Last year the Council adopted the BT phone box in Mere Road. After taking it on it decided that it really needed repainting, as it clearly hadn't been done by BT for many, many years.

We did try to get BT to carry out this essential maintenance work before passing responsibility for the box over to the Council, but they said we would have to take it as it was, or they would remove the box as well as the telephony equipment.

So the Council was investigating how to get hold of the right colour paint, and thinking of how to recruit a team of volunteers to do the task.

This all stopped, though, when Councillor Phil Childs came home to find a team hard at work repainting! We can't work out why, but obviously BT issued instructions for this to be done, apparently unaware that they no longer owned the box!

Unsurprisingly, Phil decided not to tell the men to clear off and leave our box alone, and as a result we now have a bright and considerably more attractive telephone kiosk.

Parish Clerk, Julian Gibson, said, "I have been nagging the Council about getting this done for some months, but now I'm glad that we didn't get round to doing it earlier!"

The question that is unanswered, though, is what should be done with the box? At the moment it is just an empty telephone kiosk. Does anybody have any ideas about putting it to some useful purpose?