Burley Cross Postbox Theft (17 page)

A few weeks later, in March (WG, 18/02/06), we found Mr Tunnicliffe OBE focusing his considerable mental apparatus on yet another social and cultural institution: Mother’s Day, and the ‘questionable tradition’ (his words, not mine) of ‘saying it with flowers’.

This tradition is ‘questionable’, it transpires, chiefly because of the ‘tragic, even criminal conditions’ endured by workers in the third world flower industry. To illustrate this point, Mr Tunnicliffe went on to describe (in almost excruciating detail)
the thirty or so flower farms surrounding Lake Naivasha in Kenya (suppliers of the excellent – my word, not his - £2/dozen roses offer at ASDA), where not only were workers earning, on average, a ‘pitiable’ £45 a week (‘and remember, many of these poor wretches will be women, most of them mothers’), but where a combination of ‘polluted run-off’ from pesticide use and ‘water depletion’ (from, well, watering) were lowering the levels of the lake ‘to a dangerous extent’, culminating in (brace yourselves) ‘Hippos slowly frying to death in the punishing heat, simply in order that pathetic, Western cheapskates might have the opportunity to buy their beloved mothers a bunch of cheap roses out of season.’

In April (WG, 2/04/06) Mr Tunnicliffe OBE weighed in against Easter (‘Did Jesus die on the cross and rise again to bring the world the gift of eternal life, or simply to provide greedy, clinically obese Christians and their spoilt progeny with the opportunity to gorge and binge on irresponsibly packaged chocolate eggs?’).

It transpires (according to the researches of our fastidious correspondent) that your average chocolate Easter egg consists of approximately 45 per cent packaging.

You might be forgiven for thinking that this is
good
news for the ‘gorgers and bingers’ among us, i.e. fewer calories (you can’t
eat
the packaging), but it isn’t. It’s actually bad news –
very
bad news – because (as Mr Tunnicliffe is only too keen to inform us) ‘the buffoons at Wharfedale Council’ haven’t seen fit to provide adequate numbers of foil and card recycling bins in the borough.

In November (WG, 1/11/06) we find Mr Tunnicliffe OBE working up a sweat over the negative implications of Fireworks Night. These are (as you have doubtless already guessed) manifold, and include ‘noise stress’, ‘the danger of smoke and gunpowder inhalation to asthmatics and people with chest problems’, ‘fires’, ‘serious accidents, even death’, ‘the threat of copper and other metallic compounds entering the soil, crops
and water table’, and last – but by no means least – the ‘stress imposed on birds and other animals’ (who, according to LT OBE, ‘experience Fireworks Night as the start of a terrible – and potentially infinite – war’). I could easily go on, but I’ll spare you.

And now, finally (WG, 19/12/06), it’s Christmas, and –
surprise, surprise! –
Mr Lance Tunnicliffe OBE has decided that this is an opportune moment in which to deliver the taxpayers of Wharfedale (already a rather joyless and brow-beaten bunch after the constant hectoring they’ve received at LT OBE’s behest all year) a withering lecture about the ‘wastefulness of the Festive Season’, focusing principally on Christmas lighting displays (in our homes, our villages and our town centres) which he calls (variously) ‘a glittering tribute to the hollow excesses of Mammon’, a ‘crass obscenity’ and (my personal favourite) ‘the perpetually exploding flashbulbs of a consumer culture turned tabloid’. (?!)

Mr Tunnicliffe reserves his special ire for Wharfedale Council (why change the habits of a lifetime, eh?) which he accuses of being ‘criminally irresponsible for leaving the festive lights on twenty-four hours a day’ and ‘failing to transfer to LED Low Impact bulbs’.

Of course nobody could dispute the fact that Mr Lance Tunnicliffe OBE has a valid and interesting contribution to make on public and private ethical debates alike (indeed, many of his more salient points I have raised in council on countless occasions myself).

He speaks an awful lot of common sense. And yet… well, am I
entirely
alone in wondering whether the only reason he seems so determined to put a damper on all our High Days and Holidays is because (perish the thought!) the poor soul has so little to actively celebrate in his own life?

Has Mr Lance Tunnicliffe OBE officially become 2006’s greatest party-pooper because he has no party left of his own to poop?

This thought makes me sad –
very
sad. In fact it makes me so sad that I’ve resolved to take a little bit of time out of my frantic Christmas schedule to raise a small – but deeply environmental – toast to the dear old sourpuss (hopefully
before
he launches his inevitable assault on ‘The Horrors of Hogmanay’ next week).

I hereby extend a cordial invitation to you – the long-suffering readers of the
Wharfedale Gazette –
to join me… In fact – moderation be damned! There’s no time like the present: Merry Christmas, Lance! Cheers! I do hope it’s a good one.

Oh…

And turn the lights
on
as you leave, eh? There’s a good chap.

Yours Sincerely,
Baxter Thorndyke

1 Fa’weather Cottages
‘Paradise’
Burley Cross

19th Dec

Dear Mr Braithwaite,

I’ve changed my mind again. I do think I would prefer it with the plain terracotta trim (as you originally suggested), with the main body of the piece in a subtle off-white or soft cream (it was extremely kind of your wife to agree to engrave it for me at
no added cost
. She’s such a talented calligrapher. Her ‘Paradise’ has received nothing but compliments!).

Around the outside edge I want:

IN MEMORY OF BRADLEY
2004–2006
A MOST LOYAL, WISE AND
BELOVED COMPANION
.

If there’s any extra room, then just a small, rough sketch of some marigolds (English NOT French, please!).

It’s taken me a while to come up with the actual poem. I’ve been through about three boxes of Kleenex in the process (man-size)!

Bearing in mind what you said (and how busy your dear wife is with her new sign-writing business), I have tried to keep the number of words down to a minimum. Here is what I’ve finally settled on:

What do you think? If it’s a fraction long then remove the two lines that start ‘No more…’ (although I’d hate to see them go, quite frankly; I feel the sombre mood of the piece would be greatly undermined by their absence).

I was thinking the size of a large dessert plate (or one size down, is it? Same as all the others, in any event).

Thank you, in advance, for your patience and your craftsmanship.

You have made a poor, heartbroken widow very, very happy.

Merry Christmas,

Bea ‘Bunny’ Seymour

PS Cheque enclosed. I have post-dated it to February 19th. I do hope that’s all right.

PPS I just noticed my price-list is dated from 1998! It’s almost antique! I do hope I’m not diddling myself!

PPPS P&P is included, I presume?

Bless You.

X

A dispatch from the desk of:

Baxter Thorndyke, Cllr
The Old Hall
Burley Cross

20/12/2006

Dear Mr Liam Holroyd MP,

I have yet to receive any reply from you re my – marked URGENT – email on the Chinese manhole covers issue (10/12/06). Following a brief – but extremely edifying – conversation with one of the people at your Constituency Office (a volunteer. I think his name was Derek – or possibly Don – Hoon… a Scot, rough, slightly over-familiar, nervy, bit of a stammer) I have subsequently decided that the situation is sufficiently grave for me to ‘break the trail’ myself (so to speak) and to forge forward with several independent pieces of preventative action off my own bat.

The first has been to contact the local constabulary directly, and to forewarn them of the problem, although – in all candour – I’m not holding out much hope of a positive response on their part. PC Laurence Everill (or is he a sergeant now?) – at Skipton – as good as laughed in my face when I approached him a short while back on behalf of the BCPTW with incriminating photographic evidence + car registration details of all those individuals caught behaving ‘suspiciously’ at the public conveniences in the village during the month of August (his patent indifference to our ‘special initiative’ has left us with no option but to display all the information we gleaned on our new website to try and ‘name and shame’ those involved into desisting from their abhorrent – not to say anti-social – behaviours).

As for PC Roger Topping – at Ilkley – well… where do I
even start?! I mean of what
earthly use
is the man?! He’s just a huge, forlorn elk, a tragic bison, lumbering about the place in that improbably gigantic pair of perpetually squeaking loafers of his like some heavily tranquillized mastodon.

Those shoes
can’t
be Police Issue, surely? (I mean to hell with ‘the element of surprise’, eh? You can hear his approach from the neighbouring street! Tammy – my darling wife – says it sounds like he keeps a tribe of gerbils held captive within the insoles which he sacrifices as he walks!).

Have you ever
looked
at his feet? They’re ludicrous – absurd!

And the way he constantly sniffles and snuffles into that voluminous red hankie like some chronically hyperactive bloodhound… Unbearable!

As a point of interest, what is this curious malady he always seems to be suffering from? So far as I can tell it changes every week! Gluten intolerance? Hay fever? Something viral? The clap? Heaven only knows (or cares, more to the point)!

Whenever he pays a visit to The Old Hall, I get Tamm to stand guard over the ceramics. He collects Staffordshire figures, I believe, and always heads straight for the big display cabinet in the corner of our ‘formal’ lounge, where he drools and gibbers, inarticulately, over our prized Majolica, his massive, clumsy white hands flailing through the air like a couple of poisoned doves in the final throes of agony.

And those mournful looks! Those strange, watery grey eyes – like a pair of suffocating squid trapped inside a greasy bowl full of slowly congealing albumen. Repulsive! In truth, I’d sooner have him shot and mounted than do business with the wretch (and I think it would be
kinder
. He’s certainly beyond ‘fixing’).

At least Everill – for all his unbearable arrogance and his smugness – has a measure of vitality about him, even if he never bothers putting it to any kind of positive use (you’ve probably already heard the rumours about his
actual
behaviour during the ‘Great Conflagration’ at Tilton Mill? Apparently, according to my source – who’s utterly reliable – rather than
‘staying behind and risking his life’ to save that fabled ‘disabled woman’ during the fire, he was trapped inside the storeroom with her, very much against his will.

In fact he reportedly tried to use the back of her chair to scramble up on to the ledge of a high window and make his escape, but the buckle on his belt became entangled in her hair…

They took her to hospital afterwards, not for ‘smoke inhalation’ –
WG
, 12/08/06 – but because she needed stitches in her scalp after he ripped out a sizable chunk of it in his urgent desire to ‘do a runner’. Now I hear he’s even to be awarded some kind of public
honour
for his troubles! What a joke!).

The second piece of preventative action I’ve taken (and this was on Don – Dan – Derek’s – advice) was to compile a permanent photographic record – an ‘unofficial archive’, if you like – of all the manhole covers in Burley Cross (over ninety, in total! Ninety-three, to be exact).

I completed this task last week, and must say that the whole process has been a real ‘eye-opener’ for me. I honestly had no idea how incredibly ornate and beautiful some of these metal covers are! As I believe I said in my last email, it would be difficult to calculate how great a cultural loss the theft of these ‘individual pieces’ might be to the village. They are a vital and precious part of our increasingly fragile heritage.

To head off on a slight tangent for a moment: I was surfing the web the other night and came across an Art Website (I duplicate their capital letters with a distinct sense of irony) called ‘Ruavista’ (simply go to ‘manhole cover theft’ on Wikipedia and then follow the ‘signposts’) who have a whole collection of manhole covers on show in their ‘virtual gallery’. They call them ‘symbols of the Industrial Revolution’, and say how they ‘offer living testimony to the industrial artistry of the second half of the nineteenth century’.

Pretentious waffle, for the most part (of course), but I became so excited by the overall concept that I actually sent them an email enclosing a couple of my own photographs to
display online (I have yet to see them up there), and this, in turn, spurred me on to thinking about creating my own website – to showcase the wonderful selection of covers in BC (with a brief history of the town included etc.) – so that people from other parts of Britain, and the world, might get to share in this wonderful, hidden bounty of ours.