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Village Diary

By Graham Virgo

I have just returned from a week’s summer holiday in Guernsey.

We decided to travel by air from Stansted, which meant that this morning I was building sandcastles and digging rivers on the beach at 10.00 a.m. (I don’t know what it is about summer holidays but I always seem to regress to childhood) and was back in cloudy Gamlingay by 2.00 p.m.

Although I have only been away for a week it is surprising how many small changes there have been in the village during that time.

I suppose that we are all aware of the big changes in the course of the year, such as the bank and the video shop closing, the butchers and the fish and chip shop reopening and two estate agents opening, but change can happen on a much smaller scale. For example, I have just returned from an evening stroll around the village. It is obvious that we are now approaching autumn. The leaves are on the turn and many of the summer blooms are past their best. There are a large number of new notices and posters around the village advertising cultural and social delights to come over the next month, such as the Village Show, the Gamlingay Players’ next production and music in the Church, most of which will have happened by the time you read this.

But perhaps most Traffic Conestartling of all is the plague of traffic cones which have swarmed over the village, especially down Stocks Lane. These are part of the much needed work on the verges of that road, but why so many cones? I noticed the same when the Hatley road was closed earlier in the summer. There were loads of cones, which obviously proved to be too tempting for certain inhabitants, since many of these mysteriously moved around the village over night.

This reminds me of the cone which I got to know quite well outside my house last year. Alan Bennett had a lady in a van and I had a traffic cone. This cone was left behind after some urgent road repairs. It stayed on the verge for ages and then, a few months later, at a time when there were no road works in the village, another one suddenly appeared. I told my children a night time story about the lonely traffic cone who walked (or whatever traffic cones do to get about) around the roads and lanes of Gamlingay looking for its lost love until, miraculously it found it and they lived happily ever after outside our house. Of course, the story should not finish, there because presumably they wanted children. Indeed, one morning a few months ago I found these two ones one on top of the other. Very soon after that they both mysteriously vanished. But that might just explain why there are so many cones on Stocks Lane…