What a Difference a Decade Makes

Someone recently suggested I should change my blog strapline to The Man Who Gets About A Bit. They've formed the impression I spend my time flitting about the country - one minute in Oldham, the next in North Yorkshire and then, at the blink of an eye, in County Durham. Gallivanting is, I think, the term that has been used.

It's true, I do like to put myself about. It's one of the things that divides Mrs Blunt and I, she much preferring to spend her time around the hearth at home. As I travel the land, I try to stay alert to the changes that have occurred in places I used to know.

So, as I found myself (unexpectedly) in Daventry, Northants earlier today, I was able to reflect on how a decade had taken its toll on a town that - when I first knew it - was in something of a crisis. Well known high street shops had deserted the place in droves, leaving a phalanx of charity shops and run-down pubs in their train, fighting a desperate rear-guard action against out-of-town shopping centres.

Well, I was in for quite a surprise. Daventry has re-asserted itself. The pubs are smarter, the shops more varied and bustling, and there's even a very nice Costa Coffee shop that's opened up.

When I first visited Daventry back in the early 1990's, it was at the invitation of a group of locals who were trying to stop their local Health Authority closing down the much-loved Danetre Hospital. They'd heard from somewhere that the power of Bill Blunt's pen could cause bureaucrats to quake in their comfortable, leather office chairs, and wondered if I could help them out.

My initial assessment was bleak. The NHS managers seemed intent on closing the place and flogging off the land for housing development - a fashionable way of generating revenue at the time. If that happened, the opportunity would be lost forever for future developments, and it would be another nail in the coffin for the town.

My time with the group was brief - enough, however, to organise a lobby of local councillors, MPs and health service officials, produce a few well-aimed newsletters and organise a march through the town against the proposed cuts in services. Victory in the first battle was hard won, but sweet when it came: we commissioned an independent report on the health needs of the town, and argued that the Health Authority needed to carry out their own 'health needs assessment' for the local population. They eventually agreed to do just that. I was satisfied, at the time, that my work was done.

What a pleasure, then, to see today that (all these years later) the Danetre Hospital had not only survived closure, but had been augmented with the opening, late last year, of a brand new community hospital on the same site. This, on the land that would otherwise have fallen to housing development.

There will be some readers of my blog who think that old Bill Blunt spends his time wittering on about meat pies, prostitution in Oldham, MP3 players and Walthamstow Dog Track statistics. If that's what they want to think, that's fine by me. But they'd better take note: Bill's still got his quill, and it's ready for sharpening whenever the occasion arises.