Your letters

Manage our roads properly

Sir, — For four days this October, Tuesday 7 to Friday 10 — working day journey times through Henley took
45 minutes instead of 10, costing thousands of man/woman hours of wasted time.

The cause was a closure at the end of Fair Mile roundabout with three-way traffic lights, apparently due to fixing a water leak. The work finished in two days and for a further two nothing was done beyond two cars being parked there.

In Watlington, the car park, without which the shopping street cannot operate, was to be shut for an entire week from 7am to 7pm every day. By noon on the first day shops were mostly empty and appointments cancelled as customers could not get to park.

At 12.30pm the Hill Road entrance to the car park mysteriously re-opened — the only sign of any work being white paint round a manhole cover and a fire hydrant.

Work, however, can be done well and promptly — see Reading Road in Henley by the United Reformed Church and within a working day. In Watlington, what was to take a week’s closure was just done in a day on October 16.

We’ve also had a 15-week closure of Shirburn Road into Watlington and several proposals to shut the upper road through Greenfield and Christmas Common to Stokenchurch, all aborted.

Why can’t these closures be announced and properly managed in the first place?

This can only lie with Oxfordshire County Council, the highways authority, which issue temporary traffic regulation orders, for which they need 12 weeks’ notice.

Is this Lib-Dem hybrid working from home or just poor management? What’s needed is feet on the street and control of contractors, including night work. — Yours faithfully,

Adrian de Segundo

Russells Water

Be careful what you wish for

Sir, — Looking at the recent correspondence from Tim Davis and Andy Robertson, there is a bigger picture which I believe Tim was driving at.

The country is in an unhappy place both politically and economically. The popularity of the Government has plummeted in a year flat. Labour claim to be pro-growth and business but the budget pointed in the opposite direction.

Their strategy is to cast around for blame — the last government, Brexit or the Office for Budget Responsibility. They appear oblivious to the harm caused by their own actions.

The Conservatives are at their lowest ebb in living memory. This is of their own making but is Reform UK really the answer?

A case of be careful what you wish for. — Yours faithfully,

Stephen Brett

St Mark’s Road, Henley

Blatant poor planning

Sir, — We elect our councillors to act in the best interest of the town but after the traffic debacle during the excellent Henley Literary Festival, it was obvious that the town’s interests had been ignored.

How could all the road works, absent repair crews and traffic lights, set up when no work was taking place, be allowed?

In my last letter, I mentioned Buckinghamshire County Council prohibits the setting up of temporary traffic before any repair work begins. The letter from Rosemary Duckett (Standard, October 17) mentioned the traffic lights at Northfield End set up before any work started and the lack of continuous work in Market Place.

Surely the town council and county council should be ensuring such blatant poor planning is not allowed to take place? Being told by the town council it is doing as much as it can on social media and it’s out of its control is a cop-out. Roll on the next elections. — Yours faithfully,

Tim Davies

Henley Conservatives
St Mark’s Road, Henley

Look at facts and move on

Sir, — It was good to see Douglas Kedge once again taking a modest tilt at a clergyman but, in my opinion, it is long past the time to follow up on Douglas Adams’s quote in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy wherein he asks “Who is this God person anyway?”.

It is just over 2,300 years since Aristarchus of Samos showed that the Earth rotated around a star (the Sun) but his discovery was largely ignored. Then, some 1,800 years later, good old Copernicus showed it again and was attacked for doing so by the clergy of the various monotheistic religions which continue to cause such trouble to this day.

In recent years, we have seen three amazing telescopes, first the Hubble, then the James Webb and latterly the Vera Rubin, that have all shown us pictures of the universe going back for at least
13 billion years.

These observations and many others show that there are up to 400 billion stars in our own tiny corner, the Milky Way and many trillions of galaxies and quadrillions of stars elsewhere — a quadrillion being 1,000,000,000,000,000.

What I find incomprehensible is that people still believe that there is some supreme being, God, behind all this and in whose never seen image we are all supposed to have been “made”. They even believe that this being made everything in the universe in just 518,400 seconds and then also provided an afterworld for some of us!

I have to own up to having been heavily catechised as a child and believing all that tosh. Fortunately, I learned to think for myself and then had the good fortune to live in London through the “swinging Sixties” and so was able to escape the dogma. I urge those being deluded by religions to look at the facts and move on. — Yours faithfully,

Philip M M Collings

Peppard Common

Concerned about homes

Editor, — I am writing to express my strong objection to the recent planning application submitted for Empstead Works in Greys Road, Henley.

My concerns centre on the continued lack of supporting infrastructure within the town and the inevitable increase in traffic this development would bring to an already congested area.

Given the growing public concern over the cumulative impact of new developments in Henley, greater awareness and open discussion are essential if the community is to have a meaningful voice in how our town evolves.

Thank you for your attention to this important issue. — Yours faithfully,

Jacqueline McLean

Henley

Performance was superb

I watched the Henley Players’ production of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband at the Kenton Theatre last Saturday afternoon. What a superb performance!

Inevitably, the Kenton has to try to be all things to all people. Not an easy task but it does mean, from time to time, we have drama of first-rate quality.

We are so fortunate to have this wonderful theatre combined with the highly talented Henley Players. Both need our support. — Yours faithfully,

Tony Fox

Henley

Thank you for kindness

Just a word of praise for the emergency ambulance service which often gets criticised for being slow to respond.

They came to me some four minutes after being called, burst through the front door and in no time seven of them were quickly and efficiently working on the patient.

They were incredibly kind and considerate to me at a dreadful time, and I shall always be grateful. I hope they will be able to read this. Thank you. — Yours faithfully,

Katie Kubicka

Henley