Frome

Frome, starting the very lazy way and posting the first few results of a Google search – I hope that the Tourist Information Centre are suitably gratified that it appears as number 1 in the search results, got to find out what WordPress makes of so much HTML in one go….
Not a lot,  seems to have stripped the links and just about everything else;  can’t really take issue with WordPress about this, it would be all to easy to clog the site completely. Guess I am just going to have to go  through line by line and manually correct the HTML to sort of reflect the results of the googling (see Displacement Activities)

maps.google.co.uk search for ‘Frome BA11 UK’ to get the general idea and the satellite and street views

Frome Tourist Information Centre, Somerset attractions, Somerset …the official Frome tourist information website, everything you need to know about frome, tourist information, accommodation in frome, whats on in frome.Bed & Breakfast – Accommodation – Tourist Information Centre –

Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia Frome is a town and civil parish in northeast Somerset, England. Located at the eastern end of the Mendip Hills, the town is built on uneven high ground, …History – Governance and public services

Frome Town Talk Events, News, Shops, Shopping, Restaurant Reviews, Jobs … – the Official Web Guide to Frome Town Centre, includes information on this busy, friendly Town, its shops and businesses, tourist facilities

Frome Town 1 Paulton Rovers 1 AET (Paulton win 5-4 Frome Town were knocked out of the Red Insure Cup at the first round stage by local rivals Paulton Rovers on Wednesday night. Matt Cooper gave the visitors …

Black Swan Arts – Contemporary arts gallery, shop and cafe in the Black Swan Arts Frome, contemporary arts gallery and studios in Somerset, … Black Swan Arts, 2 Bridge Street, Frome, Somerset BA11 1BB Tel 01373 473980

Frome Town Council – Home – 3 visits – 24 Oct27 Aug 2010 … Frome Town Council – making Frome a better place … Frome is a market town with a charming historic centre and more listed buildings than…

Frome Festival    The annual Frome Festival includes a wide range of events, including live music, films, art exhibitions, dance and music summer schools.www.fromefestival.co.uk/ –

Frome Rugby Football Club – HomepageFrome Rugby Football Club Rugby Union club Somerset – Southern Counties South – FromeSomerset. –

Frome Community College Frome Community Media Arts College. Students and Parents Links. showcasing student work. Commitment and care for students. Frome newsletter … –

Family and Local History in Frome, Somerset This site is concerned with family and social history in the Hundred of Frome. This consisted of the parishes of Beckington, Berkley, Cloford, Elm

Frome Somerset local information guide – Come and have a look at Frome Somerset England, what’s on, where to eat, how to move to, live and work in Frome

Fairly random but genuine looking and sounding  YouTube clip, there are plenty of really weird ones out there if you feel like YouTube browsing…

This is a lovely form of displacement activity, now I ‘ll start adding some of the other links that describe the places I know. Any blog about Frome must mention the Cheese & Grain a venue that punches above its weight by attracting some big names simply because bands like performing here. Pleasant surprise, the website has been greatly improved since last I looked! I don’t drink any more but many Frome events are lubricated by Frome’s very own micro-brewery . It is attached to The Griffin where the natives are mostly friendly, there is even a congenial backyard for smokers and other outdoor types. Frome has been a market time for at least 1,000 years,  general markets on Wednesdays and Saturdays with a livestock market a few miles away. For some reason Frome has been a backwater for most of the last 100 years and as a result the town has been spared most of the town centre developments that have afflicted most nearby towns. The result has been the survival or creations of independent traders, particularly in the Cheap Street and St Catherines Hill areas. This is turning into a bit of a travelogue, looking in detail helps remind me what a nice part of the world I have ended up in. I came here as a mental health refugee from Gloucester greatly aided by strong support from my daughter and the psychiatrist I was seeing in Gloucester. I landed in supported accommodation run by what was then Mendip Housing (the entity created as the result of the bulk transfer of housing stock from Mendip District Council) currently trading as Flourish Homes but soon I suspect to be known as the Aster Group as more and more functions and staff are taken from the group’s component companies. Not that I am especially alarmed as the service I get as a tenant continues to be good, I don’t believe that bigger necessarily means better. Meanwhile when I do go out< Frome is surprisingly good for real coffee. my favourite place is Dining Divas, situated in the Black Swan Arts complex but there are others, the most pretentious (customers that is, not the not staff) being the La Strada at the top of Cheap Street.  At the start of Stoney Street is the owns’s only natural and organic cafe , the Garden Cafe which includes a roomy barkyard with interesting views of the rear of old Frome buildings. There is no website but The Market Cross cafe is old school and unpretentious; I have not been there for many years so I don’t even know if it serves real coffee, ditto The Settle on Cheap Street.

That’s enough about cafes!

Hardly rocket science, wondering what difference it makes to save this file as .html? Will I be more likely to keep the links or will it just help confuse WordPress some more? What do I make of Frome so far, how does living here compare with the Forest of Dean, Rotherhithe or Prague? It’s different from any of the three cited, easier for me to be whoever me is. For a start it’s much safer living somewhere nothing much happens or when it does makes a splash story for the Frome Times or the Somerst Standard(rarely much particularly hard news, more of an advertising vehicle which would be quite good for fire lighting if only I had a fireplace). Mike at the shop is a good local news source, he’s a good listener and his customers tell him what’s occurring. I suppose a happy consequence of living in the same place for a number of years, it won’t be long before I have lived here longer than I did at Na Šafránce! Does that mean I am finally settling down or just that I am getting old? Whatever, Frome is not a bad place to be doing it; the social infrastructure works it is possible to find a good doctor, there is a dental practice that welcomes NHS patients, all the various health services are accessible and Frome even has a new hospital. I remember discussing the differences between here and Gloucester where there is a noticeably higher staff turnover, came to the conclusion that staff stay in post longer simply because this is a much nice place to live, raise a family &c. The communications infrastructure is pretty good too, there is still a railway station whence it is a possible to get a through train to Paddington and bus services connecting Frome with the other towns in the area. In other words it’s possible to live a life without a car.

My oh my. just found an interesting factoid (while researching the dragon issue as part of a Facebook conversation) namely that  the Rees-Mogg dynasty once owned a colliery, in other words yet another Tory MP supply comes from 19th century coal exploitation, it’s not just South Wales and Yorkshire/Lancashire but even infects more bucolic parts of the country.

QUOTE Either way, the young Rees Moggs are difficult to ignore. One satirist likens writing about their travails to, “dispatching a straightforward half-volley pitched a few feet wide of off-stump”. He adds: “Jacob and his sister embody everything Cameron doesn’t want to see on his benches, and everything I do. They are unreconstructed toffs, ardent tax-cutters, and slightly obsessive Eurosceptics. Most importantly, they’ve always had an unerring knack of ending up in the news.” UNQUOTE

I think that the population of Frome is jolly pleased to have not elected the Honourable Annunziata Rees-Mogg as its MP, preferring to return David Heath with an against the trend increased majority

Rudely interrupted by the window cleaner (had to get dressed earlier than I’d intended)  one day I might be shamed into cleaning the inside windows too. Still need to find a way of automatically harvesting Facebook status comments into this or any other blog: blog activity keeps being interrupted by conversations about dragons and the (non)availability of virgins, especially because the phone keeps notifying me of Facebook status updates. Time to go out and look for some mythical beasts or at least ask Mike at the shop if any of his suppliers can provide such a thing….

Fiddlesticks, apparently in Frome there is no demand for dragons or virgins so the wholesalers stopped supplying either years ago 😦

As usual nothing worth watching on TV nor via the internet, even Facebook as gone suspiciously quiet, am I missing something? Getting well into grump old man mode now, I really dislike all the Halloween nonsense that is everywhere, Strangly enough it did not really exist as a ‘festival’ until after the first UK showings of the Spielberg film ET yet now the retailers’ experiences put Halloween only second only to Christmas as an easy merchandising and revenue generating opportunity. And the Americans take it so seriously! Roll on Guy Fawkes Night, at least that is done in remembrance of real people and a real event and I don’t suppose there is any harm in reminding parliamentarians that one day someone might succeed in blowing them all away. Meanwhile, a Facebook thread just gave me good reason to post http://video.yahoo.com/watch/4744168/12670535 which I’ll share here so as to be able to find again in the future. Back to Frome, this week’s lead in the Somerset Standard is “Supermarket plans to transform town centre” Find it interesting that Pang Properties who already own most of the town are involved, guess the whole scheme will depend on Anthony’s approval. I suspect that this story will run and run so that in the end folk will be so fed up with hearing about it that Tesco or whichever retailer will provide the anchor store will just send in the bulldozers one day when the price of the rumour blighted land drops to a purchasable level and the surrounding land owners acquiesce to what ever proposal restores their own  landholdings’ values. An uncynical view might be that there are people looking to the future and have a desire to end the town’s dependence on the motorcar. ASDA and Sainsbury’s both have branches on the outskirts and  of course, do sell the cheapest petrol hereabouts. Wait and see time, most of the land proposed for redevelopment is post-industrial wasteland, the biggest problem will be vehicular access but I am quietly confident that imaginative road engineering supplemented by enough brown envelopes will succeed. Of course if the retailers really looked to the future, they would pay for spur sidings from Frome’s railway lines so that they could supply the shops regardless of lorry freight costs although in reality, the big retailers will lobby for state provided infrastructure changes when their lorries cost too much. Probably not in my life time… …

Also worth visiting is http://www.fromepeople.co.uk/home