AND so farewell then Wire Fan Club – we hardly knew ye.

I’m well aware that the venture was not exactly tailor-made for misanthropes like Podium.

If I wanted to see the team up close and personal, the match ticket gets me near enough thanks. Or else I could catch a bus to Padgate College.

But the main bone of contention in these quarters (apart from the bizarre concept of an ‘official’ supporters club) was why another grass-roots voice was necessary when the Supporters Trust and Squadbuilder had been putting its collective money where its mouth has been for years.

Being a Wire fan should involve unshakeable devotion – allied with a hefty dose of cynicism from decades of dizzying highs and mind-numbing lows.

Fair play to Mr Roger Draper, currently doing sterling work on a national level, but the Age of the Marketing Guru has maybe given way to a more pragmatic era.

And the trust and Squadbuilder are proven brands, long before this short-lived fad, donating a six-figure sum to aid the Wolves since their inceptions.

For once, I’ll break the habit of a lifetime and be a joiner, hand over my grubby fiver each month and take the Squadbuilder pledge.

  •  Maybe I’m not the first to be disappointed at the state which contractors have left Bridge Street.

But someone at the Guardian took their eye off the ball three years ago so this column is calling out WBC over the ramshackle treatment of the River of Life.

Does the stellar work of Stephen Broadbent and dozens of Warrington schoolchildren, who contributed to the dozen shields decorating the route, deserve to become a builders’ compound?

Before WBC’s spin doctors descend on the editor, I’m well aware that facets of the artwork directly affected have been removed for safe-keeping.

However it makes your heart sink every time you wander by and is symbolic of the town’s total disregard for the thoroughfare over the past decade.

If I was Hancock & Wood, McDonald’s or Burger King I’d be asked for a non-domestic rates reduction.

  •  Bus adventures (part 94): On a brisk spring day, and with little sign of the Martinscroft or Westy buses surfacing, your correspondent wandered down Manchester Road.

Nothing had arrived outside Peacock Avenue, so it’s then a short walk to the first of the two cemetery stops.

Just in time for the Woolston or Leigh buses, according to the timetable. Except of course the Woolston bus pulls out in front of my very eyes, from the top of Padgate Lane, outside Chevy’s, and trundles on.

On closer inspection the timetable was for Helsby Street, two stops down. Oh how I laughed.

  •  The same walk into town involved a stop-off at the new(ish) entrance to St Elphin’s Park and a quick perusal of the Fairfield and Howley Residents Association notices.

One passerby asked whether I knew what the structure, where I was standing, used to be.

As a former Willis Street tyke, I confessed I didn’t.

An old tram stop, said the proud local, perhaps only one of two such surviving examples. Then he was off. Brightened up my day no end.

  •  A leaked letter from Warrington North MP Helen Jones to education campaigners on the controversial schools funding changes made me marvel.

Despite being presented with an open goal, to skewer the government, Mrs Jones still manages to have a sideswipe at WBC for not consulting her.

Reminds me almost of the gloriously belligerent former Crewe and Nantwich Labour MP Gwyneth Dunwoody.