I’M delighted to report that this column has been nominated for a regional press Campaign of the Year award.

I don’t think I’m in with a chance of winning, not least because many of my competitors are daily papers with bigger readerships. (So I’ve got my excuse ready when I’m roundly defeated!) Also because the brief window for online voting closed before I could tell you about it in print. And because the shortlist is actually quite a longlist.

But at least it’s given more exposure to an issue about which I feel strongly.

What did I write about that interested the judges at the Society of Editors?

I questioned the plan to build hundreds of houses around Old Sarum airfield.

Not with strident Sun-style sensationalism, but with a variety of reasoned arguments and a healthy measure of scepticism.

And very grateful I am to the Journal for giving me free rein to express my views on this and many other subjects.

Whether readers share my concern or not (and I’ve heard from very few who don’t) they clearly think this is a development proposal of such significance that it needs vigorous public discussion – something our planning authority, Wiltshire Council, has yet to facilitate.

So where would that discussion be happening, then, in a democratic manner accessible to all our citizens, whatever their age and computerfriendliness, if not in the pages of this newspaper? Answer: Nowhere.

There are plenty of single-issue pressure groups. That’s the way society’s going, given our justifiable disenchantment with the party system.

But there’s nowhere else that provides a focal point for the entire city.

It’s easy to scoff about the ‘local rag’ – though I’d rather people directed their derision at the appalling standards of some national tabloids – but when weekly papers die, as so many have done recently, a community loses its collective voice.

Since this is Local Newspaper Week (what do you mean, you didn’t know?!) I just thought I’d let off steam on a subject dear to my heart.

Do you remember that 1970s Joni Mitchell song, Big Yellow Taxi? “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,”

she sang. Airfields, local newspapers, meadows...I can think of many instances where that applies.

  •  IN other flying-related developments (as they’d say on Have I Got News For You) readers may have noted that a drone carrying a camera dropped in on my perennial geraniums on Sunday.

Its owner wouldn’t have spied anything more interesting than my husband getting on with a long overdue spot of weeding and lawn-edging, assisted by the dog as Chief Twig Chewer, while I was enjoying la dolce vita in Tuscany with the Community Choir.

If the owner of this item would like to contact me and assure me that in future it won’t be hovering over my garden but minding its own business elsewhere, I’ll be happy to arrange its return.

anneriddle36@gmail.com