Shropshire is a county in the west of England, bordering on Wales, famous for AE Housman's poem A Shropshire Lad. It is a rural county, with farming and tourism as the principal economic activities. The rolling hills Housman called blue remembered are now yellow with rapeseed. Far from being a land of lost content, Shropshire is a vibrant part of England, with a few big towns (Ludlow, Shrewsbury, Telford) and numerous small towns, villages and hamlets, populated by a welcoming population, almost exclusively white, of natives, holiday-home owners and retirees. One of the prettiest villages is Clun.
Clunton
and Clunbury,
Clunford
and Clun,
Are the
quietest places
Under
the sun.
There is a fine Anglican church in Clun, where playwright and 'angry
young man' John Osborne is buried. One of his great characters,
Archie Rice, an entertainer, says
Observation-is
the basis of all art.
The Shropshire Star offers a weekly compendium of multiple
observations, local, national and international, in berliner format, costing eighty pence for the Saturday edition. The Saturday 15th April
edition leads with the Roman Catholic Bishop of Shrewsbury bemoaning
the weakening of the Christian festival of Easter, as he observes it,
in the marketing of a chocolate egg hunt at a Shropshire National
Trust property. The Bishop acknowledges that
a
recent survey of national opinion also produced some confusing
results as to what the British people believe about Christ's
resurrection and the life of the world to come.
This story appears beside a front-page photo of well-known pop singer
and sybarite Rod Stewart, who is due to play a concert locally.
There's news of a coach fire due to overheated brakes and of the threat
to a Women's Unit at Telford Hospital. Features and ads abound,
telling of the county's tourist activities, in particular over Easter
weekend, a classic time for family holidays. There was an ATM
ram-raided from the post office in Malvern, half of Shrewsbury's town
councillors plan to step down ahead of next month's election, while
Telford councillors were advised to desist from tweeting
if you
are angry, tired or in a bad mood.
The most (in)famous tweeter today, Donald Trump, features in an
opinion piece by Nigel Hastilow, where the commentator nails the
hypocrisy of recent responses to warmongering in Syria.
A child
blown to smithereens by a barrel bomb, a vacuum bomb or a cluster
bomb is just as dead as a child left with no outward blemishes who is
killed by inhaling sarin gas.
That sentence appears in bold in the column. Nigel Hastilow comes
back
to the
question of why some weapons are unacceptable when it's OK to use
others.
For that column and its insights alone, it's worth reading The
Shropshire Star. It has
the nuanced multiplicity of
the local and regional, presenting
sophisticated thinking far
from the homogeneity of the
metropolitan media and the crass uniformity of the on-line world.
Let's
hear it for proximity.
Where else but in The Shropshire Star would you find
ads for MANBAT, a funeral directors, shot-, bead- and grill blasting
services, a report of the sighting of two rare, white squirrels
near Shifnal and a review of a rock-gig by Kasabian that was so
special it
probably
won't happen again.
Not to mention astute political commentary, that shows more moral
imagination than a slew of broadsheets and global on-line news
channels, owned by the an incestuous cabal of overly rich people.
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