Anyway the first house where Joy was called, the residents weren’t in, she pushed a leaflet through the letter box and a silent dog lurking inside bit her finger.

Just to be on the safe side, I took her to the doctor’s in Kings Langley – where the nurse was fully booked doing vaccinations.  So off we went to Hemel Hempstead and the Urgent Care Centre.  The picture shows Joy duly bandaged and armed with antibiotics afterwards.

But it reminded me of the dangers faced every day by postmen and deliverers of every kind.  And also how difficult and inconvenient it is to get to the rambling hospital site at Hemel.

Last weekend I wrote a post about Hemel A&E closing and that all roads no longer led to Hemel – well today they did.

Imagine my astonishment when I came to the top and found the tin church.  These are common in the Highlands, but I never thought I would see one in Hertfordshire.

Officially it’s the Church of the Ascension, and the tower looks like a Jules Verne rocket ready to blast you to the moon and beyond.

It’s the original flat pack church – normally designed for shipping out to the colonies.  Apparently you could even buy them in Harrods and I guess you still can.  It cost £80 – a bargain.   Refixing the steeple cost considerably more a few years ago.  And now they have a need to fix the roof.

So let me commend the parish coffee morning on the first Wednesday of each month.  You contribute to the roof, you get the chance to see inside the warm pitch pine interior, and you meet a lovely group of people including Bedmond’s energetic and much liked councillor Joy Mann.

We have always had a rope swing in our garden. Our children’s friends love it. Unfortunately squirrels also seem to have a taste for manila hemp and so every so often they bite through the rope where it is tied round the branch and it all comes down in a heap – fortunately without serious injury so far. I am prompted to record this, having just learned the origin of the phrase “Money for old rope”.

It comes from the use of old ships rigging being used to make paper. I learned this fascinating nugget of information at The Paper Trail at Apsley next to Bedmond and Primrose Hilland so only just outside the St Albans constituency boundaries.

Frogmore Mill on the Gade at Apsley was where the first ever continuous paper-making machines were installed – the so-called Fourdrinier machines which allowed mass production of paper and therefore a step change in availability of low cost books and newspapers.

Coincidentally paper was first produced in England in individual sheets only a few miles away in Hertford. St Albans had one of the first printing presses after Caxton introduced the process into England. And Watford became the print capital of Europe with the children’s books of my youth coming from Odhams Clear-Type Press.

Paper and printing became the engines of democracy – and Hertfordshire was at the epicentre.

Why money for old rope? Because some of the paper produced by the new process was for the banknotes first introduced during the Napoleonic Wars. As a young man I did a number of holiday jobs at Postlip Paper Mill in Gloucestershire where the first ever banknote paper had been manufactured – and they were still producing the highest quality chemical filter paper in ancient lime-washed and sunbeamed buildings when I worked there in the 1970s.The very knowledgeable former paper maker who showed us round Frogmore Mill was a fund of information on other familiar phrases. Knocking off time? That was when you used a sledge or mallet to knock off the drive belt connecting the steam engine to the machinery. Mind your p’s and q’s comes of course from the old boxes of solid type and the importance of not confusing the two letters.

The Paper Trail complex of ancient buildings dotted along the river house a number of different activities – conference and corporate entertainment facilities, a business incubator, and most interesting to me a small letterpress business using old-fashioned lead type-setting machines and museum-worthy Original Heidelberg printing presses. They even have the contract to print the Daily Order Papers for the House of Commons – an admirable use of public money to preserve a dying art.

I learned to print at school on an Original Heidelberg machine and I worked for a year at a small letterpress printers in Cambridge – it was a genuine craft swept away by computers and desktop publishing.

The credit crunch has been a savage blow to The Paper Trail as planned property disposals came to naught. Here is a museum celebrating Hertfordshire’s particular and special contribution to the history of civilisation. They are trying to raise money wherever they can. It’s well worth a visit and they need the punters.

There must have been a couple of hundred people there specifically for the rally – and then all the passers-by who were shopping at the French market.

I was pleased to be on the same platform as Roma Mills and Anne Main because there is nothing party political about this battle. We sink or swim together.

In summary I said (as I have said previously) that this proposal has perfectly horrible implications for Park Street and the villages but it is also a knife in the underbelly of St Albans.
In short I spoke about all the issues highlighted in my earlier blog on my formal letter of objection to the scheme. Now we have the hard work of mounting the technical arguments.

I hope to see lots of people at the St Albans District Council Planning Referrals Committee on Monday evening!

I did the Walking Race which has the great advantage of starting in the relative cool of 8 am – see atmospheric early morning picture (right).

The bizarrest moment was walking up Bedmond Lane and hearing a shrieking whistle ahead as a steam roller clanked, rattled and hissed past on its way to Redbourn. It seemed a metaphor for my own ancient machinery huffing and puffing round the 13.5 km course, which beats the bounds of the west of the constituency.

Going back down Bedmond Lane, we met a different kind of steamroller in the shape of the awesome phalanx of runners bearing down on us between the high verges like some wild infantry charge. All they lacked were the assegais.

I finished my stroll in just under three hours which meant I was there to see Dominic Easter triumph in the proper race in just over an hour. I first met Dominic when I spoke at St Albans School a year ago. He is on course to be a great running star, he made the race look so easy, and I will be able to tell people that I finished the Half Marathon ten minutes in front of him – shame I had to have a two-hour start…

It was a particular pleasure to be greeted at the finish line by Iqbal Zia, the new Deputy Mayor.

In the picture I have my race finisher’s medal. Iqbal has the much more significant badge of Deputy Mayor of the City and District of St Albans. He is the first representative of St Albans’s non-White communities to hold this office and he is proving to be a star.

Today he took off his badge and jacket and joined the children and their parents in the 1.5 km fun run round Verulamium Park. Great stuff.

One of the many best things about the St Albans Half Marathon is the way that so many different types of people are encouraged to participate – runners, joggers, walkers, veterans and children.

Schools compete against each other, and my oldest son’s first school St Alban & St Stephen retained the school trophy. Good to see their enthusiasm given all the snickiness about school sports.

I finish this post with pictures of the two kinds of steamroller on Bedmond Lane.

It is quite clear that the system is broken in the whole south-west of the county. Last night I was in Bedmond and the same issues were being raised on the doorstep. It must be heart-breaking for any parents and I thank my lucky stars that my own children all got into their first choice comprehensive school.

The simple fact of the matter is that too many local school places are taken up by children from outside the city and district – I am told that 310 more children will be coming in from outside the district boundaries from this September. This is specifically allowed under the rules, but that’s where the problems arise.

Within the district, treating St Albans city as a single parish has produced a nightmare for most families in the centre and south of the city where they have almost no chance of getting in to the prized STAGS, Sandringham and Beaumont.

Life is not made easier when St Albans has so many faith schools, whose catchment areas can become very wide. Liberal Democrat national schools policy is to ensure that faith schools remain properly inclusive of their local communities precisely to address the situation where families are denied their local school.

Questions need to be asked about the sibling rule and whether it should have the same over-riding supremacy when families move away from the priority catchment area for a school.

We also need to ensure that all schools in St Albans are equally prized and valued. There is no doubt that Francis Bacon in particular suffers from past reputation. Maybe a rebranding would give it a truly fresh start, there is no doubt that many of the core problems are being tackled but it takes a long time to overcome word of mouth based on ancient history. The now much lauded Sandringham came out of the much maligned Marshalswick School.

Another interesting idea was a “swap shop” where for example parents seeking a single sex school for their child and being awarded a co-ed could trade places with another family which wanted a co-ed and had been given single sex. It sounds barmy but that has happened this year, leaving both families unhappy and frustrated.

In the final analysis, there just are not enough schools. It’s the St Albans primary crisis writ large. Children’s lives and happiness are at stake. When is the county council going to grasp the nettle?

Walking was anyway a lovely way to do it – starting at 8 am before it got too hot and with the leisure to enjoy some spectacular views.

The whole exercise was a superb advertisement for St Albans, and the route itself had the great merit of linking St Albans with Bedmond, uniting the different strands of the constituency. Apart from some occasional unsightly fly-tipping, we went through glorious countryside and woodland.

Not being a clubber of the golf or dancing variety, I confess that I had not been to Batchwood Hall before. The view from there of the skyline of St Albans is simply breath-taking.

The event could not happen without a huge amount of work by council officers and all the uniformed and voluntary groups who provide marshals round the course. My hat off to them all.

And by the way I went round in sub-15 minute miles, completing the route in 3.04 hours and thereby just beating even the fastest of the runners – though I had a head start of two hours on them!