Your letters
To the EditorIain Scotter’s letter in the November Newsletter highlights the growing concern about the unwelcome and ever-increasing signage that now disfigures our parish.
According to Clerk’s Corner, the Parish Council were not even aware that road signs were to be erected on Red Lion Hill. And the Parish Council is now aiding and abetting the process by putting up two more signs on the newly discovered Lee Clump Road. Why? – and what next?
What with road names, white lines, roundels, speed posts, cycle routes etc., our village is now greatly over-signed. Just stand at the top of Oxford Street and look around – not so much rural beauty as inner-city scrap yard. I admire a great deal of the work done by the Parish Council (e.g. the children’s playground), but surely they have a much more pro-active and vigorous part to play in safeguarding our local surroundings. Perhaps next month’s Clerk’s Corner could let us know the policy of the Parish Council on this important issue.
Mike Senior
The Lee
To the Editor
I read the letter in the November Newsletter regarding the figurehead at Pipers with amusement then incredulity.
As far as I remember, the writer of the letter re. the Admiral said it looked more imposing before the renovation and I agree with him.
Unfortunately, Admiral Howe was in a state of disrepair, particularly internally! He has been beautifully restored to his former glory but needs protection from the elements.
“Rift in the community... insult to residents...” what nonsense! Of course you wrote your letter with ‘tongue in cheek’ Mr. Metcalfe?
Sheila Illing
Swan Bottom
To the Editor
Just a note to express how much I appreciated your community’s public footpaths while I was here visiting my sister and brother-in-law in The Lee.
I particularly liked the stroll I took with my sister along the Ridgeway national trail. What a smooth, well-maintained surface. And what vistas of rolling fields and deep woods from such other trails as the Chiltern Link.
I also enjoyed being able to stop in at a public house along the way and enjoy a bite of lunch and to jog out the door and into the woods for my morning exercise.
As a hiker who’s climbed all of the Hundred Highest Mountains of New England and co-written hiking guides with my husband to Acadia National Park in Maine, I would rank the trails and the views here up there with the best of them. (Perhaps I’ll put a photo of a view from one of your trails up on our hiking website, www.geocities.com/fourthousandfooter.).
Residents of this community are fortunate to have such a wonderful natural resource right in their backyard. Thank you for sharing it.
Dolores Kong
Milton, Mass., USA
To the Editor
In defence of ‘Christmas’ lights
I have always felt that the lights adorning the outside and inside of homes is one of the biggest joys of the end of year holidays. They cheer the soul on a dark and cold evening; they are welcoming and warming.
Of course lights are just one of the many fine Pagan, Roman, Jewish, Nordic and similar traditions that make up the holiday festivities. Nearly all the aspects of celebration that are now associated with Christmas – lights, candles, trees, Yule logs, holly and ivy, gift giving, mistletoe, feasting (the list goes on) – predate the year AD273 when the Church decided to celebrate Christ’s birth on 25th December. It is likely that the early church chose this date because many primitive faiths celebrated the mid-winter solstice as the birth of the ‘new’ Sun that would provide heat and raise the crops during the following year. Lights were an important part of those festivities.
So there’s no argument – winter lights are not Christian – but surely that’s no crime. And if occasionally they are taken to excess with a little over-exuberance – which of life’s pleasures aren’t? At least the lights are taken down in January to allow us to enjoy the tranquil starry winter skies, spoilt only by the occasional high-power security light.
Phil Ogley
The Lee
To the EditorAt 11 am on the 11th day of the 11th month, more than 11 (or multiples thereof) of us gathered to remember the fallen of two World Wars and to ponder on those still dying in foreign fields (ironically, poppies today have a different deadly significance in Afghanistan).
The only sound after the Last Post was the sound of the birds and the breeze as we stood in golden November sunshine for the one minute silence... except of course, for those folk who drove up to the Green in their cars (always noisy diesels it seems). Seeing the gathered throng, they don’t have the courtesy to turn off their engines, but have to try and inch their way forward and ‘force’ their way through. Such crass behaviour is amazing, no one can be that busy or that important that they can’t wait, or can they?
Trish Swain
Swan Bottom