Don’t feel too ill informed if you couldn’t put up your hand. It is just one of the many surprises that you can find with Lesley Keast.

While one is not meant to play favourites too often in this column it is impossible not to note the news Lesley has said she will retire from Council life after the elections next year without some public thanks and regret for her decision.

My terms as Mayor have been made that much easier and reliable with the consistent support and stability that Lesley has bought to the job.

Not that Lesley has always been uncritically supportive all the time. One of her greatest strengths is that if she thinks you are heading down the wrong track she will tell you. Firmly, and as often as it takes.

In fact, she brings to politics the same sense of fair play that she once also deployed on the soccer fields, as (I believe) about the second woman in New Zealand to become a qualified soccer referee.

That’s another Lesley fact that I have gleaned over the years.

Now she’s decided that grandchildren beckon, along with her continued involvement in helping the emerging Third Age movement in Christchurch.

Even at the risk of an almost-guaranteed telling off, I think it worth sharing with you some of the rest of the story of the life of what has been one of our most accomplished Deputy Mayors in the history of Christchurch.

Right through her life she appears to have simply refused to not have a go at tackling challenges head on. Lesley has often said that for someone who was a Hornby solo mum before the term was even coined to end their political life as Deputy Mayor is proof that life can indeed be an amazing journey if you want it to be.

She has also often reminded me forcefully that the catalyst for her entering public life was to ensure that the voice and experience of those who have little power over their lives was not only heard but respected, and acted on.

The forklift skills I mentioned come from when she was a pioneering working solo mother in Christchurch, starting with the Government Print Shop. Lesley ran the shop for 10 years. She got the forklift licence as part of the earlier process of applying to be stationery supervisor. Her first application got knocked back and she appealed and won the decision in one of the first gender-based industrial cases in New Zealand.

As Lesley says, in those days women faced not so much a glass ceiling as a glass basement in terms of upward career mobility. The experience helped send her deeper into active politics, with increasing levels of involvement in the Public Service Association as a field officer.

In the 1980s she moved on to become electorate secretary for Larry Sutherland.

National politics never quite had the appeal of local involvement and it was also around this time that she was building on her Hornby community activity role as a councillor in the old preamalgamation Paparua County Council.

She joined the amalgamated Christchurch City Council as a Wigram councillor in 1992. Over the years she has built up a solid reputation as someone who not only sees the big picture but who has the patience and focus to colour it in and make it work. Lesley has a ferocious appetite for work which gets results.

She worked out a year or so back that she was hosting on average about 12 mayoral receptions a month on behalf of the city and myself.

That, of course, was on top of her normal workload as a councillor and jobs such as prudently and efficiently running the Mayor’s Welfare Fund.

Then there are always other “little” projects with various community groups that have been lucky enough to enlist her support.

It has been a daunting record of positive achievement. We are going to lose both a great role model and also an enormous amount of historic memory when she goes next year.

I just wanted to take this chance to publicly say from myself and from all Christchurch people of good will, thank you, Lesley for a major contribution toward making this a great city to live.