About a year ago I made the rather (in retrospect) strange decision to put my name forward to become a local community councillor. It’s a long story, but I did it as a favour to a kind farmer neighbour who asked if I’d take over from him. He’d been doing it for 20 years and had had enough. He thought of me, he said, because of the huge fuss I had made over a road closure that was affecting me and my neighbours by writing lots of angry emails to the local MP. He thought community council work might be just the sort of thing I’d enjoy.