2 July 2007
You can't stop unhappy accidents
The hearts of everyone, I hope, went out to the family of the young lad killed tragically by a falling beech branch at Felbrigg Hall last week. It was reassuring to hear of the measures that had been taken by the National Trust to ensure that the 500-acre wood was as safe as possible. But it was slightly less reassuring to read that the police and Health and Safety Executive were “combing the area to work out why the bough fell”.
They should listen to the boy’s grandfather, who refused to blame anyone. “It was a freak accident,” he said. “It was a one in a million chance. You cannot stop it.”
It is a sad fact that beech trees sometimes lose their branches without warning. What can we do about it? Send in gangs of tree surgeons to do weekly checks – a kind of National Tree Service?
Keep away from beech trees? Sadly, nine out of ten urban families would not be able to tell a beech tree from a gooseberry bush, so perhaps we should label them, or surround them with palings? Maybe we should avoid woods altogether: most children are told that nasty things lurk there, and of course they do.
Bad things happen to good people. Bad things happen to happy, fun-loving, intelligent 11-year-olds. No amount of safety measures, risk assessments and allocation of blame is going to stop it.
As a grandfather of two lovely, innocent and promising under-fives, I really do wish it were possible to guarantee their safety at all times. But I know it isn’t.
The truth is we could waste an awful lot of time, and stop an awful lot of fun and enjoyment, by pretending it is.
Mystery of tourist bus spotted at Fakenham
Alarming news from Fakenham: a reader tells me that he saw a Norwich open-top tourist bus passing through the town, heading in the direction of King's Lynn.
“I find it hard to describe the looks on the faces of the occupants,” he said, “but mystified comes close.”
It may be, as my informant suggests, that the strange bus misplacement is linked to the “home rule for Norwich” campaign. But I think it far more likely that the bus driver took a wrong turn and became attracted to a wormhole in the Hingham area, which is well known for time and space distortion.
Either solution would explain the mystification, which is quite common anyway around Fakenham. Locals tell of ghostly buses passing through the town containing the shades of passengers past. When the moon is full and the traffic is right, strange voices can be heard pleading not to be let off.
These are not the only strange sounds to be heard in Norfolk nowadays. Walking across Cley marshes between showers last weekend, my companions and I were buzzed by a very large bird that circled noisily for some minutes. Or maybe it was a helicopter. It seemed to be looking for food.
Top local explorer Richard “Volcano” Meek tells me that everything in the sky is getting louder, especially in the twilight of early morning and late evening, when birds of all kinds “twitter and screech away”.
He suggests that this behaviour may be the cause of the freak weather conditions we have been experiencing, not to mention rising sea levels. “I reckon it’s all down to Gloaming Warbling,” he concludes.
Stand back: the shingle's moving
I was a little disturbed to find a notice by the beach in Cley which revealed that the shingle bank is moving inland at about a metre a year.
We kept well clear of it after that: no-one wants to be mown down by a shingle bank, even when it is as unimposing as the one at Cley, which looked as if it would have trouble holding back a strong ripple.
I hope for the sake of the splendid new Norfolk Wildlife Trust visitor centre that I am wrong about this, because it would be a shame to lose it, together with all those lovely oyster catchers, avocets, marsh harriers and spoonbills. I see the penguins have already gone.
Clampdown on speeding tractors
A friend who is keen to spot bizarre roadside objects when visiting Norfolk tells me that he came across a speed camera pointing into a field.
Happily I was able to reassure him that this was quite normal: it was directed at preventing reckless driving by tractors and combine harvesters, which can be a real problem in the west of the county.
That is why there was very little support in Norfolk for last week’s Scrap Speed Cameras Week. No-one likes to be overtaken by a tractor when they’re trying to change a CD or drive across a field, or both.
There was widespread laughter near Themelthorpe at the 28,000 people who signed a national petition to scrap speed cameras, though apparently this was directed not so much at their muddleheadedness as at the response from the Prime Minister, whoever he may be.
Or maybe not. While travelling one of my favourite escape routes from Norwich to Holt recently, I came up against a driver who thought 45mph was a bit on the excessive side for a good straight road, and downright audacious if it bent a bit. Then on the Reepham autobahn, only days later, I was stuck behind someone who felt 35mph was just about possible, closely followed by three others who agreed with her.
I would like to say the four of them were overtaken by a combine harvester, but this would be misleading. They could have been, but they weren’t.
Tenuous grasp of energy issues
Attributing suspect motives to people who disagree with you is a common method of getting your own way. So it is not surprising to see it surfacing in the vicinity of wind turbines, against which there are substantial and genuine arguments.
There are also vociferous and well-meaning promoters, one of whom was reported as saying that he had faced a complete spectrum of opinion – from an architect who sees them as “industrial desecration of a rural landscape on a gigantic scale” to “families with a real grasp of the energy issues” .
Right, so the architect has no grasp of the energy issues? And of course families do. Must be all that eco-propaganda they’re pumping into schools nowadays. Very deep.