I seemed to spend all of Tuesday walking to and from the town centre on Council business. In the morning there was a briefing for new councillors on the role of Local Area Partnerships (LAPs). Dilligent readers may remember I spent Monday evening at a meeting of the Neighbourhood Forum, a body set up to [...]

During the Mayor’s Sunday Service, Kendal’s new Mayor asked for the Parable of the Good Samaritan to be read. This must be the most famous answer ever to the question “Who is my neighbour?” So it was with some interest that I went along to a meeting of the Kendal Neighbourhood Forum, a forum run [...]

I went along to the opening of a fascinating little exhibition at Kendal Library this morning. Kendal is an ancient wool town – the town’s motto is Pannus mihi Panis (Wool is my Bread) – and a sample book dating back to 1769 somehow survived the centuries to become one of the town’s treasures. This [...]

It’s been a hectic week, which means my good intentions of posting my first impressions of life as a Town Councillor have been a bit delayed. Monday night was meetings night! Planning Committee kicked off with a brief training session for new councillors; followed by a meeting of the Planning Committee (14 planning applications rattled [...]

Following the driest spell in Cumbria for years, you think the weather could have stayed dry for the twenty minutes it took to process from the Town Hall to the Parish Church and back again for Mayor’s Sunday. Alas not – it started raining on the way there and positively bucketed it down on the [...]

After living in Edinburgh (population 450,000) it’s a bit of a change living in Kendal (population 26,000). We went to a Fairtrade event last night, and were pleasantly surprised at how many people we knew already from other places. I spotted another town councillor plus a district councillor there – it made me wonder how [...]

Just back from our first holiday in two years, which meant I missed the first ‘real’ meeting of the new Town Council. However, I won’t have long to wait, as the next meeting is a week today. It’ll be interesting to see how things work in our ‘one party state’. Where a council has political [...]