A Day at the Crocus

A quiet day of doing very little, and not a bad day for all that.

Right up until the crump. A large, unhappy crump, from outside, that shook the whole house. And again there are police cars and ambulances at the end of the road. Fortunately, this time, it appears no-one has lost their lives, but two cars are in bits on the corner of the main road, by the entrance to the village hall and play park, at the junction by the blind bended hump back railway bridge.

Not, you would think, the best place for a further new junction for access to another 120 houses. Let's hope the Inspector thinks so at the Public Inquiry now rescheduled for June...

Villages grow over time. Ours has been here since Domesday, and up until about 1800 there was only the main road and ours. The hill was a twisty zig zag, to allow the horse carts to make the ascent toward Bristol, and nobody needed parking spaces. Now, although improved over the years, our road network is too constrained by history to be capable of managing the traffic of the twenty first century; of households with three or four cars - necessitated by rural living and urban work - and of the through traffic from Gloucestershire seeking access to the motorway.

I have a meeting next week, with the local authority, developers and other stakeholders, where they will discuss how they are planning to fit another 1200 houses into Charfield. Given the current logistics that's another two to three thousand vehicles every morning and every evening.

I dislike the thought of more crumps.