COLUMN - My Melton with Kelly Davies

That local pride also extends back home, where I have been assisting James Colclough with this year’s Melton BID Business Awards.

This year, 259 businesses within the borough received at least one of the 3,469 individual nominations.

If you’re one of the 2,038 people who submitted one of these nominations, thank you for taking the time out of your busy life to shout out your favourite business.

You can see which ones have been shortlisted in the top three for each of our 16 categories elsewhere in this week’s Melton Times.

The judges will now have invited all these contenders to September’s presentation ceremony.

If you want to join us, make sure to purchase your ticket because it’s going to be a fun evening, celebrating some fantastic businesses.

Seeing such a vast quantity of top quality businesses just makes our unsuccessful UK Town of Culture bid all the more frustrating.

I’m sorry, but who on earth decided to go with ‘Nation’s Favourite Dining Table’ as a theme when ‘More Than Meets The Pie’ was right there?

Melton offers so much more than food.

We have a military base with horses that inspired one of Michael Morpurgo’s best pieces of fiction, Warhorse.

The UK’s best scream park on our doorstep, at Twinlakes.

Multiple live music festivals based within the town and the borough.

A fantastic selection of independent businesses.

In short, such an accolade was gift-wrapped to us, and yet, like the Three Lions in the US, we came up short.

Like the Lions, however, mistakes will be learned from, and I would like to think the next ‘fixture’ will involve calling up some new talent from the bench.

We have the talent in Melton, quite a lot of it in fact – our manager just needs to understand that you need new ideas on the pitch as opposed to pushing the same 4-4-2 tactic.

Maybe the recent changes at the top, with new council leadership, will lead to a change of strategy?

We shall wait and see.