It was a bit of a surprise this morning to see my grandad, my mother’s father, who died half a century years ago, on BBC News. He’s the proud shopkeeper in the 1930s village scene.
It seems the rural village where I spent most of my childhood is going to become a new town, with a new railway, and a new station. The new line will restore the old varsity link between Oxford and Cambridge. It is confirmed, but no timing for construction has been announced. Gordon Bennett knows when—if—it’ll actually get built.
The village, although small, was never exactly quiet. The existing railway, stationless since the 1950s, is the East Coast Main Line. The road through the village is the A1. So it between the cows and the corn you’ll hear the rumble of high speed trains and the roar of impatient drivers. That was true when I was a child, and it’s true today.
I left the village to go to university, and never returned. I really don’t know what to think of the proposed transformation. It will be utterly different from my childhood memories, but my memories and their associated emotions are already disconnected by existing changes. At least I do know some people still living in the village, if vaguely.
The village has a museum which opens once a month, often with special events celebrating its history. I’ve been there once, and I think now I have to go there again, before the character of the old place is completely transformed. I’m due to visit the UK next year—I’ve been invited to exhibit in Northumberland—so I’ll drop in. I’d better plan for a lot of driving.
I’m sorry to discover from the BBC that all the pubs have gone. That’s horrifying, and no doubt a consequence of Covid; I drank in the last pub to close when I last visited the village a few years ago. It clearly needs something to happen for it to be brought back alive, and it seems that something will have a slightly bigger impact than perhaps one might have expected.
If I hadn’t been taught statistics at school, I might have started to believe in pixies to hear today that the town I associate with my grandmother, my father’s mother, Porthcawl in south Wales, was also in the news. A light plane crashed into the sea. Luckily no one was killed.