In Sheffield, my home town, the council has at last apologised for misleading the public, the media and the courts during the dispute over its unfathomably stupid and vicious campaign to fell 17,500 of the city’s street trees, many of which it now accepts were perfectly healthy. This development is, of course, welcome, if long overdue. But it doesn’t really change anything. Who will ever be able to forget the chainsaws? Beloved limes and sycamores are gone. Most of us will be long dead before their replacements reach anything like maturity.
Thinking about this horrible, unnecessary business all over again, I’m struck by the default accusations of nimbyism on the council’s part, an attitude that persists even now. In its statement, it said that it had misrepresented those who protested against the destruction as “primarily interested only in their own streets”.
I know this is true; most activists cared about neighbourhoods far beyond their own. But I also wonder why the council believes it might be morally dubious for a person to worry about his or her own street? Isn’t this where community begins? Each street is part of a village – Sheffield is famously a collection of villages – and these villages make up the city.
Councils, it seems to me, deploy the word community only when it suits. Recently, I waited for an hour at the library to talk to our (Labour) councillor about low traffic zones. As someone who is in favour of LTZs, but finds herself sandwiched between two of them, I wanted to know how it is decided who will benefit from such schemes, and who will be their victims. But from the moment I opened my mouth, I understood I was wasting my breath. To ask questions, let alone to have feelings, about the place where you live is increasingly framed as naked self-interest by politicians on the left, the idea being, I think, that if you make people (your own voters!) feel mean and inconsiderate, shame will silence them, and you can then get on with doing whatever you like.
To absent friends
To a party in Soho to celebrate the 50th birthday of Virago books, and how lovely to find myself wedged between two of the writers I admire most, Hermione Lee and Sarah Waters. Guests have been invited to wear green in honour of Virago’s famous livery, and I look like a jolly Pacer – the minty sweet that ceased production in 1985 – in a frock with white and sage stripes. But there is a painful absence: my friend Carmen Callil, the publisher’s founder, who died last year.
More than once, I imagine I hear the sound of her laughter. How I wish she was in this hot, crowded room to make wild introductions and even wilder pronouncements – and that we could gossip about this amazing gathering of women (and some men) together later.
Serious reservations
The neurotic messages we receive in advance of almost any visit to a restaurant – your booking is approaching; please confirm your booking; thank you for confirming your booking – are still annoying. But silence is now no good either, for it induces one’s own neuroticism.
Having heard nothing since I booked a table at a new Greek restaurant, I decide to ring them. A man picks up. “I’d like to confirm a booking,” I say. “What?” he asks. “Er, I’m hoping like to confirm a booking,” I repeat, increasing the brightness in my voice just a notch. “OK,” he replies. I run through the details. Silence, and then: “See you tomorrow.”
How refreshing! I think, hanging up. I must push from my mind the idea that our reservation may be only as real as Atlantis, or the Garden of the Hesperides.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
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