I’m sat in the garden as I write this, it’s Sunday afternoon, the sun is actually shining and one of the dogs is sat at my feet. The other is indoors, asleep in his little bed, content with his safe and warm little world.

Well….

When I say garden, I mean a space of half an acre or so in front of me with a view that is unbroken until the Shropshire hills get in the way.

It’s beautiful, it’s peaceful and it’s mine because I worked for my whole life, paid my mortgages and my dues and tried to live a life more or less within society’s rules.

I’ve never taken a penny from the state and have paid a LOT of tax for an ordinary boy from a council estate in Hackney.

I’ve not posted much recently. The twin horrors of Irina Zarutska and Charlie Kirk showed a face of humanity that is more than depressing, vapid evil, gleeful celebration and chilling indifference to the public murders of innocents.

The Unite The Kingdom protest was reported exactly as could be predicted, everyone is either far right or too stupid to know that they’re being turned into Nazis – or whatever.

The Southport inquiry is shaping up to be incredibly grim.

And our retarded government just rewarded Hamas for a mass murder event by unilateral recognition of Palestine.

If we’re not careful, we can get into the mindset that all is lost.

And it isn’t.

The vast majority of people are still good, honest and friendly, particularly out here in the Shire, I’d be shocked these days if I met somebody out walking that didn’t say hello and stop for a chat.

Communities still exist, we look out for each other, donate surplus fruit and veg ( for free obviously) and watch each other’s houses when neighbours are away.

For something more concrete – I’ll give you this.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a councillor and I see that as a privilege rather than a perk, if you’re not helping, don’t bother.

A car stopped on the road last week and a lady leaned out for a chat to say thanks for helping with some speed issues through her hamlet.

But that’s not what I’m going to write about.

We see the planning applications as soon as they come in and I’m proud that we’ve never played the NIMBY game, each application is looked at on its own merits.

And so one came in from a company wanting to change a residential address to a shared children’s home.

Me being me, I looked the company up and the alarm bells started ringing.

It’s a company owned by a Zimbabwean who has a string of failed companies and some complicated relationships with interrelated companies and some very dodgy looking accounts.

The application was absolutely full of holes too.

So I flagged this up and found that the house is one of only three that were built in 2017 on a rural road – and that a previous councillor lives next door and is trying to sell up.

They were unaware of the application as the Zims hadn’t posted it in public, but the Zims are awful neighbours and there have been a number of rat infestations along with a number of ‘incidents’.

I wrote to the chair of the council asking for details of all and any contracts held by these people and enclosing details and photos of a previous place that they’d flipped like this in Dudley – this is the house as of a few weeks ago and that’s a year after planning was granted.

I worked quite closely with the neighbour on the other side of the current house that they wanted planning for and we found a huge number of issues with the company, the person owning it and some potential fraud on a large scale – all passed to the relevant authorities for further investigation.

My theory for what it’s worth is this.

The Zims didn’t and don’t have a contract, but the change of property designation makes the house fit for HMO use, so they’d flip it, fuck off and leave the neighbours to deal with whatever horrors came next.

I also think that they assumed that a load of rural fuckwits wouldn’t know what was going on and they’d get this waved through.

But.

This isn’t a big town.

The neighbours mobilised, objection after objection, the county council took a side before the outcome was officially decided.

And it’s a big fat fucking NO.

But it’s worse than that, a number of councils are now investigating, the police may be along with the QCQ and the Charities Commission.

I did that.

I could have ignored it and let it pass, if I had, I doubt anyone would have known.

If we don’t stand up for ourselves, who will?

By the way, when I saw the company name in the application, it wasn’t apparent that they were Zimbabweans.

I couldn’t give a fuck about that, you’re either ‘us’ or you’re not. Anybody scamming people aren’t ‘us’.

The end of this week brought forward some good news.

One of my feral ponies is a dad again, he’s currently being fucked over by the company for something that they’ve got completely wrong – at some point they’re going to have to pay him a lot of money and I’ve made sure that he’s fully supported by experts still in the company and by solicitors.

He’s a fantastic man to know, hard working, intelligent, funny and very, very personable.

And he’s invited me to his house on Friday to take part in a Naming Ceremony- he’s of Nigerian descent and I’m incredibly honoured to be invited.

So, with all the awful news, the certainty that our government would rather rape us financially than actually fix anything, we have to take each small victory as it comes.

I’ll leave the ending of this to Churchill

‘This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.’