This week’s column comes to you from high up in the Californian hills overlooking San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge.
Making your way to the West Coast of the States to visit friends and search for business is somewhat of a mission involving a twelve hour flight and eight hours’ time difference.
It’s a long way to come, and home seems such a small and distant place from such a vantage point. It makes you believe just how unimportant to the grand scheme of things, you, your community and its issues can be.
On the way over however, I took time to read a couple of Bucks Heralds from recent weeks and I was struck by the strong sense of spirit that shone through the letters pages and articles.
From the recent incredible effort to raise funds for young Alex to those writing in to say that they recognised the town could be in better shape but that we needed to be grateful for what we have, a deeper sense of community shines through than is on show over here.
Partly, this is to do with scale.
The States is a huge place and living in a gated property in its own 10 acre plot does separate you from your neighbours and shields you from the serendipity of bumping in to someone by mistake.
We benefit greatly from the lack of gated communities and the more human size of the town.
This helps, but I do sense it is more than this alone.
I am continually struck by the number of people who are prepared to step forward to help our community and to think not only of their own ills, but to be there for others.
I suspect this is borne of the self-same spirit that I spotted in the pages of the Herald.
We are a people that love to moan but equally we get stuck in and try to do something about it.
This week, three such men, all of whom I know, stood for the leadership of Aylesbury Vale District Council.
These three good and true men stepped forward to show their commitment to our community, and while you and I had no say in their election, the appointment should mean a difference to each and every one of us.
One stood for what he learned in the past, another on what is important in the present, and the third has a strong eye for the future.
All three were right. More importantly, all three ooze that self-same Aylesbury spirit that says, although we are small and insignificant on the world stage, we can still strive to become the best Aylesbury we can be.