That a crew of placemakers, designers, and developers are intent on reviving the old Camp Picton, turning it into the centrepiece of a series of villages offering multiple new ways of living here, is an unprecedented turn of events.

Despite its promising title, the open-book exam is the absolute worst kind (except, perhaps, for the “take-home.”) Your answers are better the fuller and longer they are. If you skip a question, or a consultation, beware.

The Community Services, Programs and Initiatives department has, together with the County Arts Council and The County Foundation, devised a plan to direct a portion of the municipality’s tourism revenues to fostering the arts. The plan makes perfect sense. Our arts organizations not only make this a flourishing, vibrant and utterly unique place to live, but draw great quantities of high-spending visitors.

The County wineries shifted Wassail from the apple trees in winter to the grapevines in late fall, the time for local vintners to celebrate the harvest come in, all the hard work done, the vines wrapped, ready for winter. Time to invite the neighbourhood in to drink and to sing, to wassail the vines. As Richard Johnston, of By Chadsey’s Cairns, wrote in these pages last year, “We needed the visitors to come in the darkest, most depressing time of the year, November, and maybe December for good measure.”