No razzamatazz, very little ceremony and no real celebrations, as the keys were handed over by the builders. I found it all disappointing. I went down to the field to take pictures of a ceremony and came back with none and just a few pictures of the building. Thankfully we will be putting that right with a proper hand over next week.
The build up to the completion of this magnificent new building has been monumentally disappointing and for me, on a personal level, quite upsetting. Let me tell you why.
Firstly Friday was the culmination of over a decade of work by so many people.
It was over 10 years ago when three members of the Hethersett Memorial Playing Field trustees got together at my house to put together a planning application for a new pavilion on the playing field. The existing one wasn't fit for purpose and had been one of the reasons for the cricket club moving away from the village
I was one of those three. We put together a comprehensive planning application about the benefits of having a new building that we could be proud of. This included full plans of the proposed building which had been drawn up by an architect. It was an exciting opportunity for us to have a new building. We had visited the facilities available in other villages much smaller than ours. Places like Freethorpe and East Harling.
A few months later myself and Ian Fieldhouse drove to a meeting of South Norfolk Council's planning committee and we spoke in favour of our application. We answered a few questions and the subsequent vote was unanimous in giving us planning permission.
Previous plans had been put forward for a new building but had come to nothing but this time we had something concrete to work with if you will pardon the pun.
For a number of reasons, many of which I have long forgotten, the building was not started. For various reasons I left the playing field trustees (reasons included threats to me and my family as I mentioned yesterday).
Then the project was taken over by the parish council. Plans were modified and passed again, grants were achieved including a six figure one from the Football Foundation and a loan was taken out.
And the day came when work started to demolish the old building. It only took days to bulldoze it. And like a Phoenix from the Ashes a new building began to rise.
Over nine months of work followed and we today have a building we can be immensely proud of. If you want to see how the development progressed just have a look at Hethersett Herald which featured photographs every month as the work progressed. You can see back copies at www.hethersettherald.weebly.com
Just two days before the handover of the keys I felt rather depressed by the whole thing and I will tell you why.
On Wednesday evening the parish council called an extraordinary meeting to discuss some final aspects of the building and its surrounds. This meeting almost disintegrated following a farcical exchange which ended with the parish clerk calling for the police to be called in.
I won't go into exactly what happened but it was pretty unsavoury and when it came to public comments towards the end of the meeting I felt I had to say something.
I pointed out that we seemed to have lost any pride we should have in a sparkling new building that we should be proud of and not one where we are squabbling over minutiae. This should be a time for celebration and everyone working together and not a time for acrimony and spats between the parish council and the playing field trustees (some of whom are the same people).
I felt rather angry that some people seemed to have lost sight of what we were achieving and I felt this needed to be said. At the end of the meeting it was announced that parish clerk Annette Palmer had resigned earlier in the day.
This whole episode has become somewhat unsavoury. I apologise for the seriousness of this blog but sometimes when I feel strongly about something I have to get into serious mode or mood. Let's hope that the obvious rifts can be healed so that the village can be proud of what it has achieved. Achievements can only be obtained by people working together and not by people working in opposition. That has always been my mantra and it always will be.
I do hope this blog doesn't upset anyone as that was never the intention and I thought long and hard about writing it, but it is a subject I feel very strongly about.
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How nice that two of our MPs have resigned in a poetic way.
Yes we have lost Boris and Norrie's. Well they pretty much rhyme. I'm just wondering what Boris Johnson is trying to hide and whether he's got something up his sleeve other than his arm. He's not the kind of character to go quietly.
I am rather pleased that a couple of days ago I predicted his downfall when talking about his availability to join the presentation team on This Morning.
I have forseen a couple of things in the past few weeks. A couple of weeks ago I went to watch Hethersett play cricket and made a prediction that one of the opposition's opening batsman would be out caught behind the wicket off the third ball of the second over. Guess what. He was caught in the slips. It was a pure guess, a pure stab in the dark for me. I haven't as yet used the same method to predict the lottery numbers.
Whilst I was writing this piffly part of today's blog the Scottish phrase "A wee dock and Doris" kept coming into my mind. There was a song with these words so I had to look it up to confirm that fact.
"A wee dock and Doris" of course referred to alcohol. It literally means a drink at the door and refers to a parting drink given to a guest, a kind of one for the road and the song by the same name was recorded by music hall artist Harry Lauder.
I do love silly rhyming things. You could keep going with Boris, Dorries and a wee dock and Doris by adding in Chuck Norris and Nottingham Forest and even a chap called Maurice and an animal called a Loris. Enough of this, no more they cried.
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We are living in a world of misleading headlines to garner effect.
Things like. "Richard Keys responds to West Ham Sack Decision on David Moyes" which is one I spotted yesterday.
This is a totally and deliberately misleading headline which immediately makes you think that West Ham have sacked their manager despite just winning a European trophy. So you open the story up to read more and find the decision refers to the fact that Moyes hasn't been sacked and not to sack him was the decision referred to.
To me this is shoddy twisted and deliberately misleading journalism. But that's the kind of world we live in where Donald Trump claims that he's innocent and there's a conspiracy against him. I wonder what it's like to have the mindset of Trump where everything is viewed through his own eyes and everyone else is wrong whilst he is always right.