A STORY I did on calls for a Skelmersdale town council has left me with a rather worrying prospect; what if one was actually set up?

Don’t get me wrong, democracy is definitely no bad thing, and Skelmersdale Town Council, if it ever exists, would give the town’s residents a bit more of it. The problem for me is that I’d have another council to try to cover, and it’s tricky enough as it is.

Chances are if you’re reading this you don’t care what happens with parish and town councils - I understand if you find England’s World Cup game against Slovenia a tad more pressing - but it’s not what they do that worries me. It’s just that there’s too many of them.

In West Lancashire alone there are no less than twenty town or parish councils (21, if you include the parish meeting at Bispham) and while they’re undoubtedly a great source of stories there’s no way I could cover all of them equally. Particularly not when I already cover the goings-on of West Lancashire Borough Council and Lancashire County Council, and that I also follow Sefton Council which has another nine parish councils within its boundaries.

Put it this way; in my old patch of Abergele in North Wales, I covered the two hour full council meeting of Abergele Town Council, the same again with the neighbouring Towyn and Kinmel Bay Town Council, and Conwy County Council’s bigger gatherings, which would take up perhaps a day’s worth of reporting time each month.

But to cover one meeting of each of the parishes in just West Lancashire each month would, I reckon, be a scary and unmanageable prospect, particularly in these austere, editorially-strapped times. It’s nobody’s fault. It’d just be difficult beyond belief to give these meetings the coverage they deserve.

So if the Skelmersdale Senior Citizens’ Association gets its wish and a Skelmersdale Town Council is set up, I’ll turn to the great works of Homer Simpson if they ask whether I’ll be covering it.

I can’t promise I’ll try, but I’ll try to try.

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