Rossendale Valley – hits the news for the forth time ever!

It’s not very often that Rossendale Valley appears on the national news. There are three other times I can recall, which after living here for 20 years says a quite lot.

The first time was when Sky News decided that the Rossendale constituency was a marginal seat in the 2005 election (incidentally, Labour won again). They interviewed me and asked what I thought about the Tory’s policy on ASBOs. I didn’t know what one was. It was live. It was hell. Moving on.

The second was when a man from Hall Carr (a council estate in Rawtenstall – the town which guide books would, I can only imagine, call “the heart of the valley”) shot at people out of his bedroom window. The mother of my Cheshire-based boyfriend at the time expressed concerns about him travelling to the valley after that.

The third was when Sophie Lancaster was murdered in Bacup (definitely not the heart of the valley) by some drunken scum. This still upsets a lot of people including me, so we’ll move on. This was the last time (as far as I know) that the valley was mentioned in the national press…

Until now!

18,000 Rossendalians could be left without gas and electricity on Christmas day after a gas mains exploded on Monday.

(Wow, get that intro. That’s what a ridiculous amount of ‘news writing workshops’ does to you – writing intos when you don’t even want to be writing intos. But perhaps I should lose the quite obviously fictional term ‘Rossendalians’.)

I have tried to locate all 18,000, and although failed, have found that about ten of my friends are affected – which, interestingly (or not) is about 0.05556% of the statistic.

Gutted for them. It’s quite interesting to think of what you can do without gas or electricity. After you’ve thought you’ll come to the same conclusion as I: absolutely nowt (as we say in Rossendale). I always wondered why Jane Austin, the Brontës and Dickins were such big fans of “needlework”. Now I know.