I ride the N4 home after a late shift three nights a week. Please tell the council that the buses are not a luxury. Before April I was paying £14 for a taxi I could not afford. Now I pay £2 and I sleep on the way home. (Name supplied, Fiveways) The gas holder is the ugliest object in Port…

At quarter past two every afternoon, Kestrel Primary goes quiet. Four hundred children, their teachers, the caretaker and the two women in the office stop what they are doing and read a book. Any book, as long as it is made of paper. The school dropped written homework for its younger classes last September and gave the time back to…

A robot built from a vacuum cleaner motor and a cereal box won the regional schools final for Ashgrove Academy on Tuesday. The team of five goes to the national round in March.

For seventy minutes at Halden Park on Saturday, Port Avery Rovers looked like a team that had spent the week reading about their new stand rather than training in front of it. They were two goals down by half-time, the second a header that their keeper, Danny Rourke, watched sail over him with his hands on his hips. The travelling…

For forty-one years, if you were on Harbour Street before six in the morning, the only light on was at Penhaligon's. Ruth Penhaligon, who has died aged eighty-four, opened the café at half past four for the boats and closed it at two, when she said the tea went stale and so did the conversation. She was born in a…

Three years ago, volunteers laid six hundred mesh bags of oyster shell along the eastern bank of the Merrow estuary, where the old concrete wall had cracked and the marsh behind it was washing away. The shells came from the restaurants on the waterfront, which used to throw them away. Baby oysters settled on them within a season. Now the…

My grandfather read the paper twice a day, once at breakfast and once after supper, and he was the best-informed man I have ever known. He did not know things first. He knew them properly. By the time the evening edition reached him, the rumours of the morning had been checked, the numbers corrected and the quotes put back in…

Five years ago, a loaf of sourdough in Port Avery meant a trip to the market on a Saturday. Today it sits on the counter of forty corner shops, next to the milk. The change was not planned by anyone. It began when the three small bakeries on the east side, each too small to run its own van, agreed…

Volunteers restoring the city’s last wooden tram say it will carry passengers again in the spring, for the first time since 1961. It returned to the depot on Tuesday for its final coat.

Thursday. Lifeboat station open evening, 7 pm, the slipway. Tea, and a chance to sit in the boat. Friday. Funeral of Ruth Penhaligon, St Anne's, 11 am. Penhaligon's closed until 2 pm. Saturday. Rovers v Ashby Town, Riverside Park, 3 pm: the first game in front of the new east stand. Market on Exchange Square, 8 am to 2 pm.…

Half-term starts on Friday. Here are twelve things to do in Port Avery that cost nothing, tested by the Courier's own children, who were not asked. 1. Count the bubbles. The Merrow Field Station runs a free family morning at the lake on Saturday: nets, trays and a microscope that shows what lives in a drop of marsh water. 2.…

The sea swimmers who meet at Fiveways beach every morning at seven, whatever the weather, have asked the council for a lifeguard during the summer holidays. The group started with four people and now has more than two hundred members, about sixty of whom swim on a normal weekday. Its organiser, Maggie Thorne, says the beach has become busy with…