Where have you been all my life Jackie Weaver?

The mysterious “P” in my last post commentated thus

“ Just wondering if any Trelawnyd online meetings can be as entertaining ala Handforth Parish Council and Jackie Weaver. John?”

Well P, first let me explain the above video for those not aware of it. This video is part of a local council meeting in the North of England where old beefs and fall outs between the counsellors came to a head when a local council official , the placid and wonderfully patient Jackie Weaver was sent in to trouble shoot the Egos. 

In Wales, we in the villages of Gwaenysgor & Trelawnyd have an officially elected Community Council which are responsible for generally local and small scale affairs. I was part of this council a few years ago now, when the village was “ run” predominantly by a phalanx of middle aged, white heterosexual men.

My appointment was a small step towards diversity back then  and today I am glad to say that there are several women and younger men on the committee, but back then there was only one delightful troublemaker amid the serious old school members.

The troublemaker was a character I used to blog about a lot in the early days of Going Gently , and that was the Red Faced Welsh Farmer.

The RFWF could be described thus

“ Think of the classic actor Robert Newton in full pirate voice aka Long John Silver but dressed in an ancient tweed hat, grubby tweed jacket and cardigan and driving an old red Land Rover, with the driver’s window forever open” 

He looked and sounded every inch a farmer pretending to be a pirate.

Now the RFWF was famous for his temper and his no nonsense approach to everything village based. If he liked you , he would bend over backward to help you in anything you asked of him and after a shaky start ( we had a row over a large blue water butt of all things) he proved a godsend when I needed an expert hand constructing my pig pens and eventually taking them to be slaughtered. 

But if he didn’t like you,( and he would be first to say that there were several on the then community council  committee he hated) he was a right old bugger and at every meeting amid the boring crap of building requests and road sign issues, he would challenge the group decision making with points of order, mischievous shenanigans, secret taping of discussions and challenges to the ineffective clerk who, I am sure had to take a Valium before each meeting in order to cope.

It was great fun watching him take the floor. Throw out his conspiracy theories and shout  and bellow over his deafness which made things even more complicated and much more entertaining.

I now realise that I adored the old pirate’s chutzpah and his devilment and his cunning and when he died, I wasn’t surprised that the huge marble church at Bodelwyddan was filled to standing room by hundreds of Welsh farmer types in their black funeral coats standing shoulder to shoulder.

They don’t make them like that anymore