H AVING spent my entire working life reporting on the pronouncements, peccadillos and pomposities of local councils, I have turned full circle this week.

For I have become a parish councillor, one of those well- meaning volunteers who steers the ship of the lowest tier of local government through the turbulent waters of life at the bottom.

I was mildly disappointed that I did not have to fight an election to take my place among the village worthies, but local government isn’t what it was when I first took an interest in the topic half a century ago.

Over the years, local government has become more remote from the people, particularly at election times.

These used to be wonderful occasions, with every seat on every council keenly contested, but all that has disappeared in a sea of apathy, due to the perception that local voices and local opinions are no longer heard, thanks to the great rush for centralisation, and ever more distant decision making.

Now only a handful of seats on the 50-odd parish councils are contested, with the vast majority having vacancies, even after last week’s elections.

As a veteran of many hundreds of council meetings, I am genuinely looking forward to being a poacher turned gamekeeper.

When I started covering local council meetings back in the 1960s, they were very grand affairs indeed, with moustachioed male councillors wearing their Sunday best suits, and the very few ladies involved always sporting hats.

There was a great deal of pomp and ceremony, with the mayor wearing a tricorn hat and red coat with ermine collar, and there was a glittering array of civic regalia, including a ceremonial snuff box from which everybody took an extravagant pinch, including the press.

The speeches were grandiloquent, the men pontificating with one thumb in the waistcoat, intoxicated with the exuberance of their own verbosity.

Senior council officials wore wigs and gowns, and expressions of extreme distaste at the ranting of the councillors, for they knew it was they who ran the council, not the elected members, who were little more than an inconvenience.

The public gallery was always packed, even for the most tedious of debates, and the newspapers carried long reports of the hot air expelled from civic throats.

Local government in Tynedale was shaken by events of seismic proportions in the 1970s, when the five local authorities which had run the district since Queen Victoria was on the throne were amalgamated into one.

It was not a popular shotgun wedding at first, with the three rural councils covering Bellingham, Haltwhistle and the area surrounding Hexham deeply distrustful of the urbanites from Prudhoe and Hexham. It was such a black day in Prudhoe that veteran councillor Jack Ward turned up for the final meeting of the UDC in full mourning attire, bearing a wreath.

Procedure remained king for decades, and I recall one blisteringly hot day at Prospect House in Hexham when a perspiring councillor had the temerity to remove his jacket.

He was stiffly rebuked “for offending the dignity of the chamber” by the chairman.

Over the years, meetings became less and less formal, and councillors started turning up in scruffy jeans and tee-shirts, and addressing each other and officers by their Christian names instead of their highfalutin titles.

There was always humour in the council chamber, one of my favourite moments being a long-running gaffe involving the delightful former Prudhoe councillor Doreen Elwell, who had a problem with the name of a senior official in Tynedale Council’s treasurer’s department, one Larry Dawson.

For weeks, Mrs Elwell let her fondness for the popular game show The Generation Game and its outrageously camp host Larry Grayson interfere with her memory bank, and she inadvertently addressed him as Mr Grayson on more than one occasion.

It was only when he finally responded to one query with an eye-flutteringly camp “Shut that door” that she realised her error, and was suitably mortified.