DIARY
VICKI WOODS My Oxford friend's daughter, aged 17, was arrested last week at Faslane. She was protesting against the Trident submarines and was held for seven hours, with half a dozen others, before being dismissed with charges pending (breach of the peace). My Oxford friend was philosophical about the arrest, as befits a lifelong Guardian reader, and told my husband about it when she vis- ited the Hampshire Clinic, where he lay in traction. He was gloomily practising lifting his good leg high off the bed with little weights attached to it, in order to improve muscle tone and increase upper body strength generally, but the news was as good as a tonic. Trident! We hadn't thought about Trident for years. It's very cheering to think that 17-year-olds are still prepared to leave their large, detached houses in North Oxford to travel up to nuclear sites and be properly left-wing about life (unlike that irritating little appa- ratchik Nick Howard. What's he doing writ- ing Central Office propaganda in his gap year, at 19, when he should be in Friends of the Earth?). I rang the triumphant peace- breacher at home in Oxford to ask if she needed anything — like a lawyer, say — and was somewhat exercised by her cheer- ful promise to come down our way pretty soon 'with everybody' to get stuck into the Newbury bypass.
Ah, yes. The Newbury bypass. Down my way. The class C road that goes past my cottage (in Hampshire) joins the Bas- ingstoke road almost dead opposite the Women's Peace Camp at Greenham Com- mon (in Berkshire), and from there it's only three minutes up the hill to the Lottery kiosk at Tesco. (It's a nice Tesco: out of town, free parking, plenty of trolleys for mothers of twin toddlers weighing not more than 24 lb apiece; all that.) Well, I say three minutes, but I've sat on that hill with my numbers in my hand for three quarters of an hour and more, many a time and oft, since the A34 from me to Oxford, via Tesco, is also the main through route from London to Madrid, via the south coast ferry ports, heavily used by Norbert Dentressan- gle's giant Euro-fleet and every other tem- perature-controlled lorry ever built. New- bury is one of those towns with one road through the middle of it, north to south. All country dwellers who drive cars learn to time journeys to the minute, door-to-door: the station, 16 minutes (including parking); the orthodontist, 14 minutes; the vet, 20 minutes; the racecourse, the Volvo garage, the slip road to the M4, whatever. No longer. Criminally stupid planning deci- sions over the last three years, coupled with insane experiments in traffic control, mean that the morning and evening rush hours now run seamlessly from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day except Sunday, and your 20 min- utes becomes an hour and a half. My Oxford friend has actually turned back twice on an ordinary Tuesday (no racing, no market, no Royal Show), after idling in traffic from Chieveley to Donnington at 400 yards an hour. There had to be a bypass. There would be a bypass. Would it be an eastern or a western bypass? Citizens were consulted. Plans were drawn up. Years passed. Norbert Dentressangle dou- bled the size of his Euro-fleet.
The decision was taken last year to go west, through various pretty water mead- ows, SSIs, Civil War battle grounds and the late Sir Michael Hordem's garden at Bag- nor. I never went to look at the plans at Newbury's council offices because my neighbour the headhunter's wife nipped in very early on and telephoned the glad news. 'Not in our backyard,' she said. 'It's right over the other side.' Everything was OK in the backyard of me and my neigh- bour the headhunter's wife; also Lord Porchester and Cameron Mackintosh and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, who's never said a dicky bird about anything local at all, despite being, as it were, squire. Everything was very much not OK with the Watermill Theatre and Sir Michael Hordem, whose plaintive protests on the box were very inspiring. What was his shtick, exactly? I asked my neighbour the headhunter's wife and she said, 'Nightjars and dormice.' She rang back later. 'And fish,' she said. 'He was a fisherman, apparently.'
Dr Mawhinney's decision to halt the western bypass, earlier this year, was very puzzling. How they raged down in Royal Berkshire, when he met the local Tories and said, 'You can't have your bypass.' 'Why not in heaven's name?' they cried. Tories approve of all bypasses they don't live opposite. Bypasses mean business and progress and futures and Euro-fleets. Only 17-year-olds and Lefties can protest against bypasses on principle. Dr Mawhinney's rea- soning at the time was maddeningly myste- rious. He said he couldn't do it 'at the moment' because legally his hands were tied. 'That's what he said,' reported my neighbour the headhunter's wife after a Tory coffee morning. 'Legally, he said, his hands were tied. It must be a political deci- sion. After Twyford Down, they can't be ready for another middle-class revolt.' It hit local Tories hard, Mawhinney's decision. Vice-Admirals (Retd.) and other Tory stal- warts refused coffee mornings and contribu- tions to a man 'until that poltroon Mawhin- ney is deposed'. I don't know why Dr Mawhinney pushed the bypass through in his last five minutes as Transport Minister. Devilment? Dislike of his successor? Per- haps it was simply no longer in his backyard. Now, I know I should be protesting about the bypass. La Pasionara from North Oxford expects to see me on her barricade. All my ancient allegiances and loyalties and cricket tests are anti-bypass. But I want this bypass, and I shall be t'other side of the barricades from my Oxford friend's daughter, shoulder- to-shoulder with Brian Mawhinney. La lotta continua. But not in my backyard.
The Royal County of Berkshire itself, by the way, will soon cease to be, after nine placid centuries of bucolic existence, as a result of Mr Major's local government review. It will be abolished. Swept away. Overnight, it will turn into six unitary author- ities instead. Did everybody know that? It's crept up on me, rather. I knew the local gov- ernment review would get shot of those non- senses like 'Avon' and 'Cleveland' and 'Humberside' that were cobbled together in 1974, and good luck to it. No one in her right mind approves of Humberside. But Berk- shire wasn't created in 1974. It's been there forever, like Oxfordshire and Huntingdon- shire, breeding nightjars and dormice and fish. Nevertheless, here it sits in the 'To Go' file, and any minute now it will be gone. My Westminster friend told me at the Ritz last week that Berkshire was added to the list after some hard lobbying in Cabinet by the member for Wolcingham. So now there's a glimmer of hope for Royal Berlcs: a) because the member for Wokingham is no longer in Cabinet and b) because a long list of lords (many of them Tories and two of them gov- ernment ministers) are uniting to oppose the Parliamentary Order which is Berkshire's sentence of death, and the member for Wok- ingham will get a sharp poke in the eye. It never rains but it pours, Mr Redwood, even here and now on the Hampshire-Berkshire borders, this 53rd day of brazen drought with spiders the size of a man's hand dropping from my tinder-dry thatch in a desperate search for damp, and desiccated hedgehogs dying on the straw-coloured lawn.
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