For those of you who were unable to obtain the latest Harry Potter book ‘The Order of the Phoenix’ we have produced another edition of The Marlpit and it is delivered to your door. No hanging about in a queue at Waterstones` Book shop at midnight for this edition.

You will remember that we publish the August and September editions at the end of July so please send in any information about events that you have planned for those months by the copy date on the back page of this edition.

Obviously we must mention the awful happenings at The London Tavern and commiserate with all those whose livelihood and properties were affected by the explosion. Our thoughts are also with the workers who were injured and hope that by now they are making recovery. It is not often that Coltishall hits the national news, although RAF Coltishall does get a mention now and again. We can only be thankful that a far greater tragedy did not occur as the pub was empty, no vehicles were at the traffic lights, the children were safely in school and nobody was passing at the time. We do hope that all those who have been affected will go on to prosper in the future.

The annual collection in the brown envelopes has so far raised £1,894, roughly the same as last year and to all who have contributed we say thank you so much. One or two envelopes are still rolling in so if your envelope has not been collected, please pop it through the door of any one of the editors or hand it to your deliverer. We do apologise for some confusion over badges to deliverers as three people who had volunteered to collect did not receive their collectors’ badges and quite rightly

felt they could not go and collect without them. I will be writing to them individually to explain and apologise. Sometimes we just don’t quite get it right.

We also seem to have upset the Coltishall Parish Council, again quite inadvertently, and again I will be writing to them about it. It appears that we have not been printing the minutes of the Parish Council Meetings as often as the Council would like. We do have an Editor who tries to get along to the meetings who will do a report now and then of events. Our Editor lives in Coltishall and has every right to attend in his private capacity as a resident. It is not, however, his role to write the minutes of the meetings and we expect, if the council wishes to have the minutes or items from the minutes published, that they will send them to us. In the absence of any minutes from the council we do not feel that it is up to us to write them for them. Horstead and Stanninghall council send us copy unfailingly every month and for this we thank them. We would stress, however, that we are not showing them favouritism or being anti-Coltishall council, we are printing what we receive. This month we are printing Coltishall Council’s minutes because they were received by email just before the editors’ meeting started.

Finally we have received notification from Peter Bates that he will not be able to continue with his delivery and bulk delivering roles after July. Peter is increasingly busy with his work and other commitments and we wish him every success with them, He has been such an asset to the Marlpit over the years and has at various times held just about every role as an editor, and has also stapled, delivered and been a trouble-shooter for us. The Marlpit would not have survived without his massive contribution and on behalf of all the residents we thank him.

Please see if you can respond to the advertisements for new deliverers and also for a helper for the web site. Have a good July.

BG