The Buzz Around Beetley

~ beetleypete

This blog is named after where I live, Beetley Village, in Norfolk.

The name of the village has absolutely nothing to do with Bees, Beetles, or Volkswagen cars. However, that does not stop the local Parish Council associating the place with Bees. Our amateur football team is called The Beetley Bees, and they play in yellow and black striped shirts. And the Parish Council newsletter is called The Beetley Buzz.

(Both photos can be enlarged for detail)

We don’t have a local newspaper here. With a population numbering less than 1500, it would not be financially viable. The closest alternative is The Dereham Times, a weekly newspaper published in our nearest town. If something of note happens in the surrounding villages, including Beetley, it might get a mention. Or it might not.

If you enlarge the photo to read the text above, you will see that not much happens here. No crime reports of any kind feature, which of course is a good thing. The big news and first feature is the problem of dog-fouling, and owners not picking up their dog’s poo. That is about how angry it gets around here.
Then there is a notification of a keep fit class for ladies, a forthcoming Quiz Night at the junior school, and a note about fundraising for the volunteer lifeboats.

No stabbings or murders. No house burglaries, street robberies, or even a car theft.

To save paper, and money, Page 2 is printed on the back.

This concerns planning applications, local meetings, and the news that the small amount we pay to the Parish Council each year has been increased.
By the princely sum of £1 per year. Then there is a report of the Patient Group at out local Doctor’s Surgery, and a dog-biting incident where I walk Ollie, on Beetley Meadows.

This is local news, for local people, and it makes us feel glad that we chose to live here.

That’s ‘The Buzz’ around Beetley, at the start of 2020.

56 thoughts on “The Buzz Around Beetley”

  2. Sounds lovely Pete, but I wouldn’t trade living in California, enjoying the many distractions our city of Campbell has to offer during the week, and the quietness of the lake on the weekends. The weather is always mild which means there is not a lot of diversity between on season to the next but you get used to it. Love hearing about Beetley and the workings of a small town.

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    1. Thanks, Cheryl. I do envy your weather, and varied scenery. But I don’t envy the ever-present possibility of so many natural disasters like earthquakes and forest fires. I suppose that’s the price you have to pay for the good stuff. 🙂
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  5. I know many who like to live in or near big cities, but there is a quiet charm of small towns that you miss out on when you live in an overpopulated place. We should all be so lucky if our biggest problem was dog poo. My city has about 30,000 people, and there is nothing bigger within three hours of travel. I like it that way.

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    1. I do too. There is a lovely house for sale just two doors from me!
      You could take Ollie out sometimes, and babysit him too. He would look forward to seeing his ‘Auntie Kim!
      I would show you around, and tell you how to get everywhere.
      Maybe one day… 🙂
      Best wishes, Pete.

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    1. You could buy a nice house for a very reasonable price. Good secondary schools within a few miles of the village, and complete peace and quiet most days. No crime recorded for years, and that was ‘vandalism’. (Broken glass, and ripping up some wild daffodils.)
      This is an example of a great value large house nearby.
      https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/53800997?search_identifier=1535b60b9760ba58dfda17a3a42321d7
      But detached 3-bed houses can be had for not much over £200,000. This one is two doors away from our bungalow, and lovely inside. The garden is very small, but it is opposite Beetley Meadows.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  10. Pete, in California’s Napa Valley wine country, there is The Yountville Sun, the weekly 10 page newspaper that looks at all of the week’s happenings in the town of 3,400…from the weekly bocce competitions to wine tastings and new menus for the local restaurants, it has a weekly feature where 6 different people write about a single topic of interest to the community….oh, and once in a while an angry “letter to the editor” gets jaws wagging as well!

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    1. In the Dereham Times, letters to the editor can become quite confrontational too. Usually about housing developments, and money wasted by the local council.
      I love the local news. Tractor thefts, missing rabbits, lost cats, and Scouts raising money for charity.
      It’ s a soothing alternative to national and international events. 🙂
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  11. Beetley doesn’t have much in common with Las Vegas, which we tout as the entertainment capital of the world, and whose population (if you include the whole valley) is nearing 2.5 million. With the economy back on track after the Great Recession, the town is booming again, not only with new housing construction, but also with major projects like Resorts World, the Las Vegas Convention Center expansion (under which Elon Musk’s The Boring Company is busy tunneling), the MSG Sphere, Allegiant Stadium (for the Raiders football team), etc. The police department here is extremely well trained, and very serious about their work, which is good because the city attracts, and is home to, a significant criminal element. Still, most residents feel pretty safe. Apart from the excitement of living in a 24-hour environment that boasts many superlatives, the best part of living here is the surrounding desert, which offers endless hiking possibilities. In fact, I’m leaving on a hike in about an hour!

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    1. I imagine that LV is the complete opposite of Beetley, in every way. Even Norfolk’s largest city, Norwich, has a population of less than 150,000. Around here, it’s ‘The Metropolis’!
      Have a nice hike, David.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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    2. As someone who visits Las Vegas regularly, I agree the town feels very safe…we come to have fun, eat at nice restaurants, see shows and maybe gamble a bit…i can imagine it gets old to always have visitors!

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  12. It’s one of the reasons why we wanted to move to Suffolk. Our village is very similar. We have flower festivals, horticultural shows, church fetes, and grow your own sunflower and Christmas lights competitions (we won the latter in 2016). No stabbings, shootings or fights on a Saturday night – well, not that I know of anyway…

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  17. That used to be like the little town I lived in but not now. I moved 40 minutes away to the “big city” of 30,000 people where there are drug busts, murders and muggings. Then there was the drunk bicyclist that ran through the back windshield of our car when it was parked out front. That was fun. Still, it’s actually not as crazy as it sounds. The murders are once every few years, the drug busts are – well, no sugar coating those. We have an opioid crisis and heroin use is back up again here. The only thing I made up was the muggings. They actually don’t happen here. We feel safe to walk the streets most times of the day because so far the murders have been within families and so have the overdoses. Sigh.

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    1. The nearest big town to us is Dereham, four miles south. They do have a problem with drug-dealing, and some very occasional weekend fights in bars. But as the population is just 16,000, it is usually the same people involved in any crime. For non-criminals, it is completely safe there. 🙂
      Best wishes, Pete.

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      1. It’s pretty much the same people in this town too. I also doubled our population. Oops. It’s only about 15,000. We have three towns that all run together. I got confused. 😉 me and numbers do not mix. 30,000 is probably the population of our entire county.

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  18. Our town still publishes a daily newspaper. We are probably one of the few residents who do not subscribe to it. They bill themselves as “The World’s Smallest Daily Newspaper”. They have an online limited version, but they have so many ads now it is annoying to read there. When we had the black bear in our backyard drinking the sugar water from the hummingbird feeder, they published my photo in the newspaper.

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    1. That’s nice though. People like to read about their neighbours, and a good ‘human interest’ story. 🙂
      If we had a bear in our back garden, it would make the national news! 🙂
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  19. I would love to live somewhere like that. I am a country person at heart, but frustrated to be living un a steelmaking town. Though not much steelmakung goung on now. We’ve been taken over by the Chubese!

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    1. I was happy enough in London, for most of my life. I didn’t know places like Beetley still existed. 🙂
      Once I got to the age where I wanted peace and quiet, I found pretty much the ideal spot.
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  20. Did they ever find the owner of the dog in the biting incident? When I was a reporter on the local newspaper one of my jobs was to attend various community council meetings – dog fouling was pretty high on the agenda of most!

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    1. I think people know who owns the ‘bitey dog’. I haven’t come across it though.
      There are only three houses in my road that don’t have a dog, and some have four or five. So dog poo is always a bone of contention. 🙂 (Pun intended…)
      Best wishes, Pete.

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