put off till tomorrow

It has been announced as part of their restructuring and recovery plans that Tesco will no longer be building a new store in Manningtree.  The possibility of a Tesco there has been rumbling around for ages, to the shrill indignation of some locals who said that it would ruin the High Street.  I was asked to a candlelit vigil on the walls at Mistley (my memory may have embroidered the candlelit part, but it was definitely some sort of genteel protest demonstration) to express my opposition to the new store.  I didn't go, on the grounds that I no longer lived in Manningtree but if I had I would probably have shopped in a Tesco if there had been one, since the Co-op wasn't awfully good and kept restricted hours, so it wasn't any of my business to dictate where the inhabitants of Manningtree should shop.  And now, weeks if not days before work was due to start, the project has been pulled.  It just goes to show that sometimes it pays to make a fuss about something, because if you can only put it off for long enough it may go away.

Meanwhile, the solar farm on the far side of the valley looks dreadful, now that most of the panels are in place.  It is far longer than I imagined at the outset that it would be, snaking along the side of the hill, the further panels appearing side on as thin slivers, but the nearer ones as great grey rectangles.  The only consolation is that the worst view is from our bedroom and the entrance to the garden.  From inside the garden it is largely hidden by trees and the boundary hedge, and from the veranda you only see part of it, and that is at the base of the wind turbine which is a blot on the landscape anyway.  You just have to swivel your eyes thirty degrees to the right, and then the view is of fields and ancient woodland.

When the wind turbine went up we received a letter about it first, but I'm sure we didn't get any sort of notification about the solar farm.  I suppose it is too far away from the house.  After all, you don't have a legal right to a view.  It's a shame, though, that the locals didn't kick up more of a fuss and manage to delay the wretched thing for a few months, since government guidelines now state that the right place for large scale solar generation is on commercial rooftops, not farmland, and subsidies for the power generated have been cut.  If only the scheme had been running a year later it would probably never have been built, like the Manningtree Tesco.