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Written Records

December 2000

Rain, Rain, rain and even more rain. Feltwell is waterlogged or at least the fields between us and Southery are. Water is standing in puddles which are inches deep and many yards long. Lifting crops is proving problematic for the farmers. The ditches, dykes, rivers and cut-off channels are full to overflowing. There have even been times when I expected the old village stream to start flowing again! However, we must not grumble as we haven't had the flooding that they have had in other parts of the country, the drainage system has done the job for which it was designed. Which is more than I can say for my garage roof!

It has been a fairly quiet month in the village. We had the best attended Quiz Night for many months on the 11th and the Cricket Club made over £130 for its funds. The school hall was packed which makes the effort and time that my wife and I put in preparing the questions worthwhile, even if she did desert me on the evening itself. She was taking our daughter to a singing competition in Ipswich so I guess the excuse is valid!

The new Tennis Court finally got completed, almost six weeks behind schedule. It is up to full national standard, cost the Parish Council a fair bit of money and we just hope that it will be used properly. It is already proving popular and, who knows, maybe the next Tim Henman will be a Feltwellian - we can but hope. Whilst on the subject of the Council I must mention that Tim Fox has resigned as a Councillor from the end of the month. As Chairman I will be very sorry to see him go. He has served the Parish for many years; a lot of them as Chairman and his knowledge of Parish matters is exceptional. I suppose that he will always be remembered as the Chairman who introduced the one-way system, a very controversial project indeed and one that can still raise strong opinions.

The latest news on the Pharmacy saga is, I believe, that Dr Nisbet has won the argument and a Pharmacy is to be built on the existing surgery site. This is excellent for the village as it means that we should see no change to our current level of service. You may sometimes have to wait a long time to be seen but seen you are and you get to walk away with your medication, no having to take it to a separate Pharmacy only to be told that the medicine is due in tomorrow so please come back then. Of course none of this would have been needed if the rules and regs hadn't been designed for cities and towns with no thought given to the village. Here's hoping that the Government's recent White Paper on the countryside will really make a difference. How is medical provision in the US or Aus or NZ etc?  Please write and let me know, perhaps you'll send me enough info for a magazine article. Which triggers a thought. December's issue is the biggest this year (68 pages) and it contains an article by Feltwellian Simon Enderby who works for a diving tours company in Indonesia called Scubazoo (www.scubazooimages.com). If you go and visit the site you should find a photo of Simon swimming with and filming a Giant Turtle!

I am acutely aware that you have all been very patient with me over the non-appearance of site three. There are two main reasons for the delay, firstly, my photographer has not delivered the goods so I think I'll have to take the pictures myself and, secondly, my webmaster colleague Paul Whiteside (he who owns Feltwell.co.uk) has not delivered on his promise of free webspace. (If you are reading this Paul please respond by sending me the necessary addresses/urls etc). If I hear nothing by the end of the year then I'll just have to find another free host as I have promised to launch the site at the H&A Annual meeting in January, so it must be live by then. The site exists, it's built with development in mind but I just have no way of publishing it! Paul can be contacted from www.feltwell.co.uk. As a consequence of developing site 3 and being very busy at work I have done no upgrading on either of sites 1 or 2 this month. Further development of Site 1 is unlikely as my 15Mb of webspace at Freeserve is full. I hope to put a couple of school photos up this weekend, particularly as Glynn has requested a better quality picture than the one published in the magazine last month!  Am also glad to hear that the Search Engine has been appreciated.

Time to go to sleep now so I'll finish by wishing you all, wherever you are in our global village, a Very Merry Christmas.