked at length about my concerns for social care and this is just another example. Something has to be done about this. We accept that we need to have new development but not at the pace that it is coming and services must be in place before development comes. Services must come first and not as an afterthought, and something has to be done to increase the number of doctors and pharmacists so that pharmacies are not shut.
As I write this, I realise that my view is a very simplistic one - stop future development until the necessary services are in place. I know the world doesn't work that way but what I do implore politicians to do is have a reasonable and sensible view of what's going on and to stop burying their heads in the sand and hope it will all go away or somehow sort itself out.
There is no doubt in my mind that the problem here is greed. Greed of developers who just want to throw up as many houses as possible in as short a space of time as possible, make their money and move on. When will we realise that this is a recipe for disaster and will cost lives?
One of the messages on Facebook that I am featuring in the next Hethersett Herald got me thinking and somehow summed it all up. The poster pointed out that her criticism of services in the village came from a love and concern for the village and not out of a wish to criticise. And that's exactly where I am coming from. I have lived in Hethersett for well over 40 years. I am entrenched in the local community. I want what's best for local residents and
will fight for facilities as hard as I can with the limited ability I have.
It's strange how I would class myself very much as a moderate, but a moderate who sees that things are broken and need to be repaired. I use this blog at times to express my own honest views and will continue to do so. In my world if something is broken you try to fix it. You don't continue to break if even further. If I have a model that is broken in half, I try to glue it back to a whole not break it into four, eight and then sixteen pieces. And that's the rant over.
Thankfully there followed an enjoyable element to the day. I called in at Tesco Express to speak to Sarah Lawrence who is a brilliant ambassador for the village and works tirelessly on behalf of so many groups and individuals. Sarah also works at Tescos and fosters the links between the supermarket and the local community.
Sarah had a bag with 99 blue counters and one gold counter. Customers were asked to dip their hand into the bag and extract a counter. Whoever pulled out the golden snitch (sorry coin - I got carried away there in a kind of Harry Potter kind of way) won a gift voucher for themselves but was also allowed to choose one of three community groups/organisations to be given a £10,000 Tesco community grant.
The choice was between the new Hethersett Community Garden, Ghost Hill School which I believe is at Taverham and Age UK. I was asked to be adjudicator to ensure fairplay. It took about 40 minutes for the gold coin to be pulled out. I reckon a good 50 blue ones had already come out.
The winner was a young lady by the name of Briony who seemed delighted to have won and she chose Age UK for the grant. There were a couple of tickertape canons which made a loud bang and chucked bits of coloured paper high into the air.
And that was my morning in the village. I then returned home and spent the afternoon writing all that up for various publications. I have included photos of Kevin Salmon and the gold winner with this blog.