Thick fog closed the northern quay from mid-afternoon until shortly before nine on Tuesday, cancelling four ferry crossings. The harbour master lifted the warning at 21:40 and the 22:10 sailing will run.

From next month the central library on Wren Square will stay open until ten on weekdays, in a two-year trial paid for by a local trust. The reading room was full most evenings last winter.

Why do the bells of St Anne's ring at quarter past nine on Sunday mornings, when the service starts at ten? (Asked by Pat, Chapel Row.) Because quarter past nine is when the ringers arrive, Pat. The bells are rung by a team of eight volunteers who climb sixty-one steps to the ringing chamber, and they ring for forty-five minutes…

The walk-in clinic at the health centre on Wren Square will open on Saturday mornings from November, from eight until twelve, after the winter rise in patients filled the weekday waiting room by nine most days last year.

A plan to build 120 homes on the old gasworks site beside the Merrow goes to the council's planning committee next Tuesday, eleven years after the last gas holder was emptied. The site has been fenced off since 2015. The iron frame of the largest holder still stands over it, and the developer, Merrow Quay Homes, wants to keep it:…

Seven empty shops on the lower end of Harbour Street will be let rent-free for six months from January, under a scheme the council hopes will fill the gaps that have opened since the bank and two charity shops closed. The council owns four of the units. The other three belong to a pension fund, which has agreed to take…

Kneel on the ice of Lake Merrow in January and you can read the winter beneath you. The bubbles stack in white discs, one above another, each layer frozen in place a few days after the last. They are methane, released by the mud at the bottom of the lake as dead reeds and leaves rot. For eleven winters, a…

The press in the back room of Calder & Daughter weighs a little over a tonne and was cast in 1958. Elspeth Calder, who is seventy-three, can tell from the sound of it whether the ink is too thick. Her father opened the shop in 1975, printing raffle tickets, menus and the order of service for half the funerals in…

The volunteer crew of the Port Avery lifeboat were called out three times between ten on Sunday night and five on Monday morning, the busiest night the station has had since 2019. The first call was to a yacht with a fouled propeller drifting towards the rocks off Gull Point. The crew towed it into the harbour. The second, just…

The Saturday market on Exchange Square will also open on Thursday evenings from November to February, with lights and hot food. Thirty of its fifty traders have signed up.

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 ten past two on a Tuesday morning, the N4 pulls away from the Corn Exchange with every seat taken. A nurse coming off a late shift at St Bride’s sleeps against the window. Two cooks from the hotels on the waterfront share a bag of chips. A woman in a hi-vis jacket reads a paperback by the light over…

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 last ferry of the day across the Merrow will keep running until at least next summer, after the council voted by twenty-two to twenty against cutting it. The crossing carries about ninety passengers a night, most of them hospital and hotel staff.

Nobody on the Kestrel estate remembers who planted the pear trees, because nobody did. They were nursery stock, left in the ground when the Hollins nursery closed in 1987 and the land was forgotten. The trees grew anyway. For years their fruit fell and rotted in the long grass. Then, four autumns ago, a retired teacher called Win Abbott put…