The A470 bypass! It's open!

The New Road – It’s open!
Living in Mid Wales you come to expect that getting anywhere takes a huge amount of
time – mainly because anywhere you might want to take a proper trip to, is far
from here, but also because the roads are still on the old routes that the drovers
took and they didn’t mind the windy bits.

Our village is cut in half by a trunk road and as we scuttle across the road with
massive lorries bearing down, we cry, “Run! Run for your lives!” to anyone we
are dragging across with us. There were big plans to bypass the village and I
thought that this would be good – in my mind, the pedestrian should be king and
this would solve many of our other problems: people stop and chat, they get to
know each other and so take an interest, they get fit (well, fitter than they
would be if they drove the half mile to the shop and back), and their dogs crap
in a range of places, rather than it all being concentrated in the children’s
play area with the parking space next to it.

But, then the recession hit, and the Welsh Office was looking to cut back, so it
decided to shelve the village bypass and instead turn the section of road
leading to the village into a race track on a sixty-foot-high bund. To us, this
has the double whammy of not only not by-passing the village, but also
increasing the traffic speed of the cars entering the village by about 20 miles
per hour: it’s actually quite hard to speed on drover’s routes, but really
really easy on a nice sweeping bend with barriers either side…

People have been concerned, as well as incredulous, about the effect of the road on
the safety in the village, and we were promised a “gateway” feature that would
warn vehicles that they were entering a built up area that children would love
to play in. This, we were told, would ensure that cars would enter at 30mph, and
would potter through smiling and waving us across the road. Imagine our disappointment
when a “totem pole” was erected – a piece of 12” by 12” wood that looked
suspiciously like it had been swapped from the sawmills that sits next to the
contractor’s compound in return for a bit of tarmac for their potholes.

Yesterday we went to the nearby town. We drove down along the drovers’ route and by the
time we came back the road had been opened! Fantastic! The view from the top of
the high bund meant we could see for miles. There were some great dogging
laybys and we were able to exceed the speed limit for nearly the whole route. Sadly,
I didn’t even notice the 12 x 12 totem pole as I flashed by, so I can’t comment
on how effective it was.

I can’t wait for Carwyn Jones to come up and see it next week…

Anti-capitalists and other people wasting their precious time

Anti-capitalists…

I have been trying to blog about the anti-capitalist protestors since they first took up camp, but have held back until I had really understood what they were about. It would have been too easy to mock them for moaning about capitalism whilst sleeping in shop-bought tents and chatting on
mobile phones: wearing an itchy jumper does not remove you from being a cog in a capitalist society.
At first I was scathing – if you inherently don’t like capitalism, then you should probably move to a country that has a different way of organising itself, as 200 people nibbling on stew and sipping at Starbucks lattes cannot change the way our country has established itself over a thousand
years. But then I listened a bit more and realised that “anti-capitalist” was possibly a mis-nomer, and “bank re-organisation lobby” might be more accurate. Then I had a bit more sympathy – but only a bit.

Yes, bankers earn far more than me – but they possibly generate their company more money than I do to mine. Anti-capitalists tend to forget that in the private sector people have to earn their company more than they cost, and that is what determines their level of pay.

Of course, no-one has the right to bring down a bank – especially one that I want to pay my cheque for £37.50 into, but I think bankers would be even stupider than people think they are if there were all these wonderful ways of making lots of money, but they turned them down as it might be a little unfair to earn more than the bloke who potters around in the
wholefood café round the corner.

The real villains are obviously the people who set the rules that allowed our banks to exchange their foundations of gold to foundations of traws (hedging detritus), but 200 people pissing
behind St Paul’s Cathedral isn’t going to get to the inner circle of them.

I think the thing that sealed my opinion of the Anti-capitalists was the fact that within hours of setting up camp, they had established a kitchen tent (maybe fair enough), a prayer room, a library and a university! To me, if you’ve time to set up a university, your work has been
done. If I wanted to protest about something, I would spend my time banging on doors, debating convincingly with people who can make decisions, and thinking of clever things to say to TV cameras. I wouldn’t spend it arguing about where the tent poles for the prayer room should go
put when there is a bloody great cathedral next to it.

Powdered tomato soup with clumps in

Bonfire night: as a child, the best night in the calendar.

Us village kids used to start building the bonfire at the end of the summer holidays - we used to head down the river with an axe and depending on how many of us there were would determine how big the tree we would chop down for our centre pole. One year there weren't many, so we decided to take a short cut and started building the bonfire around the telegraph pole in the playing field - the pile was a fair size before some miserable bugger made us move it.

Every bit of foliage or rubbish in the village would be plundered and dragged to site - I remember being so grateful to this lady who cut down her hedge on November the fourth and my siblings and I were allowed to drag tons of scratchy bushes five hundred yards to the bonfire and we did so until every scrap was done and were allowed by my parents to do so until late into the night. As an adult, I now understand the lady's smug expression as she leant on her door with a cup of tea and watched as we saved her a bloody fortune on gardener's fees.

As I am now a parent, I feel it is my responsibility to give our kids the same excitement that I used to have - that feeling of drinking tomato soup with clumps of powder in as we watched some bloke trying to nail a Catherine wheel to our rotten goal-post. The excitement of watching as the "tyre layer" takes, or the thrill of being knocked to the ground in the dark during a village-scale game of Piley On.

Trouble is, bonfire nights now have conatations of where to park, cost, health and safety and general blandness as kids aren't allowed to prod the fire with big sticks or throw each others coats onto it for a laugh. You can imagine my pleasure therefore when I spotted a few fireworks out of the window coming from a distant hill farm.

I hoofed the kids into their coats, threw them outside and chucked their tea out on a plate after them. Everytime they looked as if they might want to come in (i.e their little faces were pressed blue against the door), I cheered as another rocket flew through the sky, and the fun continued.

It may not go down as their best ever, but I think it was a start.