I'm talking about gems. Not gems as in diamonds and rubies etc but gems as in hidden English villages.
The kind of village or town off a main road. Usually it has a signpost stating something along the lines of historic village or historic market town.
It is so easy to just pass them by. Occasionally we decide to take a slight detour and very often it is worthwhile
It was a long drive down to the South Coast. There was the remains of an accident being cleaned up at Barton Mills and that produced a 20 minute delay getting through traffic lights on a roundabout. Then it was a stop for petrol before tackling my most hated road, the M25 best immortalised by Chris Rea in his song "Road To Hell."
You don't so much travel the Road From Hell as survive it. It's never a pleasant experience. There are several ways to get to our intended destination of Eastbourne, none of which are easy. You can go via East Grinstead or Tunbridge Wells or down to Brighton and then across.
Yesterday we decided on the Tunbridge Wells option and it was hyper slow going. TW or Royal Tunbridge Wells to give it it's full title, isn't easy to get through although I still enjoy passing through as the place holds lots of good memories for me as I will explain sometime.
By the time we got through there, it wasn't long before we saw one of those signs. Mayfield Historic Village. What a delightful place it was, apart from cars being parked all along the High Street. It ruins photographs and makes it very difficult to take good ones.
We had coffee in a tea room and a general look round and I did my best to take some photos which I will share tomorrow.
I bought a copy of the local parish magazine. I pick these up whenever I can to compare them with our own Good News and see if there are any good ideas I can use.
*. *. *
A little about interviewing today following all the very deserved tributes to Michael Parkinson.
"We don't see interviews of this kind any more," was just one of the comments made and my question is why not?
"Conversation is dead on television. People don't have the attention span," said Sir Michael Grade and that for me summed up the situation.
Young people today can only handle soundbites. That's why we have cut down cricket, short music slots and hundreds of TV channels. We live in a disposable society where people have very short attention spans and where everything is thrown away rather than mended.
Today's so called chat show hosts have to have numerous guests per show and think the public are more interested in what they have to say than listening to their guests. Think of the likes of Graham Norton or Jonathan Ross. It annoys me intensely when a guest isn't given the opportunity to answer a question because the so called host just wants to put over their point of view.
Other interviewers ask such convoluted questions that, by the time they finish, you have forgotten what they asked in the first place. Often they ask two or three questions at the same time and often the subject will just answer one and it's not the one you are interested in.
I have often shouted at the TV "just let him/her answer the question. I want to hear what they have to say, not what you have to say."
Parkinson's interviews were, as Michael Grade said, conversations and that is surely the essence of a good interview. You are trying to encourage your subject to talk about themselves or their area of expertise. I'm a firm believer that it's not the interviewer's job to make a subject look foolish. Let them talk and if they are a fool they will soon hang themselves.
Mind you the most difficult thing is to get a subject to tell you about their life from their early days to the present in some kind of chronological order. Most just skip all over the place and you have to keep bringing them back. Often you will find subjects waffling on interminably about something you know your readers/listeners just won't be interested in.
*. *. *
Good to see the banks are being asked by the Government to provide more cashpoint machines so that people who live in urban areas are within a mile of one whilst those living in rural areas are within three miles. I like the expert on TV who said you might as well ask country people to go to the Alps as to travel three miles.
Of course this all comes at a time when most of us rarely use cashpoints due to plastic becoming King.
It's a shame that this idea comes at a time when our banks are disappearing from our High Streets at an alarming rate.