Mammy has been watching Dennistoun Community Council ask for new members.
Not for fame. Not for money. Not because anyone gets a shiny office.
Because somebody actually has to turn up.
Dennistoun Community Council has warned it could cease to exist if more people do not come forward, extending its application deadline to 9 October. The council has appealed for residents willing to give up a couple of hours one evening a month to help represent the neighbourhood.
Mammy has seen this sort of thing before.
Everyone wants the pothole fixed.
Everyone wants somebody to object when a planning application looks daft.
Everyone wants the park protected, the traffic sorted, the bins emptied and somebody from the council to explain why the thing that was meant to happen in March is now apparently happening in November.
Then someone asks:
“Right, who can give up two hours on a Tuesday night?”
Suddenly the room develops a fascinating interest in its shoes.
Community councils are one of those bits of civic machinery most people barely notice until they need one. They do not run Glasgow, but they give neighbourhoods a formal route into consultations and local decisions.
Which means the problem is not really that nobody cares about Dennistoun.
Quite the opposite.
People care deeply about parking, buildings, schools, pools, traffic, streets and what somebody is planning to put at the end of them.
The difficult bit is finding people willing to sit in a church hall with an agenda and do something about it.
Mammy, naturally, already has the pen.
She has the form.
She knows where the form was put.
She has probably brought a spare form in case somebody says they forgot theirs.
And she would like to know whether everyone intends to keep having opinions about the neighbourhood without occasionally volunteering to carry one of them into the meeting.
Because local democracy is very much like the school fayre.
Everybody loves it.
Right up until someone asks who is doing the raffle table.
