The Further Adventures of Rita Cummings
Created | Updated Apr 11, 2010
Welcome to the world of Rita Cummings, 87, spinster of the Parish of Speele.
The months since the Speele Parish Council elections had been a source of endless surprises for Rita. She had never really expected to get anywhere, but had written down a series of goals upon her retirement, which she was determined to spend the following years pursuing. Twenty years later, she had found the list at the bottom of a drawer while clearing out some old clothes to send to an orphanage in Romania. She had a faint inkling that her bonnets and corsets would be of even less use to the Romanian orphans than they had been to her, but she was set on doing her bit, as always.
The first big surprise for Rita had come before the elections even began. Exploring the murky world of politics for the first time, she discovered that several of the items on her 'to do' list were, in fact, illegal and that at least two of the countries she had intended to visit no longer existed. She was in some respects relieved by this, as she had been anxious about many aspects of her list since she got on a train at Waterloo station and woke up to find herself in France, something she had never been able to fully understand. Well-meaning friends and relatives had endeavoured to explain to her how she had managed a trip that seemed impossible to her, but had all failed to dislodge from her brain the notion that British Rail (who she still believed ran the trains) had developed some kind of hover train which carried her directly across the channel.
There had been further, and indeed greater, shocks in store once the count had been completed. Rita had been pleasantly surprised to discover that she had gained ten votes. She had always known that her support was, in the main, among the under-fives and she felt that if she were still able to stand in fifteen years she would have a stranglehold over the little village. It had come as a surprise, having settled herself as being quite pleased to have got any votes at all, even if it was only ten, to be told that ten votes was enough to get her onto the Parish Council. Her deafness had meant that there was still more news ahead. 'You've got Blah blah ten votes' she heard first time round. When it was repeated more loudly she realised that she had in fact 'Got the only ten votes'. Rita was therefore the only member of the Speele Parish Council.
Meetings had at first proved a trying and unsuccessful business, until the clerk had managed to persuade Rita that the necessity of finding a seconder for every motion she proposed was probably superfluous. Nonetheless, Rita had firmly stuck to having a vote taken and counted on every point, as she felt that democracy would collapse without it. 'I'm not going to pander to that Mr Hitler,' she would say, although nobody really understood what she meant. Rita had always been a firm traditionalist and she stuck doggedly to her principals. She made sure to interrupt herself as many times as possible during meetings, often to ask questions of herself that she had, in fact, answered ten minutes previously. Rita tried very hard to ignore herself at key moments in order that she could demand to know things she had already been told with the suspicious air of someone convinved that the truth is being deliberately kept from them and succeeded to such an extent that one meeting the clerk had been unable to attend went on for three days while Rita tried to remember what she had been saying five minutes ago. She was widely regarded as being the most popular and successful Parish Council the village had elected for some time1.
There were many challenges for Rita to deal with as Parish Council. She was determined to create a 'green area' for the children of the village to play in and solved the problem by having the Village Hall carpark painted. As it happened, this was where the village children were inclined to spend much of their time anyway, but since the newly painted car park seemed to attract more attention than the old one ever had, they were forced to stop lurking in the shadowy corners2 and were forced to go and play football around the streets instead. As a result of this, the car-owners of Speele3, being keen not to have their windows smashed, put their cars in their garages instead of their driveways, which contrived to cut car crime in Speele by two-thirds. The result of this painting was so successful that it made it much easier for Rita to gain acceptance for her plan to paint all the pavements in Speele orange. This achieved nothing at all but kept seven people in the County Hall offices busy with the paperwork.
As she grows older, Rita has become increasingly aware of the importance of ensuring that a strong community does not become isolated and that it involves itself to a wide degree with the outside world. Her first baby steps in this monumental campaign were to improve the bus facilities within the village. As little as two months ago, there were only three bus stops in the entire village of Speele and there are now forty-two. Recognising once again the value of colour, Rita has introduced a coding system whereby the bus stops are painted according to how well-served they are. A bus stop visited only once a day is black, whereas every-half-hour stops are red, although bus companies insist that the situation is not as black as it has been painted. Like many of Rita's schemes, this has, in fact, made no practical impact on anything at all, but Rita is percieved by the villagers as a doer and the feeling that someone is achieving in Speele has added to the general feel-good factor. As a consequence, many more people within the village are wearing flowers in their hats4 and crowds of more than ten are increasingly inclined to break spontaneously into song.
Rita's current project is to find a town abroad with which Speele can be twinned. Never short of ambition, Rita has already been in contact with officials in Washington DC, Tokyo and Cape Town. Washington had been the first to reply and were, if they were absolutely honest, so bewildered by the request that they agreed to it out of sheer bafflement. Rita will be flying out next week to exchange diplomatic gifts with the President, for whom she is currently knitting a bobble hat, as she feels his head is altogether too cold.
If you have any views on current Council policy or wish to suggest an international capital with which you would like to see Speele twinned, please contact Rita at [email protected]
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