Village Focus continued from previous page


walk from The Crown in the Autumn of 1997 on the Alvechurch Alight lantern procession that the idea for a magazine to reflect the community spirit so evident around me began to crystallise. Around the same time, the threat to


the Green Belt protecting Alvechurch and Barnt Green was becoming clear, with the proposal for ADRs (so-called “areas of development restraint”), which we were later to call FBSs (fu- ture building sites), to the annoyance of planning officers. A public meeting was held at Alve-


church Men’s Club, as the social club was called in those days, in 1997 with Mike Scanlon, chairman of Alvechurch Parish Council, controlling things from the stage. Many of the people I would come to know well were vocal at the meeting, including the Labour district councillor for Alvechurch Derek Waters; new parish councillor Roger Hollingworth; and Village Society stalwart Jim Parker – none of whom, sadly, is still with us. On that hot night they struggled to


be heard as the bar enjoyed volumi- nous trade and the locals became restless; but the feeling and passion was impressive to my journalist’s ear. I decided then and there that


“something had to be done” and when my then business partner moved into the area, too, it was soon all systems go – on top of all the other things we were doing that actually made money. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs used


to say that if you are going to succeed in any business, you need to love what you’re doing so much that you’ll keep on doing it whatever happens. That was certainly true for me and The Vil-


lage: I don’t think it made any money for the first few years and my business partner soon moved with her family to the Lake District, so I was left keeping it going on my own. It still looked like there were more people involved than was perhaps the case. My name appeared in the maga- zine sometimes, but so did others, most memorably Graham (sometimes Graeme) Mellor, who turned his hand to writing anything, for he was me. I particularly enjoyed the letter we


received once in the early 2000s after “Graham” had inadvertently advised walkers to follow a path for “a few hundred miles to the next stile on the right”. The letter writer was “concerned


that Graham didn’t at least suggest they take a packed lunch” to sustain them on such a long walk. My then-wife used to write lots of


features for the magazine, too – under her own byline of Jenni Ameghino, but also as her alter ego Liz Dove. She was still working at The Birmingham Post in those days, interviewing peo- ple like Douglas Hurd or FW de Klerk for The Post one day and a Hopwood belly dancer the next for The Village. The gardening column was writ-


ten by the real Anne Guest, later to become the teacher “Miss Guest” at Alvechurch Middle School, and our restaurant reviews were signed off by La Gourmande. I promised then not to reveal who she was, and even though she is no longer in the area, I’d still better keep schtum. Inevitably, and despite the help,


there was a point when it did become too much, and for me that was when we as a family decided to move to Malvern and had got as far as pro-


ceeding with a house purchase and signing our daughters in at schools there. Even after all of the effort that had gone into getting the business close to profitability, I couldn’t see the point in keeping it going from such a distance (and already, madly, had de- signs for a Malvern magazine!) and so in the spring of 2001 the last A4-sized issue of The Village was printed.


T


hen three things happened: we, as a family, didn’t move to Malvern and instead bought a


near-derelict house on Swan Street in Alvechurch; I discovered the concept of B5 magazines and the delivery options this opened up; and the local church in Alvechurch decided that a paddock people expected to be used as a future churchyard should instead be sold to a housebuilder for £1,400,000 to pay for an ambitious new church hall. The outcry and rancour the last caused in the village has dissipated now, although there are still people who won’t set foot in The Ark as a result. As a journalist at the time, I felt


26


The Village October 2018


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