Ah, Hadleigh. What a veritable gem, a glistening jewel combining a wonderful location and a cohesive, yet tolerant. community with a palpable sense of its own past and a shared vision for the future. It's even been painted by Suffolk's paint-placing son of great renown, John Constable.

Overlooking the majestic River Thames and dominated by a fine Medieval castle, albeit admittedly a little scuffed by time and housebuilders, Hadleigh is also the site of both a pioneering Salvation Army smallholder settlement and the 2012 Olympic mountain biking heats. The failure to combine the two was an opportunity missed: the cyclists could have scattered their seeds, so to speak, as they whizzed around their beloved dirt tracks.

Truly, Hadleigh in Essex is not a bad place at all in which to live.

But it's not 'our' Hadleigh, is it? We have no need of fortifications or estuary views and our small but perfectly formed Salvation Army citadel is enough tambourine-inspired activity for us.

They also have never produced as fine and as principled a martyr as, well, as you know who.

It's hard to conceive how anyone could possibly muddle the two up. It has happened, though. At the turn of the century, I vaguely recall a company produced engraved ceramicware for sale in Hadleigh-on-the-Brett that bore tasteful designs of the some of the iconic sights outlined above in Hadleigh-by-the-sundering-Thames.

Apparently, sales were somewhat muted.

So the binary I'm referring to is not the axis line from deepest Essex to lightest Suffolk.

Rather, I have in mind the perplexing question as to why the place most of us call home (and some call their second or third home), seems to produce two of everything, whilst one would quite probably do.

I think three examples – let's call them the unholy Trinity – will suffice.

Firstly, during the first lockdown (ah, that brings back happy memories of quiet – ever so quiet, spring days), and to their enormous credit, a group of concerned citizens volunteered to organise rotas to assist the elderly and others who might be self-isolating with their shopping, prescriptions and anything else that came to mind.

Yet, bizarrely, within a week there had been the mother of a falling out and, kerpow, Hadleigh had not one but two such support groups! Worse, rather than cooperating together, the two sides seemed to be in competition with each other, with loud social media acclamations that each was the rightful operation. Some of the personal bile made the Montagus and Capulets look like neighbours well on the way to sorting out a minor misunderstanding about 'that' hedge.

Then, there is the tale of Angela and Neil. Neil and Angela (to remain impartial) had a great idea: to set up a local foodbank that received donations in order to distribute the proceeds to the growing number of households really up against it.

With determination and drive they built up a very extensive network, extended its operations into repurposing laptops and then ………a massive, and very dramatic, falling out.

In the court of public opinion, both came out swinging accusations around like discarded and frankly no longer loved soft toys.

So now, Hadleigh has two foodbanks (three actually, but that's another story) and never the twain shall meet until Angela and Neil/Neil and Angela call a truce. I fear, if they don't, Hadleigh streets will witness Bugsy Malone-style drive-by shootings for months to come.

And finally, the heaving, pulsating metropolis that is Hadleigh has not one but two Facebook (other social media platforms are also available) pages. I mean it's like New York, New York (see what I did there) where there is SO much opinion and news that there is enough for two whole major news titles.

Admittedly, the two Hadleigh entities occupy slightly misaligned market positions. The one favours the use of sepia photos, gentle almost whimsical musings and polite queries as to QD's Sunday opening times. The other is something of a defamation lawyer's paradise, replete with a sub-vigilante anger management issues and harassed admins who seem aghast at the mess they've got themselves into.

If they merged, they would produce a page that more accurately reflects our town than the two separate ones.

The message from all of this? It's time to get along a little better. After all, there is only ONE real Hadleigh.