200,000

Visits to my mayoral blog have now topped 200,000. I just want to say thank you for reading my posts. This blog was my way of explaining what a Town Mayor does. I am of course, one of many Town Mayors up and down the country and this blog only records how I have filled the role. But I hope that I have shown the people of Buckingham and people nearby (and perhaps further a field) something of the range of activities that a mayor gets up to. This blog is my commitment to being open and transparent in all that I do. There is nothing up my sleeve.

I have a few months yet to go, so please keep reading. Maybe this blog will top a quarter of a million visits. I am sure it won't go viral or rival the vloggers with their millions of followers! But it will serve as a long term archive of what the Buckingham Town Mayor did from May 2017 to May 2019 on the behalf of the people of the town.

Yesterday evening I had a meal with an old client now a good friend of mine. She told me of her involvement in a masters programme about community led regeneration. She decided to spend two years of her retirement studying ways in which communities can be more involved in shaping the future of their places: places where they live, work, visit, play and study. She told me that the first chunk of the programme was first developing more understanding of her own values, starting positions, priorities etc. She is the middle of writing a long essay called "The Ground on Which I Stand".

I just love that title.

In a way I have been doing something similar with this blog. The blog has not just been a document of my travels. I have tried, particularly through the speeches I have written, delivered and published here, and the reflections I have added as well: to put something about me here on these pages. I am not (just) a mayor, I am not a number: I am a free man!

(For those that don't know that was an allusion to an old TV series called "The Prisoner" with Patrick McGoohan playing the lead role.)

So what is the ground on which I stand? I could write lots about that, and perhaps one day I will. But for the time being I will simply restate my summary of my politics - particularly in the my current context:

I want Buckingham and indeed the world to be a place in which everyone has dreams and ambitions, and the wherewithal to achieve those.

As the Mayor, I will continue to look for all the ways in which I can be doing that. So for example today I am taking part in a 'Dragon's Den' type event organised by Action4Youth in MK (as part of their National Citizens Service summer programme). I can't wait to admire, praise and critique the work that the young people will have been working on!