Direct Action Plan, File Ref aab/112/x/22.7 Annex 12.3

There’s been a lot of grumbling in our little bit of Over Wyre lately, and we’re not used to grumbling, but really!  No sooner have the Yanks who wanted to inject 50bn tonnes of gas at high pressure under our houses pulled out than another lot of anxiety-inducing erberts muscle in.  I mean, you can’t relax for a minute. I haven’t dared put  my slippers on since 1965.

I don’t usually go in for conspiracy theories, despite having the largest collection of X-Files DVDs outside MI5 and the CIA, but I am beginning to get just the teeniest bit neurotic, and I am noticing the sulphurous whiff of a Cunning Plan.

My suspicions were first aroused when Wyre BC gave permission for a derelict building to be erected on what used to be a rather nice bowling green by the side of the historic Bourne Arms.  Then this morning the massive concrete plinth that had just been put up by the side of the mobile phone shop (whey-hey, we’ve got a mobile phone shop in Knotty End!) wasn’t there.  Spirited away in the middle of the night by Persons Unknown.  Derelict building still there, though.  But nice new plinth to commemorate the Battle of Britain conspicuously not there no more, our Ada.

It’s all because we’re Over the River, and not really part of civilisation as it is understood in Big Brash Blackpool or Poulton-le-Fylde-Under-P.  It is all designed to drive us out, so as to declare Knotty End a Site of No Scientific Or Any Other Interest Whatsoever, and then do what councils always do with derelict land – flog it to a manufacturer of land mines or turn it into a giant municipal pig farm or landfill site.

Well, chums, the people who live round here have been here for generations.  They all have ancestors who survived on one Morecambe Bay shrimp a year, and gave the left-overs to the people in the hut next door, and they’re as tough as old boots, and they last even longer.  And one didn’t do one’s stint in planning departments for nothing, neither did one take on Mrs T and her government without learning a thing or two about dirty dancing, so here’s slopping the slurry  -  the Action Plan, absolutely guaranteed to win funding from the NWDA, because it’s called an Action Plan.

First thing, we declare UDI and lay tons of chewing gum along Shard Bridge.  Really really sticky chewing gum. That closes the border. We then write a letter to Lancaster  City Council that starts “Dear Daddy.”  I have read up on local government law in back issues of the Gazette (not you, Sir, the legal one) and that’s considered to be the proper way to address a potential adoptive parent, just take my word for it.

We then get in touch with the people who nicked all the lead off the roof of St Oswald’s last year, and tip them off about the derelict luxury-flat Oedipus complex by the jetty, and go 50/50 on the proceeds, which we offer to Lancaster as a b    , oops, I mean as a generous gift with no strings attached.

Result? Well, absolutely nothing, probably.  But isn’t it nice to rattle your cage a bit, just for the fun of it? If it makes enough noise somebody might hear.