Here is the first of a series of newsletters from Lincolnshire, or the Shire as the good people here are pleased to call it. If you think this means that they all like second breakfasts, have furry feet and live in holes, I can assure that is NOT the case – where I live, at any rate. Down in Fenland though, it may be very different.
Lincolnshire folk want their country back – but which one?
Lincolnshire does not seem well-known to those living outside the county and many who live here think it’s best left that way. It’s full of folk who resent incomers and ‘want their country back’, but I’m sorry to say they never explain which country they want. Is it Roman Britain, Anglo-Saxon Britain, Danish Britain, Norman Britain, the Middle Ages Britain, Tudor Britain, Civil War Britain; this list is endless and it’s more than a little confusing.
Take Tudor Britain, for instance. King Henry VIII once called Lincolnshire “the most brute and beastly shire”, after the Lincolnshire Rising in 1536 disturbed his aura of omnipotence. Maybe Henry was having an especially bad heir day (he had many of them) and it’s true that some of our towns can be reasonably beastly (especially after the pubs close on a Saturday night), while some places exist where abusing children or chasing defenceless animals with dogs would not seem out of place to the Tudors. But I do not believe my acquaintances would readily admit to wanting a return to those times.
No, they are quite content to drive huge tractors around in protest at the remote possibility that a few of them might have to pay something called inheritance tax – and for a county that prides itself on its farming heritage, it’s a strange thing to see them defending the multi-millionaire landowners, like that upstanding pillar of the county Mr James Dyson Esq. Such a shame he lives in Gloucestershire rather than here.
More pillars of the community?
Talking of pillars of the community, is there anyone in Lincolnshire who has not shed a tear at the travails of the MP for Boston and Skegness, Mr Richard Tice Esq, MP? That the poor man has to spend his time dealing with the needs of the hard-pressed citizens of those two towns is bad enough but I learn that he must do so now without the consolation of the soft embraces of his loving companion Ms Isabel Oakeshott, who has fled to Dubai.
This must cause some concern for self-confessed Mr ‘Doer and Fixer’ Tice, who seems to have done and fixed very little since becoming an MP. I note from the journal of record at the House of Commons that he’s spoken up on many issues without specific reference to Lincolnshire’s many problems. It must be reassuring to them all that he’s identified that the cause of recent flooding in the county isn’t climate change but badgers.
He’ll also be reassured that fellow Reformer Dame Andrea Jenkyns is to stand for the mayoralty of Greater Lincolnshire. This is just what the county needs – a woman with a proven track record of achievement to bring a cheer to the region. Who can forget the exhilarating three months she spent as Skills Minister in 2022 and her career as a finalist in Miss UK a decade earlier?
Dame Andrea has lately been mightily concerned by the decision by the Energy Secretary ‘bacon butty’ Ed Miliband to award a contract to Ecotricity boss Dale Vince to develop a solar farm near the village of Heckington. This is strange, as in 2021 she was truly thrilled to endorse a solar farm project near Wakefield, in her then constituency. Perhaps Dame Andrea is only exercising a lady’s privilege to change her mind. Truly, as the song says, “There is nothing like a dame.”
We want no trouble here
Away from politics, life in the Shire continues without too much to ruffle one’s contentment. After all, ‘we’re local folk, we’ll have no trouble here’. Occasional outbreaks of outlandish behaviour such as the Haxey Hood do occur, but to us this is entirely normal. What could be a more traditionally Lincolnshire event than to grapple with neighbours and complete strangers for several hours in early January over possession of a piece of leather headwear while pushing them towards or away from their favourite pub?
Strange news also reaches us from Cleethorpes concerning the discovery of a 200-year-old unpleasant item in the town. Could it be that the custom of filling bottles with urine and casting them into the undergrowth was invented there? This may seem unlikely but then as they say, there’s nowt so queer as folk.
I will endeavour to find out more about this riveting story but in the meantime, I must bid you all au revoir.
