Morris Dancing!

My long-suffering wife dispatched me with to Ironbridge today with my 3 boys.

I got a passport allowing unlimited access to all the Ironbridge museums for the bargain price of £24 through my employer not long ago. We've certainly made full use of the passport since getting it - we've been to Blists Hill a couple of times and Enginuity about 5 times.

Enginuity is brilliant but there's only so many times you can go to the same place and play with the same stuff so we went for a look around the Tile Museum and then went to the Ironbridge for a look round the toll house. That's when we came across these guys:



I've lived no more than 10 minutes away from Ironbridge my whole life and didn't even know there was a morris dancing group in Ironbridge! These lot are called the Iron Men and Severn Gilders. It was really nice to see some traditional English public entertainment - even the obligatory 5 million Japanese tourists that frequent Ironbridge every weekend (ok, there were actually about 10) found it most entertaining.

Here are some pictures and the original 3gp video file which is much better quality than the YouTube version above ...

CEP rally - 18th October at Shrewsbury

The Shropshire branch of the CEP is holding a rally on Saturday the 18th of October in Shrewsbury.

We'll be meeting somewhere central - probably Pride Hill or near the hideous Market Hall - at around 10am and hand out leaflets.

The theme of the rally will be the NHS.  Just over the border in Wales they have free prescriptions and free hospital parking.  The Welsh government doesn't even pay the going rate for their treatment in English hospitals, costing the hospitals in Shrewsbury, Oswestry & Telford over £1m per year in lost revenues.  In Scotland they will all be entitled to free prescriptions from April next year and in Northern Ireland prescriptions will be only £3 next year and free for all from 2010.

Please get in touch for more details.

Shropshire Star: Kind of PM to think of England

The following letter was published in tonight’s Shropshire Star. Unfortunately, whilst editing it they took out “in England” from the end of the first line which makes the whole letter ambiguous.

Kind of PM to think of England

How kind of Gordon Brown, the MP for Kikcaldy and Cowdenbeath in Scotland, to find some loose change down the back of the sofa to pay for free prescriptions for cancer patients.

I remember when my own mother was recovering from cancer the last thing she needed was the worry of how to pay for prescriptions when she was unable to work.

However, when considering Mr Brown’s generosity, it should be remembered that in Wales nobody has paid for a prescription for nearly two years now.

And any of Gordon Brown’s constituents in Scotland suffering from long-term of permanent illnesses haven’t paid for prescriptions for some time. Already 92 per cent of prescriptions dispensed in Scotland are free of charge.

Stuart Parr
Telford