Subway to open in Oakham

It been announced that Oakham is just about to get it's own Subway franchise to add to all the coffee shops, sandwich shops and restaurants we already have in the High Street. Soon the only place you will be able to buy anything but a lunchtime solution will be the charity shops in the town. Question is how long before they start selling tea, coffee and cake like help the aged in Melton.

Rutland is currently one of the few places in the country that you won't find a McDonald's or a KFC, but after the announcement of a Subway franchise one wonders how long before they both open a restaurant in Oakham. My guess is by the end of 2016 we will have both in the town. 

The sad thing is franchises take money out of the local economy while locally run sandwich and coffee shops do more to support it, and it be those local shops that suffer. In terms of jobs the coffee and sandwich produce on only low paid and unskilled work, normally undertaken by young workers.

One has to wonder how many coffee shops and sandwich shops the local economy can support in Rutland before we see a new type of death in the High Street. These type of operations require a high throughput of customers to make a profit, and if you can't get the footfall then these businesses will close.

Halloween

Halloween goes back to the time when the Celts parts of the UK and parts of Northern France. Back then November 1 was their New Year's Day. They believed that the night before the New Year, 31st October, was a time when the living and the dead came together.

The Celtic new year was eventually taken over by the Christian church and they named it All Saints Day or All Hallows. This was a special holy day to honour the saints and other people who died for their religion. The night before All Hallows was called Hallows Eve. Later the name was changed to Halloween.

Many people of that time also believed that the spirits of the dead would visit the earth on Halloween and that the evil spirits would cause problems or hurt them. So it became a tradition that on the night Halloween people would dress up with costumes that looked like ghosts or other evil creatures. They thought if they dressed like that, the spirits would think they were also dead and not harm them.

Originally the people in Europe would carry lanterns made from turnips, however the influence of America reaches far and now in the United Kingdom we use pumpkins. These we carve and by putting candles inside them we create lanterns. The other idea that has come over from America is trick and treating, turning something that was once serious into something that is fun. 

Popular Posts

Given all that has been going on the last month with the Aldi Store planning application I thought it might be good to look at the most popular posts this month as provided by Blogger itself, all be it one day short of the end of the month. Now I take such things as the stats provided by Blogger with a large pinch of salt, as the detail in the stats is very lacking.

Blogger basically only gives you the number of page views for individual pages and a web browser and operating system percentages over the lifetime of the blog, however it does allow you to look at the top ten posts for a month and these, this month, were:

1. Aldi Plans for Oakham get Approval
2. Police investigate Rutland County Council
3. Politics is a dirty word in Rutland 
4. Social Media Campaign to get Aldi to Oakham 
5. Aldi Plans to be Torpedoed Tomorrow 
6. Rutland County Council Election Results 
7. Not to late to have your say - Aldi Oakhm 
8. NHS Management tell staff have "No to Mugs" 
9. Harrington School gets the go ahead
10. Lucy turns Four

Given the local interest and the lack of reporting in the local press and the immediacy of the internet, the interest in the local politics comes without little surprise that the Aldi planning application comes up high on the list. The only one that did come as a surprise is the last one, Lucy turns Four, which dates back to an event that is nearly three years. Since the start of the year appeared in the top ten posts of all time and it would be interesting to find out why.

Other posts that seem to get a lot of readers are those to do with politics in general and the posts looking at the posts made this month, especially the post about the UKIP MEP and the massage parlour. Seems everyone likes aa bit of scandal.

A606 closed next week

According to the Rutland Council website the the A606 will be shut from its junction with Whissendine Road, just outside Langham, to the Leicestershire county boundary, between Sunday, 2nd November, and Friday, 7th November, next week.

It will reopen for the weekend on Saturday 8th November, but two-way traffic lights will be in place on Monday, November 10 to allow the central reflectors to be put in place.

While the road is close for repairs a diversion will be put into place that takes traffic via the A6003, A47 and B6047 from just outside Oakham to Melton (see map). 

I'm sure, although details have yet to be released, that there will be local diversions in place, but HGV drivers should be aware that all the non classified roads in Rutland have weight limits on them and so they should only use the indicated diversion. 

People taking the main diversion shown in the map should allow at least 20 minutes if not longer for their journey.

Strange Diversions

There have been some strange bus diversion of late due the new policy of closing complete sections of roads to do resurfacing rather to introduce traffic lights and keeping a single carriageway open. This has been causing a number of problems for the local bus drivers especially down some of the country roads that are no more than a single track without passing places.

The problem for the bus drivers is that the average bus on number 19 route, between Oakham and Nottingham is over 40 foot long and weighs in at over 5 tons. It can't get round corners like a family car and has a non-existent turning circle, so getting it to turn in some of the junctions on some of the single track roads is impossible. 

With the coming road closure for maintenance work in Whissendine the number 19 bus is being sent on 5 mile plus diversion down single track roads. This is just at the point where it is highly probably it will meet another number 19 bus coming in the opposite direction. The last time Rutland Country Council did something similar that is exactly what happened and both buses struggled to get past each other on a single track road. 

I'm not sure who plans the diversion routes but they should try driving these routes in a bus before they put them in place. Then may be they would realise what they are asking the bus drivers to do on some of the country roads we have in Rutland. 

Finally a failing of Rutland County Council is to produce and publicise details of the routes in advance. There is little on there website and there is no maps of the diversions. This needs sorting and the diversions need to be published well in advance.

It is going to be a interesting trip for the next few days, with the drivers having to drive at speed to make up  for the time lost in the 5 mile diversion, I just hope they don't meet another number 19 along the way coming in the opposite direction.