Tag: Brownhills

January 27th – The snow, thanks to heavy rain and a sudden ramp in temperature – had gone. Only the remnants of snowmen remained, melancholy mementoes of the whiteness of the week before. The consequent darkness around St. James Church shocked me in it’s foreboding.

I’d been to drop something off to a friend, and the weather was wet, warm and inclement. I cycled up the dark pathway from School Avenue, up past the cemeteries and churchyard, and the church itself was unoccupied at 5:45pm on a Sunday, which I found oddly sad. Brownhills Church is one I’ve always had difficulty with architecturally; It’s not ugly, and it’s not remarkable. Apart from an odd spire and hideous extension, it’s pretty plain, really. It’s position, however, is excellent. It’s like the centre of the town was built around it, and the warren of streets take curious right angles around the grounds.

January 26th – Had a wry laugh at this one. Noticed yesterday that the sign was still up trumpeting the new Pier Street footbridge, over the canal in central Brownhills. The bridge is a fine thing indeed, linking as it does Clayhanger and Brownhills in style, replacing a steep-stepped footbridge that was awful, frankly.

I was unaware of Walsall Council’s ‘Drive to regenerate Brownhills District Centre’ – wonder how that’s going?

Would the last business to leave the town please switch the lights off and feed the deer? Cheers.

January 20th – Between 4 and 5pm, the roads around Brownhills were understandably, quite chewy. I span around Brownhills carefully, for fear of what lurked beneath the slush and tyre tracks. It had been snowing by then for nearly 10 hours, and the result was a wet, cloying mass that wedged in the bike’s gaps and made it heavier and heavier. The old railway line, Clayhanger Common trails and canal towpaths were very hard to cycle. 

It looks to be cold all week, and this will be the first time for some years that we have have to deal with such conditions.

I’ll be interested to watch what happens. 

January 20th – People seem to have their own realities, and nothing has brought out the selfishness and plain nastiness in some people as profoundly as the bad weather.

Ever since the snow came, people have been complaining about, and to, Walsall Council on social media. Horrified that they’ve been delayed, or that driving conditions are bad, they attack the local authority for not gritting, for being unprepared, or lazy. Time and time again I have seen people berate council employees because things aren’t as they expect and that’s what they apparently pay council tax for.

Sadly, the truth is a little more difficult. As a cyclist, I travel slowly. I intersect with gritters on the roads with startling (and often painful) frequency, because they move about twice as fast as me. I have seen them around Brownhills and on all major routes I use frequently, since just before the cold snap started. They have spread whatever the conditions, and pretty much continuously over the weekend. That’s good folk, working hard, in very difficult road conditions, to try and ameliorate the problems caused by the snow.

There is clearly a fundamental misunderstanding about how roadsalt works. It can take hours or even days to take effect, and relies on moisture and the passage of traffic to disperse it. Temperature severely affects it’s efficacy. It cannot deal with fast settling snow. A gritted road may take 24 hours to clear properly, even with continuous application. Road salt is not fairy dust. It doesn’t magically remove ice and snow. It’s a deicer, a slow one, and it’s an aid, not a total solution.

Walsall’s gritting operation costs each household about £2.50 per year.

The thing about using the roads in bad weather is to develop, and hone the skills required. It’s our responsibility to ensure we’re as safe as possible. We can’t abrogate that responsibility totally to a third party just because it snows. The man I watched slide round a corner into a kerb in Little Aston on Friday Morning probably now understands this. A £60,000 Range Rover is only as good as the driver’s skills.

Walsall Council does many things badly. Some things, a few, it does really well. They’ve always been among the best at gritting, and have worked hard to communicate their activities on social media. When met with abuse, petulance or idiocy, the public facing employees have been stoical, polite and workmanlike, often in unpaid, out of hours time.

When I see people being stupid, unpleasant or misguided on this, I will always step in to defend the council and it’s employees wherever I can. So far this weekend I’ve had hate mail, nearly had my Facebook account pulled in an infantile spite attack and been roundly abused by a noted local journalist. None of these people have shown a shred of humility towards those who are actually charged with the job they are expecting to be done.

There’s a widely held belief that gritters are not being sent out; that roads have gone untreated. That the powers that be cannot grit every inch of every road has been met with incredulity. It seems beyond many that the weather currently has control, and whilst we can mitigate it’s effects, nobody can actually make it go away.

This afternoon, at 4pm, on Anchor Bridge, I was passed by the grittier that, on social media 3 hours later, Walsall were being attacked for not sending to treat Brownhills High Street. Further down the road, at Silver Court, a team of council workmen had cleared the snow by hand from the frontage and steps, and then gritted it. At the other end of Brownhills, lorries were returning to the depot for refilling, before leaving again in series. 

Meanwhile, people are fretting on Facebook already as to weather their bins will be emptied tomorrow. As far as I’m aware, nobody has died in Walsall yet for the want of an empty dustbin. 

It’s bad weather, folks. We used to get it a lot. It’s not the end of days. The mark of humanity should be be grace under pressure, from all of us. Not just those there to serve us. 

January 17th – It was snowing quite hard when I came home. Racing another cyclist out of Walsall in that unspoken duel that often happens between two homeward-bound cyclists, we played cat and mouse along the Lichfield Road. Sadly, my younger, fitter counterpart was carrying less stuff (including less middle-aged spread!) and just outclassed me. But he set a cracking pace and I was heading home in good time. At Anchor Bridge, I stopped to admire the snow on the frozen canal. It was settling quite well now. Weather-heads are predicting heavy snow tomorrow, and the world’s going bonkers again…

We’ll see.

January 12th – I returned to Brownhills to pop to Tesco – never a great experience.

Heading back, I looked over the old market site, and up Pier Street to the High Street past the site of the old clinic. This land was once the site of a pub called The Pier, or Fortune of War; latterly, it hosted a busy market. Now, it sits derelict, set aside for a new Tesco development that never came. It has been empty, deserted and neglected for years now, and looks set to remain that way for a long time to come.

Local occasional blogger and Jack-the-lad Brownhills Barry recently speculated there were ghosts here. There are none. All that stalks here are the shadows of the past and it’s promises, and the darkness of lost horizons.

Sometimes, the tale you tell is lost in the one you left untold.

January 12th – Spent some time today making sure the bike was ready for possible bad weather – greased the gear cable, tuned the brakes, checked the wheels. The time taken to do this will ensure the snow doesn’t come…

Getting out after dark, it was very chilly are there weren’t many around. I headed up towards Chasewater on the canal, and the only living souls I saw were the rats that scattered away from my light. Through the anti-vehicle barrier on the far side of the Anchor Bridge, I stopped to look at the structure. The original bridge is in there, somewhere, but it has been widened and strengthened so many times, only the underside of the bride gives any sign of it’s history. This bridge takes a huge amount of traffic, yet just a few feet below road level it’s quiet and peaceful. For the second day running, the canal was absolutely flat. 

January 11th – Chasewater was also peaceful, but there were plenty of dog walkers, runners and cyclists about. The sunset wasn’t as spectacular as I’d hoped, but it wasn’t poor, either. I noted a massive gull roost, a welcome side effect of the increased water levels. Thousands of birds drifted gently on an otherwise millpond-like reservoir. I watched the dusk close in. It was gorgeous.
The water level seems to be stabilising right now; we’ve had a largely rain-free week, and it’s gained around 4cm, about an inch and a half since Sunday. 

January 11th – Today didn’t work out so well. A failed trip at work, then a mad panic dash to get home. When I did, I hit the canal and headed up to Chasewater, as a decent sunset was threatening. At Anglesey Basin it was quiet, and deathly still. This is the kind of chilly weather I’ve been longing for; the air was clear and hard, but a shallow mist was forming over the canal. The only thing that caused ripples was the birdlife.

Peace, blessed peace. Just what you need after a chaotic day.

January 6th – I have absolutely no idea what to make of this. Reader and top friend of the Brownhills Blog Rose Burnell had tipped me off the previous day that there was a CV pinned to a board outside the tyre sales place on Co-op  corner in Brownhills. I checked it out, and she was quite right. I’m not sure the sign was thought out enough, but ten out of ten for optimism. 

Sign of the times, or a brave punt for a new job in an increasingly hard world? I’ve no idea, but best of luck, my friend. 

I wish you the very best of luck.