World Car Free Day 22nd September
Hello, welcome to my village diary, a round up of my thoughts from the past week or so. Today is World Car Free Day, a day that aims to encourage people to be less dependent on their cars and make more use of walking, cycling or public transport. I don’t have a car so this is my life. Mainly, I’m glad of it, and value it - but our society seems to be run on the assumption that everyone has a car, so it isn’t always straightforward.
Time for my takeaways from the last week.
First, a shout out to the NHS 111 service. We probably all know that the NHS is stretched beyond belief; getting a doctor’s appointment can be a bit of a mission and I’m never keen on going to A and E. On Tuesday night my son was poorly and we weren’t sure it could wait until the morning. Using the 111 service worked perfectly. From using the website to find advice at 9pm to returning from the out-of-hours service at Tunbridge Wells Hospital* at midnight with a diagnosis, antibiotics and instructions for next actions, we can’t fault it. Let’s protect our NHS.
Another thing to treasure is our environment, and this week I found out I had been accepted as a member of a new environment committee being formed by Rusthall Parish Council. There is much talk of the amount of litter around Rusthall, its countryside and common, and the harm it does to wildlife. The litterpickers who go out either as a big organised event, or every day as part of their routine, are all heroes, and deserve our heartfelt gratitude. But is there more to the enviroment than picking up rubbish? Why is it there in the first place? There has been talk of getting people to post pictures of what they have picked up to social media to highlight the issue. Can we use the rubbish dropped as a way of putting pressure on the retailers who produce this packaging to make changes? Could we box up the rubbish and send it to a retailer’s HQ? Can we reach out to the people who drop the litter to change their behaviour? And beyond litter, what about pollution, unnecessary car journeys, building regulations, green energy and wild-life friendly gardens?
There are pros and cons to being car-free, but it was definitely a low point last week when my daughter and I spent £7.10 on a return bus fare to town, walked up to the leisure centre in the pouring rain, got her changed into her swim suit for her lesson, only to be told pool-side that her lesson had been cancelled because there were no teachers. The queue at reception was too long for me to hang around to ask what had gone wrong here, so out we went to walk and bus our way home. Now obviously this would still have been annoying if I had a car, but it would have been a quicker and less damp kind of annoying. On the way home I started to fantasise about a tram that just ran along the top between Rusthall and Southborough, or even Tonbridge, cutting out the need to go into Tunbridge Wells at all. Slightly more realistically, what about a cycle lane all the way? Because swimming pools and leisure centres are tricky to get to from a village by public transport. According to the Office of National Statistics a quarter of all UK households don’t have a car, but none of the extra-curricular activities my children have done have ever thought about how to make themselves accessible to these households. Thankfully I have friends who have often offered me lifts, but I do like to be able to get places myself wherever possible, and should it really be such a fantasy that I can do this? If we are serious about saving the enviroment we all need to make fewer car journeys, and this means bigger thinking about alternative ways of getting places.
Finally, it has been great to see pictures from the last issue of Rusthall' Life’s cover star Ben Marchant’s first exhibition. I haven’t been able to go and see it myself yet, but it’s been extended, so there is hope! Read my interview with Ben here.
Thank you for reading, as ever I appreciate it! If you would like to get in touch with me please contact me here.
Jayne
*Luckily I could call my son’s dad to take him to the hospital, because that is another place that isn’t too easy to get to without a car, especially at night!
Cycle lane dream
