right winning festive front door is key

what went on at Dunster Castle in 1263! A coach trip took our members to Winchester for the Christmas Market and there are talks on the history of Sherborne Castle Gardens and life on a Fairground still to come

Last summer, our outings with coach pick-ups and drop-offs in various places went off to Dunster Castle, Croome Court, The Vyne and the Sandham Memorial Chapel, Castle Drogo and a guided tour of some ancient and interesting churches in east Dorset and for the more sprightly there was an annual walk, this year a gentle stroll up to Alfred’s Tower at Stourhead. These activities are greatly enjoyed by our members and provide an opportunity to meet friends and visit places which wouldn’t normally be on the agenda, and of course raise a little money to help our National Trust properties.

Why not come and join the association? Our membership secretary would love to hear from you: BVYNTmembership @outlook.com

Geoff Goater, committee member n You are probably right to double the rates on my second home in West Dorset, but don’t kid yourself it’ll sort everything for Dorset’s young people. It costs relatively little to build a house, and Dorset has the second lowest population density in England. We have nearly (6/7) of an acre each.

I’ve noticed the opposition in this second-emptiest English county. After my mum and dad retired here in 1985 they didn’t like new building blocking ‘their’ view. They didn’t appreciate my saying anyone who complained and had more than two kids or four grandchildren was being a hypocrite, so maybe also anyone who uses services substantially staffed by immigrants. (NHS anyone?)

Try living where l usually do in West London and watch the multi-storey rabbit hutches around you rising and blocking the sky – you guys even have stars, and air that doesn’t shorten your life.

Retirees do appreciate the famous West Country welcome to grockles, but they are freeing up more expensive space in the cities for younger workers. I reckon mum and dad spent half a million in the local economy in Dorset and another quarter of a million for mum’s last five years in a care home.

My friend, a former government chief architect (now living in a boat in Cornwall) vehemently argues that there are massive opportunities for sensitively siting new-build in the countryside. Before the enclosures plenty of Dorset was more densely populated than it is now.

Last Saturday I walked on

Dartmoor with, I guess, two thousand mostly Devonians protesting landowners’ criminalising the local population with a mob-handed legal team. It’s not original for the richest to divert the rest from their depredations by blaming outsiders, but the people I spoke to weren’t falling for it. Yet the land price inflation created by landed estates’ nearly 70-year exemption from inheritance tax will only get worse as billionaires, like Dyson, even if their first billion was socially useful, scurry into the market –not that that makes the hereditary owners of the large estates, for which Dorset is famous, necessarily better.

The longstanding aristocratic strategy of dribbling as little land for homes on to the market as will keep prices as high as possible is not new. But the

Financial Times will tell you that 80% of the finance (debt) sector rests on (inflated) security on land and homes. The more they can inflate that (your rents and mortgages) the higher UK asset values. Most of the money created in my working life has been through land price inflation. (Subtract your home new-build insurance estimate from the estimate on Zoopla. Coincidentally 80% for the land is normal.)

The are other complications to inflated land values but the ownership and financing oligopoly is the elephant in the room. There are 30 million empty bedrooms in the UK, mostly not in second homes and the necessary procedures to encourage owners to share could be eased while sustaining lodgers’ wellbeing.

Good luck in doubling the council tax take from us. If I commercially let my parents’ bungalow for more than 105 days a year, I can officially become a business and exempt. The likes of AirBnB would push me into unecological ‘added value’ redecoration, whereas now friends and family occupy in my absence, clean up and ideally donate for fuel usage (and spend more money with local businesses). My alternative is to bring forward my retirement here and declare my London house the second (or rented) home, although my son, who can no more afford to buy than most millennials, may have mixed feelings about seeing less of me. The silver lining of current economic turmoil is that the paper asset value of people like me will drop by six figures in around a year and, a few more millennials with wage rises above inflation should own not rent.

Land law, I was told by a law professor at Bristol, is a total mess. Good luck catching the mice but for real change face up to the elephants too. David Dewhurst, London

Vittles (food & drink)

Keeping things simple is often the best.

I have cooked more meals than the average person. When you have a restaurant it’s a bit like ‘entertaining’ 100 guests every day; the only bonus is that, unlike a dinner party, they pay as they leave.

I have also eaten in some of the finest eating establishments, both here in the UK and abroad. Undoubtably though, my best meal was experienced at a delightful Ferme Auberge, sitting under a veranda, naturally made by an ancient gnarled and twisted wisteria, its heady scent blessed by the day’s heat.

It was simplicity to an extreme, no pretentious affectations, just a cherished, well-used wooden table with bench seats, radiant sunflowers reverently placed in an old copper kettle gilded centre stage. Everything we ate had been grown on the farm and prepared with love. Food