Cinio Gyda'r Teulu

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The reason I had to do yesterday's trip to the Black Country on the bounce was that we were booked in at The Royal Oak in Betws Y Coed today for our monthly lunch with the boys and Irene. The return journey from the wake started about as unpromisingly as it could have. The entire trip home should have taken less than three hours from that far north of Birmingham. All I had to do was traverse out from Gornal Wood onto the Stourton road, via Kingswinford, to pick up my old A5 route and thence home to North Wales. It took an hour to travel the less than five miles to Stourton: Wordsley High Street was simply solid with crawling nose-to-tail traffic, pavement to pavement, the traffic not easing until after the Stewponey junction, and I was past Roy Wood's old place, Stourton Hall.

It's been a good while since I drove anywhere in the West Midlands, and whilst it was always a busy place, this was absolutely nightmarish, and a damned good advert for any and all traffic control regulation possible, and improving public transport services and pricing to boot. It reminded me of central London thirty years ago, so God knows what the metropolis is like now, if the provinces are so bad. I pity city dwellers, I really do... Anyway, after a patchy trip of over four hours, with a fuel stop, and a broken down forty-footer at the Oswestry Services precipitating a further half hour of clutch-damaging crawling, I made it back home. Pictured, the five of us at lunch this afternoon: worth the hassle in the end...

 

 


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