If we need new anthem, can it be Jerusalem? (From Gazette & Herald)

If we need new anthem, can it be Jerusalem?

8:00am Wednesday 15th August 2012 in Columnists By Des Reed

Malton , August 7. Some good news for those householders who had a preference for the blue box rather than the ‘clunky’ bag recently issued.

I’ve had an advice from Mr AL Denney who raised the subject with John Brown of Ryedale District Council, which responds by saying that “if you prefer you can continue to use the blue box for paper and cardboard instead of the new bag”.

I’m sure there’ll be lots of folks who will prefer this, and my thanks to Mr Denney for bringing us the news.

•  I read today that one of the journalists in a national newspaper thinks the current national anthem should be replaced, because, he says, it’s a dirge.

Well, it is rather slow, and not all that stimulating, and as he says, the Queen can’t very well join in singing her own anthem with the rest of the folk. Fair enough. He therefore suggests ‘I vow to thee my country’.

All a matter of taste really, but I don’t find that a very ‘stirring’ tune to let yourself rip by singing. My own choice would be ‘Jerusalem’, whose beautiful words really get to me, and a tune ‘out of this world’.

Right, but the word ‘Jerusalem’ could be the stumbling block.

However, this song is an anthem and not perhaps to be taken too literally, and that’s the one I really enjoy hearing.

Just listen to an audience singing it, compared to the existing anthem – you can tell the difference in enthusiasm. Last night of the Proms wouldn’t be the same without it.

•  It’s been all hands to the garden just lately, getting bushes cut back, and weeds lifted, grass cut, hedges trimmed.

Much more than I can cope with really, and each day when I look at my thermometer-card from British Gas, I read the words ‘Help the Aged –We will’.

How aged has one to be to qualify for their promise hasn’t yet come to fruition.

Cut the back ‘lawn’ (should I say ‘grass’) today, a bit of a struggle, but with a sit down and a ‘breather’ every few minutes it can be done, and the satisfaction of another job done is a great reward.

•  I was never very happy with Eric Pickles’s quick assessment of our planning problem at Malton, over the car park sale.

I always thought it seemed the response was going to be negative, before he even issued his opinion.

I was never happy about it because he obviously couldn’t have given enough consideration of all the aspects of the proposals, bearing in mind that having at least four supermarkets already, Malton doesn’t need yet another one.

Roddy Bushell certainly isn’t accepting an ‘off the top of the head’ decision and is originating an appeal under planning laws, and those with more common sense than avarice will be wishing him well.

I have before me a list of the councillors who voted for the sale, there were 17 of them and only three of them could be labelled as ‘local,’ the rest were from the numerous villages around such as Normanby, Nawton, Foxholes, Middleton, Beadlam, Wharram, Kirkbymoorside , etc, (just to name a few) and I ask, what have they got to do with the desires of Malton folk?

Their wards will be prospective recipients of moneys from our sale, or so it will be expected.

Time for Malton to have its own say about what happens to our town. Yes – ‘Our town’.

•  Parking on the nicely restored verges in Greengate has started again, and already there are large bare patches where the grass has been killed off.

Could the local councillors who have a liability for such things, of whatever council, perhaps have a bollard or two put up to restore Greengate to respectability again and deter this practice, which, as winter approaches leads to a roadside quagmire if allowed to continue?

•  There seems to be uprising of dictatorship again in different places which continue to flourish.

Three girl singers, held in jail for their singing in church. Held for far too long, and should have been treated for what it was, just a public feeling which needed expressing.

Putin lays the law down in the way dictators do. And Syria, I really can’t understand how a leader can kill his own folk, and wreck his own country.

Yet no-one dare start any international opposition for fear of what might escalate. Meanwhile it’s the poor folk of his country who are losing out, as they always do. Time for the world to settle down. Will it ever?

• One never knows who owns what these days, and one I see, which all housewives will know, Premier foods, which owns Hovis and Mr Kipling, has sold its Sarsons and Haywards brands to Japan’s Mizkan conglomerate.

Perhaps the average householder will never know the difference and the vinegar and pickles will just stay the way they are, with the finance going elsewhere.

•  And a closure with the words of Yvonne who manages the Salvation Army’s Health Food shop here: “You’re blessed when you can show people how to co-operate instead of compete, or fight.”