LET me tell you something about Cheshire.
It starts at Hoylake in the west and ends at Stalybridge in the east.
Even though Wirral and anything the other side of Bowdon has not been in Cheshire since the last time they mucked about with the boundaries, the folk who live there still see themselves as Cheshire people.
Certainly those whose families who can trace their residential antecedence right the way back through the mists of time to, oh, 1974 and beyond.
That was when they were displaced, told they were someone else, but they know they are from Cheshire, whatever the maps say.
It must be terrible not to belong to a real county, to be part of some sprawling metropolis with a made-up name instead.
Being of Cheshire – Lancashire, Cornwall, wherever – is to have an identity. It becomes part of your character and romantic.
Being from Merseyside or Greater Manchester is to be an ant.
Tell people that is where you are from and you are known as a Scouse or Manc, like millions of others and it is no use trying to explain you overlook the sea or the Pennines. It’s too late. They have you weighed up.
They chopped lumps off Cheshire before and beggared around with county boundaries all over the country at fantastic cost to all of us and now they’re at it again. Oh why don’t they just leave us alone. There were nowt wrong wi’ it to start with.
I never noticed the public clamour. My wife usually lets me know the way the wind’s blowing, yet she never once said: “You know what I really, really want? Local government reorganisation.�
I can’t recall the marches and coppers dragging away long-haired protesters still clutching banners proclaiming: One Unitary Authority – Or Die.
Politicians can’t help changing things.
Something as fundamental as an ancient county can be tootling along, minding its own business and upsetting no one, when – wallop! – someone says it’s not allowed any more. It is antiquated, as if they had suddenly noticed and that was itself reason to start dismantling it.
This time we are being cut in half, East and West, like the old Germany, abolishing six boroughs which never really caught on.
They were an invention when what were known as rates took off like Wayne Rooney’s pay packet.
Ahh, but this time we are told, local government will not only be cheaper and efficient. Yeah, course.
Your bills will go up to pay for something you never knew you wanted.
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Real Cheshire folk know their true boundaries despite lines on a map: I was born, and still live on the Wirral - born in