And nowt to do with the village!

The title of this week’s blog comes as a result of a comment made, which is much appreciated and valued, from a follower of the Toller Porcorum Facebook page.

I was walking Misty over fields the other side of the Kingcombe Centre the other Sunday morning when I met a chap out looking for his dogs. It appeared they had gone AWOL. He was not worried as they often legged it and came back when they were ready.

As we were both retired we got talking as you do and it turned out he was born and bred in Hooke and went to school in Toller many years previously. He was telling me how things had all changed over the years. He said the area around the Kingcombe Centre used to be home to 60-70 people and they never had a postbox. Apparently postie, who had a rest house near Hooke would ring his bell on his way back through to Toller and people would come out and give him their letters and parcels.

Before we parted company he told me how the watercress grown in Hooke was loaded on to horse drawn carts and taken down to Toller station where it was loaded on to the train and taken off to who knows where.

We both agreed that we lived in changing times as we said our goodbyes.

Now talking about trains I had to attend a two day meeting in London last week, thus no blog. I chair a Community Interest Company referred to as the Dorset County Sports Partnership or Active Dorset for short. Anyway we are one of 43 in England and once a year all the Chairs and Chief Executives touch base to discuss strategy and forward planning type of things.

My Chief Executive gets me some return tickets to London from Dorchester south but tells me I’ll have to purchase my own underground tickets. So squeezing into one of my old ill-fitting suits from when I was working Mrs. F drops me off at the station reminding me she is not a taxi service. So boarding the 11.33am to London Waterloo, stopping it seemed just about everywhere and places it was not meant to I settled into some light reading for the nearly three hour journey.

On arriving at London Waterloo I made my way down the escalators into the heart of the underground system. Now, I said to myself, where is the booking office? I must have looked like a lost pensioner as a really nice member of staff came over to me all to quickly to lend a hand.

“I want to purchase a ticket to Warren Street station please and I can’t find the ticket office,” I said. “Oh we don’t have one of them anymore,” was his polite reply, “But do you have a contactless card,” he asked. I then saw a hole-in-the wall ticket machine and thanked him and said I would use my card in the machine.

Still smiling and being ever so polite he said, “No sir, you misunderstand me, you don’t need a ticket if you have a contactless card.” Let’s just say the penny was not dropping for me and the nice chap could see this so he gently took my elbow and asked me to follow him. Anyway he led me to the barrier and said, and this was when the penny dropped, “Swipe you card over the terminal and do the same at your destination and that is all you need to do.”

I was really impressed and thanked him profusely. Ticketless travel on the underground network whatever, next driverless trains? London, I found in the short time I was there, is such a multicultural city full of young people, seeking to making a living from all four corners of the world, yes I know the world is technically round. How it has changed since I was a boy.

Everywhere I went, where I stayed and whoever helped me was not a native from these shores. Every last one of them was polite, hardworking, well turned out with a bright smile. Whether we end up with hard or soft borders let’s make sure we continue to invite the brightest young things from around the world to our country as I for one see it being a better place for it. Not sure I want Kevin and Perry serving me my breakfast at 7.30am on a Wednesday morning.

Now with any networking, information sharing event there has to be some talking and the transfer of new ideas. So on the Tuesday evening the Chairs of the 43 partnerships along with others sat down to dinner and in between courses we interacted with our speaker Myron Rogers from across the pond ([email protected]). He spoke to us about ‘The Art of Change.’ Let me quote a few of the key messages he gave us:

• If you can find a path with no obstacles it probably doesn’t lead anywhere;
• The process we use to get to the future is the future we get;
• The way that a complex system responds to a situation is determined by the system itself not the situation and we see and hear what we know; and
• A living system preserves it’s identify. It will change in order to preserve it.

Now a week later I am still trying to get my head around some of what the above means but for me I guess it means, ‘if we continue to do things the way we always have done, don’t be surprised if the things we get are the things we always have had and not necessary the things we might actually want’.

Change is mostly continuous (contactless travel on the underground) it is in all our daily lives regardless of who we are, what we do or where we live. Change will differ of course dependent on who we are, what we do and where we come from but there is no avoiding it. Sometimes change is more sudden and uncomfortable, discontinuous if you like, and we might worry more about how we are going to cope with it (Brexit being a case in point).

Myron Rogers might suggest there is an art to change. That tends to suggest it is more about cultural (the way we do things around here) than by systematic mechanical process alone. In the end a bit of both I suggest. The way we do things around Toller and Hooke have changed greatly over the last 100 years. That change has been affected by both internal and external forces, some continuous and some discontinuous. We can’t change any of it now even if we wished to because it’s happened and can’t be undone. But what we can do is affect the future if we want to by being a proactive part of it.

Now that has got something to do with Toller!

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ― Margaret Mead