A mild start to a month that ended cold miserable and wet during which Heronshaw and the family got the biggest share of my time. On the former, an achievement to produce piling and building control plans for the new Harnser without the assistance of the architect and then to complete the piling and excavation.
For the latter, we enjoyed two hotel stays at The Swan Hotel, Horning, and The Grand Hotel in Brighton, during which time we successfully celebrated both Daniel's 20th birthday and Mother's Day! Further work on the boat was progressed fitting a new canopy and helmsman seats to The Paxton Princess and personally being reunited with the Ancient Order of Foresters Friendly Society in the footsteps of my father and grandfather before him.
We were very pleased to hear from Della's P.E. teacher how her physical recovery after her serious accident had been "miraculous" and that "she was running and jumping with the rest of them with a very positive attitude". My political friends would have liked me to have spent some time campaigning for the newly-called general election but the pollster who had been enquiring into our local constituency has given very little chance of success.
Instead, I had been diligently attended my council and local meetings, winning funds for Little Paxton Village Hall and a £50K St Neots Museum grant and laying out versions of the FOCUS newsletter with its self-financing adverts. I was more having trouble finding a local candidate to stand for the District Council as my successor, now that I was retiring, but prospects for opposition to John Major’s Tory leadership looked promising with an election in process.
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The month started quite mild, and we thought that spring was coming early being sunny and still with the warmest of this year so far but then became cold, miserable and wet with an unsettling north-easterly wind. There was the odd welcome milder day after the previous harsh chill which soon gave way to wind and rain again. Heronshaw and the family got the biggest share of my time this month. It was quite an achievement to produce piling and building control plans without the assistance of the architect and then to complete the piling and excavation within the month. Then we managed to expose the old Heronshaw to an initial survey and evaluate ways of rebuilding it during my couple of working visits to Horning during the month.
With Steven Bloom visiting and reviewing the project we made an urgent visit to Horning to mark out the space for boatshed and dyke. We laid out the positions of both the extended boat dock and new boatshed and also gauged the heights of various parts of the plot above water. I had a visit by a roof truss maker and a viewing of Mr Howlett’s nearby boathouse (which we see as a model to scale up and follow) before meeting up with Mr Amis about the necessary piling. Then a meeting with the structural surveyors David Townsend, between times trying to visit planners at NNDC office in Cromer and North Walsham without much success I eventually spent an entire day working on my new boathouse plans, designing the roof trusses and the piling plans, printing out copies for NNDC and the structural engineer and an evening writing up my notes and letters for Amis and the NNDC.
There followed a busy day organising the piling and building regulations application for my new Harnser boathouse which ended with the Amis piling crew and equipment arriving on a barge and in two vans. We filled a small skip with rubbish during a day clearing up and amending the piling plan to incorporate the Amis recommendations. We found some interesting coins in the Heronshaw loft. Before long, the Amis crew were busy sinking the new piles for Harnser (as I had decided to call the new boatshed). As I was making a start on my boat-house drawings later. After finalising my detailed design plan, I dropped off copies with the structural surveyor and District Council offices in Cromer.
I had borrowed Jack’s chain saw and was trimming the boundary branches as Amis finished off the first batch of piles and he then pulled the piling rig out of the way so that they could start the digging out for the extended boat dyke to go under the boat shed. Before long, Amis had excavated most of the dyke extension and soon finished it. I was soon making a bonfire out of the old timber and undergrowth that we had been clearing from the plot and Steve and I were then moving more earth around to level the site.
I surveyed Heronshaw to try and work out a scheme to jack it up chatting with Jack Edwards and Mr Howlett so as to have a look at the latter’s boat shed, which formed a smaller model for my new one but there was bad news about the thatching costs for the old Heronshaw, I discussed the Heronshaw planning agreement with solicitor John Koch of Taylor-Vinters who will now be negotiating the terms with the Broads Authority as I started working out the complete list of timber for the new Harnser boat-house, sending out quotation requests for the timber to a number of Norfolk sawmills and timber merchants
Stephen and I were also finding time for the Paxton Princess, fitting the new canopy to the boat and buying it a new helmsman seat from Jeckells. I had made an early start with Steven Bloom for the drive to Potter Heigham for the boat auction, picking up a CQR anchor ordered the refrigeration equipment that will upgrade the boat fridge and also authorised the new navigational interface to be installed. We then started loading up the Paxton Princess with tools and parts and reviewing the fitting of the new helmsman’s seats and fridge, also re-installing the gas cooker. I had also been executing my plans for the end of the tax year, with PEPs and TESSAs to "top-up" and Friendly Society tax exempt schemes to investigate and had another BES investment to make., A full day of tax planning and updating of my accounts saw me being reunited with the Ancient Order of Foresters Friendly Society in the footsteps of my father and grandfather before him.
I also took time with the family and actually had two hotel stays at The Swan Hotel, Horning, and The Grand Hotel in Brighton. We had successfully celebrated both Daniel's 20th birthday and Mother's Day and I also joined the family for day shopping and leisure trips. We were pleased to get good school reports for Debbie and Della but were most pleased to hear from Della's P.E. teacher how her physical recovery had been "miraculous" and that "she was running and jumping with the rest of them with a very positive attitude". She still limped slightly, and her knee hurt, through uneven exertion, so I looked forward to her recovery.
Less good news of Mum who fell ill after seeing Diana and the girls and had a cold compounded by Diarrhoea. She seems to be getting more forgetful and had become ready to move in with Freda "for a convalescence" as she sees it. Fortunately, the new room was nearly ready at Redgrave with only the plumbing and carpeting to come. I also made time for my family, shopping in St Neots for a few chores and coffee in Brackenbury’s, to Brampton Garden Centre for a soup and salad lunch and to Cambridge with Diana this morning for coffee with her much-improved parents, walking over to the Grafton Centre for some shopping and then lunch of soup and salad in the Arts Theatre Restaurant.
I was happy to have some family relaxation after Di decided to come to Horning for the weekend and had booked rooms for us and the girls in The Swan Hotel at a cost of £65 per night for the four of us including breakfast. I checked in to the Harnser Suite of The Swan Inn as Diana arrived later time with the girls. There followed a relaxing family day in Horning enjoying swimming at the Horning Leisure Centre, until joined by Daniel and Angela to go It seems that I have upset Debbie grievously by commenting on her fringe being curly and she cried constantly! We then booked a three-day holiday at The Grand Hotel in Brighton for the family including Daniel and Angela the following week at a cost of £800. I managed the trip after first briefing the gardener and builder about work to do around the swimming pool in our absence now the pool-room shower and urinal were both working well.
We stayed in The Grand Hotel in Brighton with our girls and Daniel & Angela and I took Diana for a look at the shops and memory lane and then to the cinema as the girls watched the room TV and swam in the hotel pool. We had the following day in Brighton shopping, visiting Palace Pier and The Aquarium from which the two dolphins Silver and Missy had been released a year ago with no confirmed sightings thereafter and we went an watched a long soppy love film for Diana’s benefit A full day of activities in Brighton followed on Daniel's 20th Birthday, touring the Royal Pavilion, visiting the Brighton Marina village and then playing at the St Alfred Bowl in Hove. Diana and I had nice cocktails in the hotel lounge before eating early and watching the film JFK.
After successfully resolving a hotel billing dispute in my favour, we set off home from Brighton, dropping Angela off in Peterborough in time for her train to Stockport. On one occasion, Di brought Daniel and Angela at Heronshaw after his car had broken down in Wymondham. After warming them up with a cup of tea whilst I finished off, working, Di took Angela home and I took Daniel to collect his car and towed it back to Paxton. I was spending a little time with my girls at bed-time, pretending that Debbie's cuddly. "Lulie" was alive and working her like a puppet which they both appreciated. To a Family Service and feeling that the Rolls Royce ought to be disposed of and then to Peterborough to order traditional black and white number plates for my historic Reliant now that I had recovered the number CJW 986.
This was all during a month that my political friends would have liked me to have spent campaigning for the general election, In other things, I have diligently attended my council meetings and done something to help a successor take over in May but have done little in the General Election campaign apart from encourage deliverers and poster displays as, although I think that our party will do well nationally, I am no great champion of lost causes in this constituency and do not want to exhaust the organisation for the local campaign to follow. I has arrived quite late on to the adoption meeting for Sue Sutton at the Priory Centre. Back home Percy told me that he, too, has fallen out with the S.W.Cambs Campaign Team after the pollster who had been enquiring into our local constituency has given very little chance of success here as I anticipated. Nationally, the Tories, in a full month of campaigning, have almost certainly sealed their fate by undertaking a very negative approach. They were behind in the polls again and the IRA were widening their mainland bombing campaign to include civilian targets
Locally, I was not totally inactive, laying out the final versions of the FOCUS adverts; that left us with more advertising revenue than ever before. I was aways spending evenings on Council business. Such as Southoe Parish Council and a Village Hall Meeting which went quite well, although I found myself having to do far too much of the talking such as a Little Paxton Planning Committee meeting before another of the Parish Council which achieved a formula for liaising with the Village Hall Committee.. I had joined the panel for an HDC Parish consultative meeting, then another Local Government meeting, this time at The Alwyn School, Ramsey, for the third in a sequence, again tussling successfully with Derek Holly, before my last Local Government Consultation meeting, this time in Huntingdon. I came back home from Norfolk for a HDC Southern Area meeting and then off to the pub for a drink with Sally and Derek to give them some advice and make some amends for my recent absence in Norfolk.
Then another evening to the HDC Finance Meeting which approved my £50K St Neots Museum grant after which I was invited for a drink by Terry Hayward in a Buckden pub who wanted my advice and was also trying to pump me for information. I was free with the former and tight with the latter. All this time, I tried to get Parish Chairman, John Knight, to try to get him to stand for the District Council as my successor without success, then John Grosvenor later and getting him to consider standing but, him declining, and after discussions with Sally and Percy I had to put up with adopting John Brown from Perry. I was still dropping off more leaflets for delivery in Hail Weston and Diddington, then writing to my Focus deliverers to retrieve the situation in Little Paxton.,
Elsewhere, the reaction to the budget did not look favourable, with the city worried about the level of the government borrowing requirement and no reduction in the standard rate of income tax. John Major then called a General Election, which I thought the worst mistake of his (short) career. The stock exchange was falling sharply and now no longer any chance of an interest rate cut. I ignored a clamour from my political colleagues to organise our general election campaigning locally. I do not believe that it would be decisive and did not want to get distracted from my personal projects now that I was getting them on the road. John Major, rattled by Kinnock's progress in this first week of the campaign, changed his stance to that of a strident partisan politician rather than that of the nice prime minister and I think that is a mistake for the Tory strategists to make.
As the month progressed, the latest opinion polls had Labour several points ahead which was bad news for the Tories. There was a political election row after the Labour Party highlighted the plight of a young girl having to wait for an ear operation The Tories seem to have come off worse over the N.H.S. row and their campaign was looking increasingly in trouble with some party members being openly critical and the Stock Exchange ended the week sharply down again. \As the month closed, the weekend opinion polls had Labour still two points ahead of the Tories who seemed bound to lose the forthcoming election. Nigel Mansell won in Mexico, his second world championship race in succession