Following the leader is not on the right track

For a week, now, I have been bottling up a feeling of frustration. I am miffed, outraged, hopping mad and many other things whose true expression would be unprintable in so stately a newspaper as this.

In last week’s column, I made brief mention of the Ashford Youth Theatre who had received notice from the council to quit the old coachworks in Dover Place.

The building is to be pulled down in order to extend the grandiose ‘business park’ scheme.

The reason for my discontent is our council’s dismissal of anything which counts as real art in favour of high-priced, pretentious nonsense. Nothing which the council has installed and called ‘art’ can stand alone without an unconvincing explanation of its raison d’etre.

That the council has access to immense sums of money is regularly made evident by the disclosure of this or that multimillion-pound scheme.

At present there are what leader Gerry Clarkson calls his ’big eight’.

Sadly, the Ashford Youth Theatre – a genuine, long-running artistic enterprise and a jewel in Ashford’s otherwise tarnished tiara – apparently matters nothing to those who have nothing other than pound signs in their eyes.

Equally sadly, it would seem that we have been lumbered with a group of councillors who blindly play a game of ‘follow my leader’.

We hear that a secret sum of our money has been allotted to shore up the Elwick Road joy-park scheme.

The site there is large. Many people have cried out for years for a theatre. We have a highly regarded and successful theatre company about to be dispossessed of their home.

Would it be beyond the scope of our councillors’ thinking to put the two elements together and provide the town with something that would prove to be actually worthwhile?

‘Would it be beyond the scope of our councillors’ thinking to put the two elements together?’

I had been having a major struggle getting rid of weeds and a huge amount of ivy from the paved area and wall in the front of Barton Towers. On Sunday, Mrs. B and I looked out of our front door to find, to our great surprise our wonderful neighbours – mum, dad and three young girls – going hammer and tongs at doing the job which, I confess, had been weighing heavily on my mind.

“Well, they are old,” said one of the young girls to her mum.