Uffculme revisits its moment of notoriety

Uffculme, the nearest place to us with shops and a Post Office and a bus service that runs more than once a week, was featured on Charlie Brooker's How TV Ruined Your Life, which is quite exciting.  It's right at the beginning, the thing about the explosion in the fireworks factory.  Uffculme is a bit of a nightmare because, of the three roads into it, two are only wide enough for one vehicle at a time.  Consequently you only need two cars to make a traffic jam, but from where we live you have to drive through it to get to the station or the motorway.  It's quite a poor place, and isolated, and I used to laugh at the signs on the lamp-posts saying "Don't do crack!", but actually drug use among the young is a big problem in rural areas where they have nothing to do and no prospects of employment.  There's a big rubbish dump which smells foul when the wind is in the east, and an estate where people throw things through each other's windows in outbursts of neighbour-from-hellishness.  Brooker talks about quaintness, wrongly.

It's a bit depressing because I was all ready to buy into Brooker's thesis that the world isn't as bad as the news makes it sound but actually that was one of Uffculme's more interesting moments.  Amazingly no one was killed and no one was badly hurt, though a lot of houses lost windows and the church roof was damaged.