Cotswold Line reopens. World no longer cut off
Aug 3rd, 2007, 06:21 AM
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Cotswold Line reopens. World no longer cut off
Britain's Network Rail announced this afternoon that the Oxford-Worcester railway line has now reopened. Normal services will probably resume tomorrow, as a few trains got stranded by the floods and they need to be moved out of the way first.
With the reconnection of the water supply round Tewkesbury yesterday, that means Cotswold life is now more or less back to its dampish norm - though anyone planning to stay in Gloucestershire hotels might check first, since a few places still need to dry out and clean up.
The weather is now sunny, bright and warm - though a bit humid in some parts, since the heat's bringing a lot of moisture out of the soil. For August, it's astonishingly green, and flowers seem to be taking a lot longer than normal to start getting blousy.
Except that hay's been made and many blackberries are edible (and there's an AWFUL lot of blackberries along the footpaths), it's really more like June than August. Oh, and many of my regular footpaths are actually less muddy than they were in June.
Wherein lies the moral. The Cotswolds, by definition, are hilly: that's what the "wold" bit means. Since water's designed to run downhill, it was inevitable life would get back to more or less normal everywhere pretty quickly. It's taken a bit longer than you'd expect, because the once in a thousand years water volume two weeks ago caused some infrastructure damage. For most people and businesses, life never stopped being normal in the first place anyway.
But people and media describe the exceptional, not the commonplace. If exaggerated reports of the damage put off tourists to this affluent, well-insured and highly resilient part of the world - well not a huge amount of business was lost, and tourism's a pretty trivial part of the local economy.
Exaggerated reports can deter tourism to places that need it badly, though. On the evidence of this "emergency", I'm going to be be very sceptical indeed about press accounts of why places are unvisitable.
So is Mardi Gras really the best time to visit New Orleans?
With the reconnection of the water supply round Tewkesbury yesterday, that means Cotswold life is now more or less back to its dampish norm - though anyone planning to stay in Gloucestershire hotels might check first, since a few places still need to dry out and clean up.
The weather is now sunny, bright and warm - though a bit humid in some parts, since the heat's bringing a lot of moisture out of the soil. For August, it's astonishingly green, and flowers seem to be taking a lot longer than normal to start getting blousy.
Except that hay's been made and many blackberries are edible (and there's an AWFUL lot of blackberries along the footpaths), it's really more like June than August. Oh, and many of my regular footpaths are actually less muddy than they were in June.
Wherein lies the moral. The Cotswolds, by definition, are hilly: that's what the "wold" bit means. Since water's designed to run downhill, it was inevitable life would get back to more or less normal everywhere pretty quickly. It's taken a bit longer than you'd expect, because the once in a thousand years water volume two weeks ago caused some infrastructure damage. For most people and businesses, life never stopped being normal in the first place anyway.
But people and media describe the exceptional, not the commonplace. If exaggerated reports of the damage put off tourists to this affluent, well-insured and highly resilient part of the world - well not a huge amount of business was lost, and tourism's a pretty trivial part of the local economy.
Exaggerated reports can deter tourism to places that need it badly, though. On the evidence of this "emergency", I'm going to be be very sceptical indeed about press accounts of why places are unvisitable.
So is Mardi Gras really the best time to visit New Orleans?
