Retired I may be - although Her Indoors doesn't believe it - but I do stravaig around the place, sometimes at jogging pace. involving myself in a cornucopia of activities to occupy my mind.

Indeed, as I have written in this column before - April, 2019 to be precise - I have one of the best retirement jobs in the area. No, madam, I don't just mean spreading goodwill and mirth every week on this page (Editor's note: I wondered what you did) but I am referring to the fact that I am one of the merry musketeers of the Kelburn Windfarm Trust, disbursing loads of money to loads of good local causes.

We may not be in the same league as the Weirs of Largs, who became Euro millionaires overnight with a damn lucky lottery ticket a decade ago, but the local committee has reached a monumental milestone in giving more than half a million pounds to legions of organisations in Largs, Cumbrae and Fairlie, from the Boys Brigade to Upbeats, from schoolkids to the Foc-ers (Firth of Clyde Rowers).

It was in 2012 that I was asked, as Largs editor, to become chairman of the new Windfarm Committee, which distributes annual community benefit grants from RES (Renewable Energy Systems) - the operators of 14 wind turbines on the Kelburn estate.

RES, which grew from the Sir Robert McAlpine engineering business, has been involved in wind energy development since the 1980s, and now operates 21 wind farms and 341 turbines in Scotland. It is responsible for 10 per cent of the UK's wind energy capacity.

To mark another year of community grants, now reaching £550,000, the local Trust held an awards evening in the Woodhouse Hotel in Largs last week, to congratulate representatives of this year's 21 recipients. The company set up the annual fund to boost environmental, educational, amenity  and socially sustainable ventures in the windfarm's local area. West Kilbride has its own wind farm fund, while Skelmorlie is hoping for one (but that's another story for another day).

Chairman Alistair Green of Fairlie told the gathering that almost all applications for 2023 had received grants, ranging from £220 to Cumbrae Sonoro Choir, to £7,000 for the volunteer-run Viking Festival. Grants of £5,000 have gone to St Columba's Episcopal Church in Largs for improvements, including energy saving, and the amazing Millport Town Hall redevelopment.

First-time beneficiaries of grants included the new Cairnie's Quay Association (£5k), which is restoring and upgrading the historic moorings on Largs south promenade, and Fairlie Primary's Parent Council (£5k) to set up eco education projects at the village school. A new Green Futures group which plans to establish allotments at Douglas Park were given £3,000 as seed funding, if you'll pardon the pun.

As Kelburn Windfarm Trust administrator, I was able to reveal the happy news that there will be at least another decade of community grants. That's another half million of a windfall!

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Thought for the Week: The question is not what you look at but what you see.

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It was refreshing to read the interview with newly returned police sergeant Donald Fisher who...wait for it....actually lives in the town.

When Donald was here before, I was on the community council, and he came over as an obliging, co-operative type of police officer who communicated well.

In most of my time as editor, the local sergeant or inspector would pop in to the office as part of his beat, and, over a coffee, exchange information with the newspaper.

I'm afraid the departing sergeant, who will remain nameless since, quite frankly, he was as far as the public is concerned, was of the mould of too many modern police 'chiefs'.  He was less than generous in dealing with this paper.

He was more bureaucratic than constabulary, more a keyboard pusher than a crime solver, more interested in rules and regulations than investigations, more woke in that he would rather respond to someone, say, stating that a man can't be a woman, than turning up if you've been robbed or going out to penalise dangerous double parking in our narrow streets.

In fact he would probably make a Chief Constable!

I regard Sergeant Fisher as a good listener, good communicator and, obviously, community minded.

Good riddance to the last Chief, Iain Livingstone who marked his retirement by slagging off his police force as racist, sexist, mysoginistic and all the rest of it. He'd been in charge for a decade!