Friday, February 12, 2010

Territorial dispute

A lady called Karen Bradley has written to The Times, compelled to pass on the intelligence that they had wrongly located the village of Flash in Derbyshire when it is, in fact, in Staffordshire.

Well yes, but. Only just.

Flash is 4 miles from Buxton, which is indubitably in Derbyshire; the village has a Stockport (SK) postcode & a Buxton postal address. Buxton is the town where many Flash residents do their shopping, visit the doctor, etc; they were among those who lost out most when bus passes did not allow free travel everywhere outside your own local authority district or county, since a hospital visit might, for example, involve crossing from Staffordshire to Derbyshire to Cheshire.

People also sometimes get Flash confused with Flagg, another village high in the hills, a similar distance south of Buxton but east rather than west & most definitely in Derbyshire.

A confusion which I myself was making until sorting it all out yesterday. It used to make me cross that I couldn’t remember the proper name of what I assumed was a single village - an early sign of Alzheimer’s?

Sigh of relief, just muddling up the memory what must have been perfectly clear in my youth.