A wonderful sketch of yesterday's Cumbria County Council meeting

"Cumbria Journo" Ellis Butcher has written an exceptionally entertaining (and pretty accurate) account of Thursday's double meeting of Cumbria County Council which you can read at

https://cumbriajourno.com/2017/06/30/cumbria-county-council-the-sketch/.

I particularly love the "Reservoir Dogs" riff on the newly elected Conservative county councillors.

There are about sixteen Conservative County Councillors who have just been elected for the first time to Cumbria CC, including myself, plus a couple of returning members who had been county councillors before. Of the new Conservative members quite a number are tall, generally smartly dressed, and aged in their twenties or thirties.

I qualify under the first of those descriptions but sadly not the third.

All three descriptions apply to half a dozen of the new Tory councillors and "Cumbria Journo" has a picture of James Airey and five of those  - Ben Berry, Ben Shirley, Gareth Ellis, Stephen Haraldsen and Sol Wielkopolski (who was charmingly polite about the struggle some councillors were having pronouncing his name) as the Reservoir Dogs.

As I have the enormous ego which is almost universal among those who put themselves forward for elected office (because nobody who does not have a high opinion of their own abilities would or should offer themselves for these important, difficult and largely thankless jobs) I was ever so slightly disappointed at not being mentioned in the article but I can still recommend it.

The article finished by noting that the county coucnil stood for a minute's silence in memory of two former county councillors who died recently, one of them my good friend Ray Cole. It concluded with the words "They will be missed."

I agree.

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