IS there anybody there? Last night I dreamt I went ... (no, not 'to Manderley again', like Daphne du Maurier's narrator) but to Newnham's Victoria Hotel.

And like 'Rebecca' I was disheartened. Like her 'I looked upon a desolate shell... ("boarded up and looking sad, full of faded glory, a bit like Newnham itself') with no whisper of the past about its staring walls...and suddenly it seemed to me that light came from the windows... (was it Brian Bennett, with a candle in the wind?) And then a cloud came upon the moon.

So I got up and googled Newnham's Victoria Hotel. And I learnt that Newnham-on-Severn Tory councillor Diana Edwards had 'vowed to fight for the village's Victoria Hotel to be returned to its former glory'.

So much for her fight because that was nearly three years ago and the Vic is still in a 'hell of a state'.

But while Rebecca was reconciled to 'never going back to Manderley again' residents of Newnham and many others still struggle to come to terms with the council's failure, not just to remove the Vic's parking lot for second-hand cars, but to match its smug promotion of local tourism with some action to return to its former glory, the eyesore that is now the Vic. And what about the equally distressing King's Head in Littledean? I hear you say. What indeed. And what about the Forest's litter?

But where was I? Ah yes... I meant the night before last. (And not 'The Night Before Christmas'... ( you know... the one 'with Santa a wreck, how to live in a world that's politically correct?') But the night I needed first to 'splice the main brace' before attending one of Newnham's monthly parish council meetings.

Forget 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'... Last Tuesday, in a cramped upper room in Newnham's Armoury Hall, there was sufficient angst and odium to make the late Hunter S Thompson's tale of his motorcycle trip to the heart of the American dream look like an outing to a local care home.

Words like 'democratic' and 'transparent' might have floated in the atmosphere like confetti at a wedding. But when allegations of corrupt election practise crept across the table 'plutocratic' and 'opaque' seemed closer to the truth.

And when the chairman called a vote on whether the council needed to accept any responsibility for the flawed village hall referendum...and the answer was a plaintive 'no', Pontius Pilate never washed his hands so carefully.

The political air in Britain is rancid with entitlement. Only when politicians at all levels of our governing class talk more about duties and less about rights shall we cease to be a plutocracy and perhaps become something approaching a democracy.

Meanwhile our country's 'sleep of reason brings forth monsters' and mawkishness.

Perhaps we should be grateful that Google's aptly described 'A48 motorway' merely delivers juggernauts, shaken lives and broken roads.

– John Muir, Newnham.