SOCIAL media can be a bit of a curse. I received a notification the other week about a Penketh Parish Council meeting which happened to be the annual meeting where the chairman and vice-chairman were elected and was being live-streamed on Facebook.

My initial response was that life is far too short to spend time I will never get back watching a load of people talking about precepts, potholes or dog fouling or whatever but against my better judgement, I switched off Emmerdale and settled down to be ‘entertained’. I wasn’t disappointed. There was so much going on it’s difficult to know where to start.

To use the vernacular, it was ‘absolute scenes’. It was as chaotic as an understated Handforth Parish Council but without the shouting.

For the record, I won’t name names here to save those involved from even more embarrassment.

So first up was the vote for the new chairman. Now I’ve been to many parish council meetings and seen many votes to elect officers but never one like the one I saw at Penketh.

Stick with me on this. There were two candidates for chairman and the ‘normal’ way to go about it is for the clerk to ask who wants to vote for Candidate A, who wants to vote for Candidate B and if there are any abstentions. All fairly straightforward.

But that’s not good enough for Penketh, oh no. They decided to do it their own special way.

Candidate A was presented and the members were asked who wanted to vote for him. Bizarrely, they were then asked who wanted to vote AGAINST him and then abstentions. I have to confess I’ve never seen that happen before but I didn’t have to wait long to see it again as the same process was repeated for Candidate B.

If that was strange (and believe me it most certainly was) we also had the spectacle of one of the councillors voting twice, once for Candidate A and once for Candidate B. Yes, that really happened.

And the same thing happened in the vote for vice-chairman.

Now I’m not an expert on the rules and regulations, standing orders, that sort of thing as they relate to parish councils but in my humble opinion, the way the vote was conducted must throw massive doubt over the validity of the outcome. But hey, this is Penketh so who knows.

That vignette on its own would have been enough but there was more to come. No sooner had the vote concluded, one of the parish councillors interjected and said he was resigning (he had taken part in the vote but to be fair, he abstained).

He said a few words, then in a dignified fashion, stood up and left the room.

The whole scenario put me in mind of the quote in the Oscar Wilde play The Importance of Being Earnest as spoken by Lady Bracknell “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness”.

Or in the case of Penketh Parish Council “To lose three councillors since last May’s elections may be regarded as misfortune, to lose four looks like there may be some unresolved issues."

Yes folks, four parish councillors have cashed in their chips since last May. I’ll just leave that there.

Is that all, I hear you ask. Well no.

At the end of the evening, in the bit where the public can have their say, there was another shock waiting when a former clerk announced she had received an anonymous letter through the post containing a printout of an email she said must have originated within the parish council that she had found so disturbing she had handed it over to the police to investigate.

I can’t wait to hear the outcome of that.

One final point, in the run-up to last May’s elections, there was a lot spoken about the need to remove ‘politics’ from the parish council.

The rallying cry was that there was no place for party politics. There is a sub-text to this if you substitute the word Labour in place of politics. To be fair, the independent candidates did well. Their message cut through and they won 10 of the 12 seats, ousting all but one of the Labour group that had previously had control.

The other politically aligned candidate who won a seat stood under the Conservative Party banner, the only political party now represented on the council.

So guess who the new chairman is?

Yes, the sole Tory. Strange that given the choice of an independent or a political candidate for chairman, the independents voted in the only candidate with political affiliations.

Absolute scenes.