Bang goes my last chance to be a county councillor. Hopefully, I'll still be around in another four years but by then I should be passing my time pruning roses and looking after my bees far from the political hurly-burly ... well perhaps not. Even if I liked roses I wouldn't know which end to prune, and even supposing bees survive my bee-keeping days are long over. But I've no appetite for the corridors of County Hall and that won't change.
I did flirt with the idea for ten minutes or so. Those who criticise should be prepared to have a go: "Before you judge a man you should walk a mile in his shoes" says the proverb (and after that –as Billy Connolly added – you can say what you like because he's a mile away and you've got his shoes).
I've never criticised councillors as a regular habit, only if they've been outrageous. I made a brief audit of what extra activities I'd have to fit into my stuffed waking time: general council meetings, committee meetings, budget meetings, all involving the trek to Truro. Site meetings, meeting with local groups and constituents. Press. Evening phone calls and e-mails. And the reading matter, tree after tree of it. The wonder is that so many hopefuls didn't allow that to put them off and were prepared to put in a working person's week every week for a kitchen porter's wages. I take my hat off to them.
They're in for a rough ride. The County Hall they'll enter will look impressive, sound, and full of well-qualified staff. But it is a quaking bog of nerves, uncertainty and fear. You new councillors have at least four years of job security, but one of the first items on your agenda will be to trim £170 million from your council's expenditure.
It's a disgusting task to perform in England's poorest and most deprived county, and everyone you meet in the offices and corridors and cafes will be showing the whites of their eyes hoping the axe won't fall on them. You stood for the council in order to change Cornwall's prospects for the better but you've been recruited for a cross-the-board sackathon, a dirty, dirty job which the Government wants to see done without soiling its fingers.
You can grumble and wriggle and appeal but the Government will quash your objections with the well-known mantra of "difficult decisions" to be made. As I pointed out a while ago, these difficult decisions don't seem to include wresting more tax from the massively rich corporations who currently pay none, asking more (rather than less) of our highest earners, reclaiming our money from the bank bail-outs, or giving less work to the mighty firms of accountants whose main job is posing labyrinthine wangles to prevent their clients from contributing anything to the general purse. Instead they'll give Cornwall a figure randomly plucked from the foul air of the Treasury's computer and leave it to you to work out whose lives to wreck and which communities to starve of essential funds.
Hopefully, you'll improve on some of the classic canards of the last four years, from the Al-Jazeera logo to the whimperingly stupid idea of spitting in the eye of our only viable industry by closing tourist information offices (through not in Truro!) and public toilets. As so many correspondents have pointed out tourist destinations around the world compete in offering the most pleasant and welcoming experience to their visitors, whereas your predecessors seemed to think it would be acceptable to leave ours lost, bewildered and cross-legged.
Good luck, especially to those who stood under party banners. That was one more reason I couldn't face the prospect myself. The current main party leaders are less horrid than I can remember, but behind genial pink Mr Cameron lurk the bloodless wraiths of Michael Gove and Iain Duncan Smith, with Mr Miliband come the gruesome twosome of Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper, and with nice charisma-free Mr Clegg comes ... just the echo of Mr Pooter. Would you rather be associated with the Thatcher loyalists, the Iraq warriors, the student grant-snatchers, or the raving loonies? Good luck, especially to the independents, ploughing a lonely furrow. Even more so if you are young. Ignore such gnarled cynics as this columnist. Your county needs you.
mikesagar-fenton@hotmail.co.uk