Langport offers to help...
The Red Cross and other international charities say they're "delighted" with a suggestion that Langport's crumbling old red phone box should be used to house refugees.
The kiosk, at the end of the Avenue next to the railway bridge (which in Western Gazette Land is Moor Close), hasn't had a phone in it for a few years now. The paint is peeling and the windows are cracked and missing (sounds like The Angel)
Last summer this man was also approached to take over the running of the box but he declined saying it "stunk a bit"
The box has been there since at least the 1960s, possibly even decades earlier and is the area's last. There used to be one in the layby opposite The Dolphin, one near the Post Office next to Stella Stuckey's old junk shop and one more between Portland Road and Wagg Drove down in Huish.
In recent discussions on its future, Langport Town Councillor Paul Toogood is quoted as saying "We could put a refugee in it." Sorry Councillor Toogood, Mr House has beaten you to it. 250 Eastern Europeans have been living in the boarded up property opposite The Old Black Swan since 2005.
- and besides, housing refugees in phone boxes isn't a new idea...this man's been living in one in Othery since January.
Mr Toogood, who attended The Prince Phillip School of Things Not to Say in Public, later went on to tell the Gazette that there were also plans for a defibrillator in the old box. But surely the box is at the wrong end of the Avenue for that? The old people's home, Ashley House, is at the other end isn't it? Unless it's for the dodgy cider tasting judge who lives at number 2.
There are also unconfirmed reports that local councillors in both Langport and Huish are arguing over whose responsibility it is to clip the hedges behind the old phonebox.
Whatever its future useage, Carry On Langport appreciates efforts to preserve the old landmark...especially as it happens to be where the Editor's expectant mother ran to from her home at number 6 in 1970 to ring her husband and tell him that that I was on the way!
(I remember it well, the phone box even stank of p**s in those days...and mother's waters didn't help)
