John, the deputy mayor, after the meeting

I've been very pre-occupied recently with preparations for the vote at the Town Council meeting tonight. We had to approve the budget for the next financial year and in doing so set the level of the part of the council tax which pays for the services we provide for the town's residents.

This year central government has made major changes to the council tax benefit system, which will have a big impact on all parish and town councils from April 2013. It has meant that all small councils have had difficult decisions to make about their tax raising. No-one is happy with the changes, particularly me. But I think it best if I don't express my true feelings.

The council meeting went well after a prior briefing session for all councillors on the background to the changes. Before our vote on the budget we had to interview five local candidates for the two vacant positions as ward councillors. There was a unanimous result which does show how like minded we are as councillors. This process is called co-opting, which is only required when no residents have called for an election. When I first became a councillor some years ago, I was co-opted.

I was encouraged to stand by John Marjoram, who was the mayor of Stroud at the time, and he had helped me to fight a campaign to stop an unwanted development project in our part of town. Although I am not a Green, I do feel empathetic to their stance, and John thought I could be a councillor. He likes people who are prepared to get stuck in, as he has done as a peace campaigner all his life, and a Green politician more recently. He has been the mayor for at least thirteen years, off and on, and is now the deputy mayor. His experience, knowledge and social concerns have been very helpful to us all.

After the meeting ended, he and I waited to talk to the press representatives from the two local papers, to brief them about our decision on the council tax issues. They will get a press release tomorrow, but it is always useful to help them by explaining the somewhat complex technical issues, which of course have major financial implications to their readers. They are very supportive of what we do, as I think are the residents, as they have voted in a green council for the last twenty years.

John has been my blip subject many times before and is used to being photographed, so I grabbed this moment before we spoke to the journalists. The overhead fluorescent office lighting is not very flattering. The picture on the wall is of the Old Town Hall, in the Shambles market place, just off Stroud's High Street. It was created by Michaela Stafford in 1994, when she was at Stroud School of Art, and I think the town council bought it with several other pictures of local scenes by various artists, which adorn the walls of the meeting room.

At the same meeting last year

Another of the local pictures