I’m not quite sure when this prosaic thought first occurred to me but for most of my adult life I have wondered if the definition of being sentient is to know the timeline of your own life.

That ability to name the year you went out with someone, the associated pop record or film, what work you were doing, the contemporary domestic and world events. Year after year.

Yet since the pandemic I constantly meet people who are not at all sure which often quite significant life events happened in the years between 2019 and 2022. When was that family holiday? Has it really been that long since we saw those great friends? What do you mean our town lost its bank five years ago? Surely it was last year.

However, in one area of my life, my memory has continued to receive engraved entries almost to the day, certainly to the week. That area is life as a district councillor, especially since I became Leader in May 2020 just after the pandemic began. Partly that is perhaps out of a sense of duty, but in truth I think it is because until very recently it has been a monumental struggle. And here more than anywhere, memory is important. Sometimes only Memory leads to Justice.

I’ll be very frank. One of the reasons I stood for election in 2019 was that I – and dozens of other candidates – had endured pretty poor treatment at the hands of East Devon District Council. To be specific about one aspect only, the multiple accounts that if you approached it with a sincere problem, and honestly contested an unsatisfactory reply, you would be treated with great discourtesy. Unless your face fitted, and you were close to the then ruling party. Then it seemed there were elements within the council which bent over backwards to help.

When I became Leader, I did all I could to try and courteously take up this cause, to see to it that the council dealt with its local citizens in a timely and courteous fashion in every department. And please don’t misunderstand me, the great majority of our officers, who’d always done their best, seemed to sense a change in culture. But not all, and not where it really could have the greatest effect. Wonderfully, our new senior officer team totally gets this, and it is being put front and centre of our new Council Plan, published soon.

In a few weeks time, I plan to use my Leader’s announcements slot at Full Council to tie up the definitive narrative around the scandal of former Cllr John Humphreys and the repulsive push back from his councillor allies and some former (ex-) officers who sought to impede us getting to the full and final truth of this two decade scandal.

At that speech’s conclusion I will say again that without the twenty-year courage of Humphreys’ victims in seeing his crimes into the court, where he received the longest sentence for historic child sex abuse in UK history - 21 years - he’d still be at liberty now, and East Devon District Council would not be doing what we are doing at Cabinet this week, making our Safeguarding policies fit for the modern world.

For all that we can thank one particular victim’s twenty-year memory. I’ll draw on my own day-by-day memories and notes of the attempts made to stop us getting to the truth. More next month.

Ask the families of Hillsborough, Windrush, Grenfell, the Post Office. To them, to me, Memory leads to Justice. The enemies of justice would have us forget.