Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

To say I was stunned when I heard of the death of David Ledsom would be an understatement.

I was aware that he had suffered a major bout of depression a couple of years ago but I have talked with him many times since then and by and large he seemed to have come out of it pretty well. And then this…

It isn’t long since I attended his retirement party on leaving SDC, the company he had helped bring to prominence. It was a great occasion with a huge number of people present in a Cambridge college hall. Who could have though this would happen?

I suppose depression is an illness which never lets you go and is always standing by in the wings. My sympathy goes out to his wife Lesley and family. All suicides leave a residue of unearned guilt as families and friends ask themselves if they could have done any more but surely David, surrounded as he was by people who loved him, knew he could call upon literally hundreds of people for help.

A couple of months ago we were saying the same of local solicitor Tara Winter, two good people lost to Bedford in so short a time.

SUNDAY - Today’s Remembrance Day service at the Embankmnt war memorial went off reasonable well today despite the fact that the actual order of service and the published order only randomly coincided which occasiuoned a good deal of head scratching and brow furrowing as people thumbed the leaflet trying to find out where they were. And the two minute silence was about doubled because the bugler who was to sounf the Last Post was out of eye-line with the parade marchal.

These things happen on live occasions. At least the weather remained dry.

There was a curious incident over the weekend. I was called on Friday by a reporter from the Mail-on-Sunday purporting to be interested in views I had expressed in my blog of a few days previously concerning the creation of a ‘remembrance season’. His questions seemed a bit vague and roundabout until he showed interest in how many councillors would be taking part in the parade.. Apparently somebody had phoned the newsdesk and said something about me banning it because there were not enough councillors attending.

I was mystified, although I knew the afternoon remembrance service at St Peter’s Church had been cancelled because the congregation had been getting smaller over the years, but that had nothing to do with me. He rang off saying there didn’t seem to be much to it.

I dismissed it from mind until later that evening when I discovered that the Mail on Sunday was trying to get a picture of me which indicated it still thought it had a story. Next morning my solicitor, Nic Davies, and I emailed a letter to the Mail on Sunday making it clear I had nothing to with the cancellation of the St Peters service and that I would not take kindly to any suggestion that I had stopped a commemoration of Remembrance Day.

There was nothing in MoS next morning so I assumed it had gone away, but after the parade I was accosted by a couple of chaps who said they were from the Daily Mail and had been sent along because they had heard the same story.

I pointed to the hundreds of people participating and they agreed that it didn’t look like I had cancelled the parafe. I told them again about the St Peter’s service and they said it sounded as though the two parades had been confused.

When I saw them later it was apparent that they had sought out the parade marshal who had told them that the borough in general and I in particular ‘could not have been more helpful to them’. So they went back to the Daily Mail offices in Kensington without a story but a couple of free cups of coffee leaving me wondering who had gone to so much trouble to pass on this dud tip without even an elementary checking of the facts.

Not so long ago the term ‘half-breed’ used to carry implications of degeneracy. The mixed-race person could not be trusted and was far inferior to people of pure race. Re-read your old Biggles books if you don’t believe me.

The implication fuelled many books and films, particularly westerns and the Nazis referred to them as ‘mischlings’ (mongrels), particularly those with Jewish genes. Hitler also called the Czechs a’a mongrel race’.

Anglo-Indian met with contempt from both sides of that racial divide although Anglo-Indian women are at least as intelligent as. and often more beautiful than, either their Anglo or their Indian counterparts.

Even when it come to pets, pure-bred dogs (for which read inbred) are favoured over mongrels despite the fact that the latter are generally more intelligent and certainly healthier, as anybody who watched that dissection of Crufts breeding policies a couple of months ago will reaslise.

Now we have a half-breed President-elect of the United States of America in Barack Obama - and who would doubt his moral and intellectual superiority over George W Bush? - and a half-breed Formula 1 World Champion in Lewis Hamilton.

And, as writer Simon Hoggart has pointed out, Tiger Woods is also of mixed race.

The day of the mischling has come, and as one of them I feel a quiet inter-racial pride.

Phew! What a sporting weekend. Bedford’s Paula Radcliffe comes back again by winning the New York marathon, Biggleswade’s Victoria Pendleton wins three cycling golds and Lewis Hamilton from just down the road in Stevenage sneaks the F1 World Championship.

An amazing record for this small corner of England.

All I need now is for Barack Obama to win on Tuesday. OK , I know it’s not sport but what a week it would make it for underdogs, a black President of the USA and F1 world champion, and victories for two women, Pendleton and Radcliffe. It might make me forget the financial situation for a few hours.

As everybody else has had their four penn’orth on the subject of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, I might as well add to it.

I don’t have much to say about Brand except that anybody who can label his autobiography ‘My booky-wook’ isn’t worth taking seriously.

Ross, however, I have always looked upon as the kind of person who is a bully when he thinks he can get away with it and a sniveller when he can’t. In ‘They think he’s all over’ he regularly tried to humiliate guest sports people who are rarely verbally dexterous; on his chat show he brown-nosed any halfway famous actor.

When he tried to bounce Ricky Gervais, the star The Office responded with a crisp four-letter word which was bleeped out but it reduced Ross to snivel-mode.

The item for which they got their come-uppance was revolting by any standards. What is cutting-edge humour about phoning an old man and boasting of have had sex with his grand-daughter, adding in a bit of graphic detail?

If the pair of them never darken my television screen again I won’t miss them. Unfortunately I doubt I’ll be that lucky.

I nearly ducked out of the Astroblast event at Bedford School this morning (Sunday). I’m glad I didn’t.

One of the advertisers was called ‘Green Witch’*. I though it was probably a new age or hippy organisation and the appearance of the publicity leaflets wasn’t reassuring. But when I gave them closer scrutiny it looked much more interesting: atronomy, rocket demonstrations, lectures on meteorites with samples for sale. So I went along to open it and, unusually for me, I stayed for the lecture by the Open University’s Monica Grady on meteorites.

There were all sorts of interesting things on sale, including astronomical telescopes. I was suprised how cheap they were. A beginner’s telescope cost about £40, and the most expensive, which included a computer to direct you to the stars you wanted to examine, less than £900 although I suppose you could spend a lot on accessories.

As I write, I might be tempted to return to watch rockets being fired from the gounds of Bedford School.

Did you know - and I didn’t - that the world champion rocketeer is British? The championship involves firing a rocket which converts to a radio-controlled glider once its fuel has been burned. The controller has to land it as close as possible to launch point within three minutes. Apparently they can ascend as high as 10,000ft although in deference to Britain’s crowded skies they are usually limited to 5,000ft.

The things one learns by being mayor!

*I still don’t know why Green Witch but I assume it relates to Greenwich Observatory.