By Mary Schwartz
DRIVING through Chalfont St Peter this week, I have been stirred by real feelings of local pride as I am saluted by the army of white flags lining the terraces of Gold Hill shopping parade.
These flags appear every year to mark the feast day of Saint Peter and Saint Paul on June 29, as a warm celebration of our village’s namesake. They decorate our communal sense of local pride and you do not have to go far to experience the friendly welcome of shopkeepers or to see The Greyhound’s chalk board advertising their “You’ve Got Talent� competition this coming Thursday. This promotional evening, hosted by one of Chalfont’s liveliest pubs and the hubbub of much local socialising, is a fun, light-hearted way to celebrate home-grown talent and personality. Such evenings promote local community spirit and I feel privileged to have grown up in an area with such charisma and charm.
Now that the sun is breaking through the clouds, our villages bubble with recreational purpose as residents get out and about, pouring into our parks and local tennis clubs (inspired by Monday’s start of Wimbledon no doubt!) I know Chalfont St. Peter Tennis Club is sending its first team to face Milton Keynes’s finest this Saturday, as other local clubs take on neighbouring rivals. This to me, is a sign of healthy local competition and pride in our home towns.
Our local newspapers: The Bucks Advertiser and The BuCks Examiner, promote our success stories and local issues. You need only turn to their back pages to see our youth and die-hard athletes of all ages proudly competing for their schools and community sports clubs. I have fond memories of participating in county, regional and national netball and athletics competitions throughout my teens, and remember the excitement of our local reporters coming along to take team photos.
June 19th’s release of the Buck’s Advertiser reports the united campaign building within our communities to save our village post offices and appeals for more residents to join the fight against the closures announced on Tuesday. Beaconsfield Old Town, Chalfont Common, Denham, Denham Green and Farnham Royal are all threatened with the loss of the post offices so crucial to their resident pensioners, homeworkers and parents. MPs Dominic Grieve and Cheryl Gillan are leading the crusade to prevent the extinction of our pivotal community service. Fierce community uproar against the proposed closures demonstrates how important our local area, its people and services still are to each and every one of us. It is evidence of how communities deeply value their local amenities, character and culture and what a tragedy it would be to see them in decline. We should be encouraged by this campaign, seeing it as a shining example to get more involved with the parts of our community that we hold close to our hearts, because local pride really might just avoid their fall.
Giorgio Armani seems to agree with me in June 24th’s edition of the Daily Telegraph. Italy’s father of fashion is quoted to have publicly grieved for the degradation of his beloved high-class Italian cities. He highlights “cans dropped in the street� in Milan’s Corso Vittorio Emanuele, amongst many other examples of the deteriorating local culture and environments. Mr Armani, like me, considers the local community to be dependent on its residents sharing a communal sense of pride, as he complains of an increasingly “slovenly� society, directly blaming the lack of respect and decent public dressing on a growing culture of “atrocious permissiveness�.
With the rapid pace of change in today’s world, it is up to us to protect what is dear and to appreciate the friendly sense of kinship that our local villages offer. If the king of understated style and elegance himself feels passionately enough to speak out and warn against the horrors of diminishing pride, we should take heed and learn that modest pride can do our communities and our neighbours the world of good.
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