Many thanks to all those who voted me in… … for a third and final three-year term as a Salisbury City hospital governor.

With seven candidates competing for two seats it was impossible to guess how things would go.

It’s a relief to know that trust members felt that we were doing a reasonable job. John Carvell and I will both quit in 2015 to make way for someone else.

The next three years will be very important as we start experiencing the effects of the 2012 Health Bill, and have to make some difficult decisions.

Incidentally, if you’re not already a member of the Salisbury Hospital NHS Foundation Trust you should join.

It’s free and it gives you a voice in the decision-making process.

*******

Richard Clewer, the chairman, Salisbury Area Board (now let me see, do I remember ever being asked to elect them? er, nope) has chided the local media for “a great deal of negative comment” about the city.

“We need to talk it up and help it thrive, not to put it down,” he declares. And he’s willing to admit past mistakes: “At Wiltshire Council we got it wrong when we removed the one-hour parking slot, but we got one-hour parking back.”

Well, up to a point Lord Copper: I seem to remember months of lobbying by the Journal and a parking boycott by enraged motorists - but if that’s how they want to rewrite history, so be it.

It seems to me that the place Salisbury really needs to be “talked up” is in Trowbridge. Perhaps Richard Clewer could tell his colleagues that reducing the local governance of an English cathedral city to parish council status and treating us merely as a revenue source was probably not a clever idea.

If the Salisbury Area Board cares to campaign for the creation of a South Wiltshire District Council, count me in.

If the planned redevelopment of the Maltings includes the 100-bedroom city centre hotel we so desperately need rather than yet another supermarket, ditto.

But it doesn’t and won’t, because right now we are powerless.

But it won’t always be that way. Eventually Wiltshire Councillors must offer themselves for re-election. Roll on the day.

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