The Force be with you

Berwickshire is one of the safest places to live according to the local fuzz. (Hard copy Berwickshire News page 4-not yet on line)Only 71 reported crimes in the last month and 80% solved Acting Sergeant Dishington told the Berwickshire Area Committee. Crime, such as it is, (and you can get a summary here is mostly of the yobbish variety. One police 'initiative' has to do with the dreaded boy racers with 90 young drivers given a course on road safety-in Duns, naturally, and remarkably enough only one ASBO has been issued-it may have been of course that some of the offending drivers were just too fast for the local police drivers. Judging over by the still appalling standard of driving by youngsters in souped up and noisy cars the message has yet to get home.

One solution by the Hutton Think Tank (Outside the box section) is to have role model drivers for these young tearaways. Hence the proposal for a new Duns Festival-Dreivers Week instead of Reivers Week. A Dreiver, A Dreiver's Lass, A Left Hand dreive Man, Right Hand Dreive etc. Young upstanding people with clean licences and in respectable eco friendly electric cars would drive around carefully performing their public functions and give their horses a week off

Supporters of this idea are asked to double park out the Jim Clarke Rooms in Newtown Street and honk your horns for upward of five minutes.

If the Police ask you to move on.

Do so, but carefully

Labels: Crime in Berwickshire, Dreivers Week, Duns Civic Week

  ¶ 1:18 PM (0) comments

  Duns Disco Clangs A

Sometimes, even in the silly season-a lengthy period in the letter column of the Berwickshire there comes a classic intervention by a correspondent and the following is an example:

Through your column I would like to air my views and the views of many about the Duns Reivers week street party on Saturday, July 12.
Firstly the whole week was a huge success and the Reiver and his party did a sterling job and did the town proud. Well done.
However, the committee decided to have a disco playing at the street party with a DJ who loved himself and didn’t seem bothered if anyone else was enjoying themselves.
The biggest mistake he made, and is definitely an unforgivable mistake, is when he asked for the Reiver and lass to come on stage at midnight he introduced him as the Kelso Laddie, then oops the Duns Laddie!
It has been tradition for the Reiver and party and ex-Reivers parties to get on stage at midnight and sing the 23rd psalm and then get all other towns to join in with their songs.
However, after singing Duns Dings A (without a microphone) they were both ushered off the stage and told that was it.
Many locals tried to sort it out and were given the same response!
I think all in all a huge embarrassment for Duns as the 23rd psalm is what everyone was waiting for and people were blaming the Reiver and his lass for not fulfilling their duties. This was most definitely not the case.
That sort of party needs a band playing and in the past has been great and talked about by many towns, but this year I felt so sorry for the Reiver and Lass as it was not an appropriate ending to their week.

Huttonian moving house missed most of the week and had not heard of this embarrassing finale to what was apparently a good event. We have all met DJ's who get it all wrong but this seems to have been a classic of its genre. Perhaps the poor sod had never. come across the 23rd Psalm-not reached the charts recently. Or, and this is understandable, the DJ was, horrors, an Englishman and got lost amongst the lassies, Dingers, Reivers and a' tha' .

(Or he may have been one of our builders, which would explain a lot)

Next year bring back the Pipe Band

I say

Labels: Duns Civic Week, Oops

  ¶ 6:51 AM (0) comments