ajoh.org

I remember sitting in a drafty community hall back in ’94, watching a lovely woman try to explain a new playground proposal to the council. She had all the passion in the world, but when the chairman asked where her… Continue reading

I spent thirty years in local government, and if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that nobody wants to read a dusty, academic tome that reads like a tax audit. I once sat through a three-hour presentation by a… Continue reading

I remember sitting in a draughty village hall back in ’94, listening to a gentleman in a tweed jacket swear on his life that a hidden well behind the old tannery held the key to a lost parish endowment. Half… Continue reading

I remember sitting in the basement of the old library, the air thick with that peculiar, sweet scent of decaying paper and damp stone, squinting through thick spectacles at a microfilm reader. My fingers were stained grey, and my eyes… Continue reading

I remember sitting in a drafty parish hall three years ago, staring at a pile of crumbling, water-damaged ledgers that smelled faintly of damp wool and old tobacco. A well-meaning consultant had told our little committee that we’d need to… Continue reading

I remember standing in the drafty vestry of St. Jude’s back in ’94, clutching a stack of damp, crumbling blueprints that looked more like a jigsaw puzzle than a floor plan. My committee was convinced we needed a high-priced surveyor… Continue reading

I remember sitting in a drafty community hall back in ’94, watching a lovely group of neighbors fall apart simply because they’d chosen a meeting space that was too loud to hear a single word of the minutes. They thought… Continue reading

I remember sitting in a drafty parish hall back in the nineties, watching a perfectly good community garden project fall apart because the committee spent three months arguing over whether a patch of land should be called “The Meadow” or… Continue reading

I remember sitting in a damp, windowless basement archive back in the nineties, surrounded by nothing but the smell of decaying glue and old ink, trying to figure out why our local residents were so convinced a certain lane was… Continue reading

I remember sitting in a drafty church hall back in ’94, staring at a pile of glossy, expensive pamphlets that promised the world but delivered nothing but paper waste. We were trying to fix the community garden, but we were… Continue reading