Third World Swindon

I loathe Swindon. No, this is not exactly true. Most days I actually love Swindon, and am in total sympathy and harmony with the wonderful blogs Hidden Swindon (see my link) and its sister blog Wrens and Hedgesparrows. I find it a nice democratic town in which to go about my business in peace.

However, late yesterday afternoon everything that I hate about the town (i.e. its moronic council and its pathetic planners) coalesced. Swindon does what John Prescott asks it to do and builds vile dense estates on the flood plain of its Front Garden. It builds a new hospital in an area of outstanding natural beauty by Coate Water because it had already used the acres of old railway workings in the town for a useless retail outlet. It confirms what we all knew would happen: that it would build out to the hospital and despoil Coate Water as it has the Front Garden. It finally decides to have recycling boxes and choses the colour orange for them, and black for its bins, so that the whole borough looks like a big litter dump. Oxford has green bins and green boxes so that they blend into the gardens. Swindon, as ever is pig ignorant. I once asked my friend why the recyclers don't leave the lids standing in the gross orange boxes when they've emptied them but instead throw them on the ground to blow all over the place. "That would be too logical," she replied.

It places a humungous chav telly screen in Wharf Green so that teenage louts and drinkers can have permanent loudspeaker decibels in their square and so that any third world visitors from, say, Moldova, could feel quite at home. Am I going to pollute my blog with this moronic looking bunch of suits, so happy to be adding to noise pollution in our town? Perhaps for a week and then I'll delete them. Yuk, yuk, yuk.


I looked around at the nastiness of Argos meets McDonald's meets charity shops, House of Fraser now an "outlet" House of Fraser, full of sad things that no one wants to buy, the closed down market and the general air of dead malaise and thought it was a foretaste of Hell.

However, there were two lovely things about yesterday's sunset: one was the tracery of the sycamore tree by the market, black with its complex twigs and seeds against the silver sky. The other was a glorious heron that flapped its leisurely way home, seen only, I think, by me, aloft in the pink and blue dusk that glowed over us all at closing time.