The Oakhaven Gazette

RADWORTH has got a golf club — and it is going to cost you.

Eighteen holes have been laid out on the rising ground above Harewood Avenue, and the Gazette can reveal the price list before a single ball has been struck. Thirty-eight pounds for a weekday round. Forty-eight at the weekend. Clubs thrown in, and a fiver on top if you want a trolley.

A buggy is twenty-eight pounds. For one round.

Radworth Golf Club is a par 72 of 6,419 yards and somebody has spent money on it: 274 trees over six species, 212 gorse bushes and better than a mile of post-and-rail fence.

The clubhouse is a 1928 pavilion on its own knoll, eight metres above the road, with a deep verandah over the 18th. Members will drink on it. The rest of Radworth will look up at it. There is no car park yet, so park on Harewood.

“We have not had a chemist five years and now we’ve got a golf course.”

That was Tracey of Limekiln Close. The fee does at least include hire clubs, and shorter rounds of three and nine holes go at twelve and twenty-two pounds. Balls are extra — nine pounds for a bag of fifteen reclaimed ones.

Bring your own, is our advice. There are 43 rabbits, 44 rooks and 79 molehills out there, and every one of them has somewhere to put a ball you will never see again.

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ALSO INSIDE

Wheelie good news

A firm has the job of emptying your bins at last — and it is not the council. Page 3.

Flush with cash

The Slag & Slurry wants a cleaner. Twenty pound an hour, cash at the bar, bogs and glasses. There are cameras. Page 2.

Bells are back

St Cuthbert’s strikes the hour again — seven in the morning to ten at night. Page 3.

Wildlife’s back too

A hundred and seven sightings down the lanes in half an hour. Page 3.

PUBLIC HOUSE · FOUNDRY END

Mop and glory

THE SLAG & SLURRY is taking on a cleaner, and Charlotte behind the bar is not pretending it is glamorous.

“Bogs, floors and glasses,” she told us. “Twenty pound an hour, and I pay you at the bar when you clock off.” A thorough shift comes out around fifty-four pounds in notes and coin.

One warning: she is watching.

Eight cameras cover the bar and the corridors, and Charlotte checks the tape. “There’s cameras all over this place, and I do check,” she said. Anything you pick up off the floor, she will know about. Two bad shifts and you are finished.

The gear is in the store room upstairs — mop, bucket, cloth and two of the yellow signs. Put the signs out. A puddle the size of a beer mat will have your legs from under you, and if a drinker goes over on one you have walked past, that is your shift marked down.

Change your water while you are at it. Wring the mop out about ten times without a refill and the bucket goes black, and after that you are just moving the muck about.

There is a rack of a dozen glasses behind the bar and a third of them are filthy. Three wipes each with the cloth and they come up clear.

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EIGHT O’CLOCK · EVERY NIGHT

Eyes down, and mind who you shout at

Bingo is running properly at the Slag & Slurry at last. Samantha comes round the tables with the cards — a pound for five — and Charlotte calls.

You mark your own cards on the table in front of you. And if you shout too early, Samantha walks over, picks your hand up and tells the whole room you have not won.

The regulars do it too. About one time in five.

Eight pounds to the winner. The house had promised a cut of meat off Bagshaws, but the butcher’s still has nobody behind the counter, so cash it is.

Samantha’s set before the bingo is a song shorter this week — seven numbers now instead of eight. One has been dropped from the running order.

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FIVE BUILDINGS · STILL SHUT

Kitted out — and locked

Good news and bad for Mitchell of Bleachfield Close, who wrote to us about the five buildings standing dark.

All five have been fitted out inside. The working men’s club has its concert room, its stage and a twelve-metre servery. The Baulk Line has its snooker tables. Radworth ABC has a ring in it. The leisure centre has a pool tank and a gym floor. The Islamic centre has its mihrab and minbar.

Not one of them has opened.

No notice in any window, no hours on any door and nobody behind any counter. “So they have furnished five buildings and locked them all again,” Mitchell said. “Marvellous.”

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BETTING OFFICE · OAKHAVEN FORK

Wheel of misfortune

Eight spins on the wheel at Last Tenner Bets on Friday night: 18, 29, 28, 4, 3, 24, 23 and 29 again.

Punters say the ball takes an age to settle. Toby on the wheel says the wheel is true and blames the electrics. Make of that what you will.

MIGHTY OAKS scratchcards are still two pounds, top prize a thousand. Still nobody has seen ACORN FALLS pay out.

REFUSE · THE CONTRACT

Bin there, done nothing

AFTER years of letters, somebody is finally going to empty your bins. Just not yet, and not the council.

The household round has been contracted out to RADWORTH WASTE SOLUTIONS, a private firm, which will work a seven-day rota across the ward — every street done once a week, between fifty-five and eighty-eight houses a day.

Green one week. Brown the next. Same day either way.

So each bin gets emptied once a fortnight, not once a week. Put the wrong colour out and the crew will walk past it.

The firm will take on loaders: six till five, forty-eight pounds a round, cash the same day. No date has been given for the first collection.

And here is the sting: eighty-two bins are missing.

A count this week found 1,010 bins against 546 houses. Twenty-two houses have none at all; thirty-eight have only one of the two.

“They have counted them,” said Shirley of Radworth Road. “They have not brought me one.”

The fly-tipping round is unchanged: half nine at the depot, £2.25 an item, £8 a site.

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HIGHWAYS · STREET LIGHTING

Lamp-posts in the sky

FIFTY-FIVE street lights across the estate were found hanging in mid-air, clear of their own pavements.

The worst, on Cropwell Avenue, was standing seven and a half metres up — higher than the houses it was meant to be lighting. The others were mostly on the Radworth Loop.

Highways blame the resurfacing in the second week of August, when the road levels dropped and the columns stayed put. All fifty-five have now been brought back down.

Twelve are still out.

Ten of those are on the roundabout islands and the contractor will not touch them. Two on the Radworth Loop remain wrong in opposite directions: one stands nearly two metres in the air, the other is buried up to its neck.

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ST CUTHBERT’S · KIMBERTON ROAD

Saved by the bell

The tower is ringing again. St Cuthbert’s strikes the hour from seven in the morning until ten at night, counting them out one to twelve, and stays quiet through the small hours.

Those with an ear say the strikes come a shade quicker than a proper tower clock. The church is not apologising.

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THE LANES

Hare today

Gordon of Kimberton Road wrote to us a fortnight ago to say he had walked the hedgerows every evening and seen one frog.

On Friday evening a single walk down Kimberton and Lacemakers turned up wildlife a hundred and seven separate times in under half an hour, across a dozen species, with as many as eleven creatures out at once.

Somebody had been counting them wrong.

Animals long gone were still being marked down as present, so the lanes were being declared full when they were empty. The books have been corrected.

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TRANSPORT

Bus-ted

The 4 went all the way round twice on Friday night, and our man had a stopwatch on it: twenty-two minutes five seconds for the first lap, eighteen minutes six for the second.

The board says fourteen minutes forty-eight. Oakhaven Buses might like to explain. And there is still not one shelter on route 4.

Gopher Cabs carried its first fares this week — £20.01 on one run and £18.10 on the next, both paid in the back of the car. Passengers who said they could not hear the radio have been listened to: it has been turned up by half again.

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WEATHER

Gust in time

Radworth has got its wind back. For as long as anyone can remember the air over this estate moved at a flat three and a half miles an hour on every dry day — enough to stir a hedge and no more.

Since Wednesday it wanders between three and twenty-one, gusts on top, and swings round through half the compass in a day. The pub sign has not stopped moving.

THE EDITOR WRITES

You asked. Some of you got.

Four of your complaints have been answered this week: the bells, the hedgerows, the five locked buildings and the street lights. One has been half answered — there is a firm with a bin contract, but there is still nothing at your kerb. The rest are below, and we have printed them as they came.

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Golf? On THIS estate?

Thirty-eight pound a round. Forty-eight at the weekend. Twenty-eight for a buggy. I have lived on this estate forty years and I could not tell you one person on it who is going to pay that.

Build what people here can use. We have got a leisure centre with a pool in it that nobody has been allowed through the door of.

TRACEY, Limekiln Close

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Thank you for the birds

I wrote to you complaining I had seen one frog in a fortnight. I walked Kimberton on Friday and could not move for wildlife. I do not know what you did and I do not care.

GORDON, Kimberton Road

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Now empty them

So they have counted every bin in Radworth, worked out that eighty-two are missing, printed a rota, named a firm and set a rate of pay.

Nobody has emptied a bin. Mine has been out since Tuesday.

SHIRLEY, Radworth Road

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Five doors, still bolted

You tell me the club has a stage and the baths have a pool and the gym has a ring. Wonderful. I have walked past all five again this morning and every one is dark with no notice in the window.

Furnishing a building is not opening it.

MITCHELL, Bleachfield Close

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There are STILL no children

A school with a path and six steps up to the door, and not one child on this estate to put in it. No school run. Nobody kicking a ball at a garage door. Five hundred houses and every soul in them a grown adult.

Now we have a golf course as well. Marvellous.

TRACEY, Limekiln Close

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Where is the canal?

This is the Midlands. You have given us a river, which is lovely, and no canal, which is unforgivable. Put a towpath in and you have a way across town that no road overlooks. That would interest a good many people round here.

ROWAN, Lacemakers Court

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Platforms, but no trains

Five stations now. Canopies, valances, the lot. No track, no timetable, no trains. You cannot get to this town and you cannot leave it, and now there are five buildings to be unable to leave from.

KEITH, Sawmill Yard

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The tags are getting worse

I asked for a bit of mess because a place with none reads as new rather than nice. There are now tags up both ginnels, on gables the far side of the estate and on the shutters. Nobody has painted over one of them.

I withdraw my letter. Again.

HOLLY, Marlpit Boulevard