A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

I'm writing this column just after Valentine's Day, so I'm clearly in the mood for lurrrrrvvvvve.

Actually, the whole thing is a festival of kitsch, bang, wallop, isn't it? For me the most moving episode is always the prior evening's communal mooch around a service station with hundreds of other lost male souls seeking out the best of the worst remaining merchandise.

This meant my employing all the wisdom of Solomon in choosing between whether a Get Well Soon or a In Loving Sympathy card would be easier to adapt to one bespeaking of my eternal love for Mrs T.

Ditto the present itself. Whether I was being rash in choosing the DriveTec semi synthetic engine oil (it does come in a rose-red vessel, after all) over the more plainly branded G-Force equivalent remains to be seen. Certainly, my dear spouse maintained that look on her face for the rest of the night which articulated the message "I'm never going to forget this moment."

Bless her. And may the Lord keep watch over me in the meantime.

Now, my reason for these reminiscences is because I wanted to focus on the value of names.

Regular readers of my spiritual outputs (eager ectoplasmatics, if you will), might recall that it was I who branded Hadleigh Town Council as England's Most Useless or EMU for short.

Since then I've been deluged by a single letter protesting that if Mayor Gordon 'Jilted John' McLeod's misfiring misfits are to be compared in an avian manner, it was closer to a dead parrot.

Recent events would suggest that the entity is a combination of the two: verily a dead emu. Or maybe a flush magpie? More on that later.

The fact that the council emus abrogated their core responsibility in setting next year's budget by giving the Pirate Queen Wendy Brame and her staff the responsibility to come up with ideas as to where the cuts should fall and extra goodies be allocated is quite, simply, an abomination.   

You had one job emus, one job. With a couple of exceptions, you rather flunked that. Disgraceful. Yes, the councillors called out some of the Pirate Queen's wackiest ideas, but she should never have been given the power to put them forward in the first place.

In fact, at last night's budget-setting meeting, no fewer than four councillors, including Jilted John were too busy doing their hair to bother turning up to the most important town council event of the year.

Which begs the question: who actually runs the council? 

Father Derek has recently recruited some neophyte curates to swell our ranks. They are certainly an enthusiastic lot. And very earthy in their language. True sons of Suffolk, really.

I stumbled into a conversation they were having about Jilted John McLeod and his relationship with the Pirate Queen.

Jilted John and the Pirate Queen appear together

Most of it rather bewildered me, to be honest, especially the Latin term they employed to describe the Mayor: 'cattus flagellari'. 

How on earth is Jilted John like a flayed cat? Beats me (or maybe him). Would my dear readers, far more worldly than I am, be so kind as to explain what this actually means? 

It would appear that all but two councillors present agreed to let the unelected Pirate Queen sort out all subsequent budgets, with a little help – at £800 a month – from an out-of-town company called 12 Magpies – there being no accountancy firms based in Hadleigh, of course.

I do hope there's no naughtiness going on here and that the Pirate Queen has fully declared any direct or indirect conflicts of interest in this costly appointment.

Magpies, one for sorrow, 12 for wealth (Picture: Pixabay)

Setting out my mark for another naming run-up, I'm not sure the developers of what was Corks Lane have thought through their new description for their life-size battlefield diorama.

Bowler's Croft? The fact that the Hadleigh Cricket Club wicket is parallel to the development means that no bowler will ever delivery a googlie or wrong 'un from that end. And why croft, which refers to a small Scottish farm? I think that someone's let the kids loose in Gipping Construction's marketing department! Unless rumours that Babergh is going to make a loss on the scheme are true and the experience of crofters in being forcibly removed is a subtle reference to impending financial disaster?

And finally, I see that there is something of a brouhaha emerging regarding allegations that the residents of East House, now subdivided into at least three bijoux properties, have installed something called a mosquito device. Only, that's a misnomer. It's not aimed at dissuading irritating insects, rather teenagers and others who might choose to congregate nearby. 

Now if only they re-set the frequencies and installed it on the Guildhall, it might cause one or two folks from outside the town from accumulating excessive and unaccountable power?