Forum

I have been looking at Parish Council Documents on this website. I cannot find a detailed set of accounts. There is a simplified set of accounts for 2020/21, which lists a figure for staff costs, and another figure for all other costs. There does not appear to be a breakdown of those other costs. There is no information for 2021/22. Could this information please be added to the website? Many thanks David Lewis

Our village pub is closed, again, and there seems to be little prospect of it re-opening any time soon. The Church is struggling with a tiny congregation and a huge financial burden to overcome following the dry rot problem. The WiG Players, once a hugely successful enterprise for such a tinny community, has folded, having failed to recruit younger members. We lost our shop many years ago. What is left? We used to have a social committee which worked energetically on behalf of the village,but this seems to have collapsed. In just over a month the rest of the country will be celebrating the Queen‘s Platinum Jubilee, which, whatever your views on the monarchy, is an obvious opportunity for every small community to enjoy a jolly good party. The purpose of this post is twofold: first, I have written it in the vain hope that it might be the stimulus to make something happen over the Jubilee period. But I don’t see this happening. Why not? And this brings me to my second point. Nobody will read this post. If I printed it out and pinned it to the village notice board, nobody would read it. It is deliberately provocative in the hope that I am proved wrong, but I would put good money on it that, in a year‘s time, there will not be single response. If we are to have any chance of reviving what used to be an exceptional community spirit in this village, we need to improve our communications. It is no good relying on people to go looking for information: the information needs to be presented to them. They (we!) don‘t look at noticeboards, and they don’t look at this website. An email database exists, in the custody of the Parish Council, which, while out of date, is at least a starting point. It needs updating, to remove those who, for one reason or another, are no longer with us, but when that is done the PC could contact the community they represent so much more effectively than at present. Other organisations, and even individuals, could use it to get messages through to WiG residents, subject to approval from a designated PC monitor. I sincerely hope this post will engender a flood of explanations as to why it would be impossible: privacy legislation, the need for PC monitoring, and other reasons I haven’t even thought of. But I bet there won’t be a single response m poi Prove me wrong! Dave Lewis lewis@dairy.me.uk

I see there's a heading on this forum for road accidents, of which we've had a few in WIG. i gather there was an incident a few weeks ago when a small peloton of cyclists had a pile-up in the narrow section near the church. There are websites on which sport cyclists can register their best times over specific on-road courses, and one of these is the B3124 between Portishead and Clevedon. That's part of the reason we see so many of them hurtling through he village in groups. If you do that in your car you will be arrested.... There is a campaign to persuade government to spend taxpayers' money to provide a cycle path through the valley, like the one on the A369 into Bristol. Is it too much to ask that, where this provision has been made, cyclists are required to use it and not the road?