PM’s actions are not in the best interests of the people

✒ THE latest from Rishi Sunak is he will bring in new powers to block solar farms.

His claim that it is to protect food security is simply wrong. The amount of land required for solar panels is tiny, no more than is used today by golf courses or horse paddocks. On the other hand, a failure to reach net zero will have a massive impact on the viability and productivity of farmland, in the UK and abroad.

For us ‘hard-pressed families,’ food security means food affordability – from the money left after paying our energy bills. The impact of climate change on food production is bad enough in the UK, but even worse in many countries that we rely on for imports.

Food security, energy security, climate change and affordability are all linked. Equally, the Government’s actions are also linked; keep us dependent on expensive and dirty fossil fuels as long as possible by failing to improve insulation and stop us having access to cheap and clean renewable energy.

It may be ok if you are rich enough to live in the countryside away from our polluted towns and cities, and can afford to pay what you like to put food on the table.

For Mr Sunak, who doesn’t have to worry about such trivia, no doubt he would rather not look out on a solar farm or wind turbine producing clean, cheap energy for the people he is supposed to represent!

For the rest of us, already furious about the recent offshore wind auction that was bound to fail, let’s stop pretending he is protecting our interests.

Dilys Morgan

Torquay

WE want to try something different with your column, the editor said to me the other day. “Give it a title. An identity. We’re thinking of renaming it Man About Town and getting you to cover the social events and gossip in our fine bay.”

I told him I wasn’t comfortable with some of the aspects of this. For a start, there is more than one town in our fine bay and people may complain if the column was Paignton-centric. We brainstormed for a couple of minutes and came up with Person About the Bay, which sounded naff, but it was almost lunchtime and the editor had a hot tip on a horse.

“Gossip is what we want, Richard,” he said, as I turned to leave. “I know you won’t let me down.”

Here we go, then.

October 9

To the Chelston Yorkie Festival at the dry cleaner’s. Not the chocolate bar, but the dog.

Yorkie-fanciers from all across the bay were there with their yapping dogs. Marjorie Higginbotham was there, resplendent in a floral dress and wellies accompanied by her Yorkie, Trev. By all accounts it seems her car needs a new clutch, though she wonders if Trev were the cause of her car failing the emissions test on its MOT. “Bad breath”, she explained.

October 10

“I’ve never trusted anyone called Ollie,” explained Bert, at the star-studded (Michael Palin’s cousin, Jeff, was in attendance) launch of the new display of rods at Bert’s Tackle, in Brixham. “Anyone called Ollie is the sort of person who buys a crab bucket just to be ironic, and then puts it on TikTok. I bet they even wear a back to front baseball cap. And don’t get me started on selfies.”

Bert’s wife Susan confided in me that she was worried about Bert’s drinking. “Six cups of tea a day he’s currently on,” she said, while wearing a floral dress with wellies. “He’s up most of the night weeing.”

October 11

Hot tickets to the opening of Ethel Coat’s new play, My Left Trouser Leg, at the Vegan Sausage, the trendy new pop-up theatre installed in the vacant vape store in Fleet Walk. Ethel was in the audience, resplendent in a floral dress with wellies. Rumour has it that she tried to use a Jersey 50p on the bus the other day.

“I probably got it in my change at the chemist,” she explained. But didn’t she once go to Jersey, in 1998? Hmm, certainly suspicious, eh, dear reader?

October 12

Sue and Phil from Dartmouth Road, Paignton, have left for a Caribbean cruise leaving their new dining room extension without skirting boards, or at least, that’s the rumour I heard from the couple next to me, as I was having coffee at a cafe in Torquay.

October 13

Strolling up Torquay’s Union Street, to return a sweater to the chazza, who was this I saw sauntering towards me but none other than TV’s man of mirth Melvyn Bragg!

“Alright, Mel,” I asked him? “Any words for the readers of the Herald Express?”

“Alright, geez,” he replied. “Anywhere you know that sells crab buckets?” He then told me a very funny anecdote about Alan Bennett and a plumb, but I can’t remember it now.

“Is this the best that you can come up with, Richard,” the editor asked?

“A faulty clutch? Someone drinking too much tea? A Jersey 50p coin? Skirting boards? A meeting with Melvyn Bragg from which you got absolutely nothing?”

I told him I didn’t really get out much.

Person About the Bay has been put on the back burner.

» Robert Garnham is a Torbay comedy performance poet. www.

professorofwhimsy.com