DISMAY and disappointment still exists over Lyme Regis Development Trust having to pay £60,000 for the old club for young people to secure a permanent youth club in the town, now known as The Hub.
Some still harbour the hope that the trustees of the former club will relent and give the money back rather than making it available for grants for youth projects in the town. I am told that is never going to happen.
Time then to focus on the future and that’s exactly what the hard working Hub supporters are planning to do by going all out to win £60,000 of Lottery funding in the ITV West Country "People’s Millions" contest as part of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee next year.
An innovative publicity campaign kicked off this week with a view of getting every person in Lyme involved, encouraging as many people as possible to vote for The Hub on June 28th - now dubbed “Hub Tuesday” with a distinctive thumbs-up logo being adopted.
The Hub has recruited Lyme-born Geoff Baker, who ran Beatle Paul McCartney’s press office for 15 years, to handle the PR and Geoff is already beavering away in his usual enthusaistic manner on loads of innovative PR stunts.
Hub project director Fran Williams, in our front page story this week, appeals to everyone in the town to get behind the initiative and help make the long-held dream of Lyme getting a proper youth club come true.
It’s ironic that the top prize is £60,000, the amount Lyme Regis Development Trust had to find to buy the Church Street premises from the Club for Young People.
Meanwhile, work continues to get the building opened as soon as possible with news this week that the InSPARation Youth Cafe could move into The Hub as soon as August.
Lyme pasty wars?
WITH the arrival of Pasty Presto, the West Country food shop chain, a bit of a pasty war has broken out in Lyme Regis.
The new shop, in the former Lyme News premises, is just a couple of doors down from The Good Food Shop, which has built a deserved reputation for the quality of their foodstuffs. A sign has emerged outside their shop saying “Best Pasties In Town” since their new Cornish competitor arrived in town.
Further down the street Mulberry Manor also has a good reputation for serving a mean and lean pasty. So who does serve the best pasty in town?
I’ve put away a few pasties in my time and bought regularly from The Good Food Shop and Mulberry Manor. With one of my daughters working at Pasty Presto, I’ve felt obliged to taste their range of tiddyoggies, as we used to call them. Last week I tried the chick pea and potato for the first time. Delicious.
One of my friends, a vegetarian, says you can’t get a proper vegetarian pasty in Lyme. There are several varieties without meat but some of them contain alien ingredients such as sweetcorn and peppers, never acceptable in a pasty in his view. A true vegetarian pasty has just potato, turnip and carrot.
So who serves the best pasty in town? I’m sitting on the fence here. I like them all!
I WROTE in this column last week about the disappointment of the Cobb toilets being out of action during the Bank Holiday weekend after promises from both town and district councils that things will be better this year with regard to the cleanliness of our public loos.
By all accounts the toilets behind the Cobb Arms were closed because of a blocked drain and West Dorset District Council’s plumbing contractors were unable to turn out.
If you were running Lyme Regis Plc what would you do in similar circumstances? Call in another plumber, of course. There are many in and around the Lyme Regis area.
But local government doesn’t work like that because it’s not their money they are spending - it’s ours, so it doesn’t matter.
Lyme’s new district councillor George Symonds was away over the Bank Holiday weekend but tells me he’s on the case.
EVENT OF THE WEEK
CAN it really be 31 years ago that a group of gauche and unwordly young men from Lyme Regis - one of them with their leg in plaster (me!) - travelled across the Channel for a game of football?
We had no idea where Creully was or that it played such a key role in the aftermath of D-Day in 1944, it being the headquarters for General Montgomery after the invasion.
For some it was their first experience of foreign travel and certainly their first taste of French cuisine and hospitality.
This past weekend the players from US Creully returned to Lyme for their bi-yearly reciprocal visit and the usual riotous time was had by all.
There have been suggestions in the past that Lyme should officially twin with Creully. But the council in Creully would have none of it, saying that there was already a unique twinning arrangement between the two football clubs. Lyme is now persuing an option to twin with Barfleur, a few kilometres from Creully.
My days of rebel-rousing with our French friends are long past but I was pleased to host a barbecue on Saturday attended by two of the twinning stalwarts - former Lyme goalkeeper Robert McClennan, who was celebrating his 73rd birthday, and Creully’s Michel Longuet, who is a life member of Lyme Regis FC, bestowed on him for his commitment to fostering the arrangement between the two clubs.
The Seasiders won the annual football match 6-5 and the 31st anniversary dinner, superbly organised by Ken and Betty Hitchcock, was held at the Davey Fort clubhouse in the evening when the new extension was officially named “The Creully Lounge”.
Longtemps vivre le jumelage!
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