Doncaster is odd but never boring

Ex Doncastra semper aliquid novi as the Romans remarked, or would have done had there been an elected mayor and rumbustious council in the days when they ruled Yorkshire. Those of us old enough to remember Donnygate and the jailing of assorted council members in the South Yorkshire town, have got used to bizarre political developments following one after the other. And now we have a new variant. The curious English Democrat mayor Peter Davies has lost an attempt to persuade newly-resurgent Labour to take two seats in his governing Cabinet. Wary of Davies' unusual and very right-wing statements (which often differ from the humdrum business of actually making Donny tick), the majority party is backing off and forming a shadow administration of its own. It is a strange state of affairs, with Labour holding an easy majority of 43 of the town's 63 council seats, while Davies actually runs things with a Cabinet consisting only of himself and four other independent or Tory councillors. A fifth has decided not to carry on and is retiring to the back benches while the sixth lost his seat. The whole thing is like a less glamorous version of the United States at various stages in its history, when a president from one party has governed with, or against, a congress dominated by the other. Davies has appropriate experience, mind you: the only major political party he has not belonged to in more than 40 years is the Liberal Democrats. Giving the birds the bird? "Kitty-wark!" is the cry of one of the UK's most distinctive seabirds, and if you want to see them at their best, hie thee off to Bempton cliffs between Filey and Brid. The sight is unforgettable. If you want to see them at their most controversial, however, head further north to the very centre of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The four great granite pillars of the Tyne Bridge – the one with the lovely crescent of Dorman Long steel – are home to the country's only urban kittiwake colony. Goodness, are they noisy. Amplified by the canyon-like streets, which rise 15 storeys to the underbelly of the bridge, the occupants of over 150 nests shriek and squawk all day between April and August. And goodness, are they messy. If you could reach the crevices and combine their layers of crap with the daily inundation on the streets below, you'd be a modern-day Colonel Thomas North (the Nitrate King of Chilean fertiliser, from Victorian Leeds). Now the birds are the centre of a dispute between local traders, the dynamo of Newcastle Gateshead's cool inner city revolution, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds plus other green groups. Should they be expelled, as they were from Gateshead's Baltic when it became a trendy art gallery? Or should they stay, as a tourist attraction whose interest outweighs its lurid disadvantages? Local media sites are running polls and consultations and no one expects any instant decisions. But Gateshead built a nifty little Kittiwake Tower when the Baltic birds fled, and it's been quite successful (though some have moved back to the gallery's window ledges). Newcastle is pondering something similar, but bigger. The giant Perch of the North? Reading isn't believing Panic over. National publicity over the apparently hopeless youth of Cumbria has turned out to be based on a busy police constable's computer keying mistake. I am not one to talk in this respect; Private Eye's Pissed Old Hack Baffled By New Technology might have had me in mind, apart from the pissed bit. But here's what happened. Answering a Freedom of Information request, Cumbria police included a nine-year-old among drink-drivers, which gave welly to an overall 'dismal nortth' study of under-18s arrested for car crime in our three regions since 2009. Whoops. He wasn't nine. His date of birth was out by ten years. As the police say: "It was later amended to his correct age of 19. We apologise for any inconvenience caused." This happened to me years ago, when I was served deportation orders from Zambia giving my age as six months, rather than 17 (It's my birthday tomorrow, btw, 18 May). I've often imagined government officials in Lusaka discovering the file later, and wondering what such an undesirable baby can have been up to.