I HOPE you voted yesterday. I did: I voted at the village hall we’re trying to save, across the road from the part-time post office we’re about to lose and only a thresher’s thirsty walk away from the village pub which this week so mysteriously and depressingly closed its doors.

What’s all that got to do with politics, you might ask? Everything, actually. For three hundred-or-so days of each year village hall, post office and pub are the epicentre of my life in Paradis-sur-Tweed. Throw in a local shopping trip (we lost our village emporium years ago) and time spent in the garden and you there glimpse a substantial portion of my life.

There’s more, of course there is: writing columns, broadcasting, trips to London, foreign holidays, occasional appearances on telly. But when it comes to happiness then post office, village hall and pub are pretty much the hub.

In my Other Life I’ve enjoyed meeting the powerful and the famous. I still do, but I wouldn’t dream of talking about them (given the resentment such self-inflating recollections engender among The Journal’s letter writers). Besides, as the Queen once told me, “Never name-drop, Banksy…”

The point is, local politics is so much more accessible and important to the quality of our everyday lives: public pressure blew away plans for four massive wind farms up here in north Northumberland while public ridicule has forced Berwick council into an embarrassed climbdown on its risible ‘zero tolerance’ policy concerning local business signs.

No such luck in affecting national or international issues: my wife and daughter joined the million who marched in London and Glasgow to stop Bush and Blair invading Iraq. Where did THAT get them?

Many of you – not me! – would have Britain turn its back on Brussels and bolt the nation’s door against incomers. Fat chance!

But when it comes to local politics, coalitions of interests make strange bedfellows: there is no more mutton-chopped an old Tory than The Byreman but he’s been striding the shire shouting the odds for the local Lib Dem who “understands the farmer”.

And me? I did the unthinkable and actually read the literature supplied by our local young Conservative candidate, an engaging chap who shares my concerns for a sense of community and rural solidarity and who comes to our village events.

I won’t say where I put my ‘X’. I don’t expect you to tell me where you put yours.

But I hope you voted yesterday . . .

BEST line ever from the groom’s speech at a wedding Gemma and I recently attended: “I’m pleased to see the marriage service encourages me to take SIXTEEN wives,” he said with a nervous glance at his bride. “Four better, four worse, four richer, four poorer . . .”

MY undying admiration for young Josie Grove, who was killed by leukaemia, and my own brush with the disease cause me to take a continuing interest in research into the illness. I commend this recent item to parents’ attention.

Professor Patricia Butler, an eminent epidemiologist at The University of Southern California, has produced startling research indicating that children who attend playgroups or go to day care – in other words mix freely with other young children and share their childhood infections – are 30 per cent less likely to contract childhood leukaemia because their immune systems are better developed.

Strange ‘myths’ from my own early life flood back: “A peck of dirt won’t harm you”, my aunt was fond of saying as she dusted down a dropped piece of toast…”Keep a dog in the house and the kids won’t get asthma,” my gran used to say. And weren’t we encouraged to catch our pals chickenpox and measles so we wouldn’t be troubled in later life?

Won’t it be great if ALL the Old Wives Tales turn out to be true?