Latest news with #MichaelHarding
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Automotive
- Yahoo
'My late wife's hearse was blocked by idiot's bad parking' in nightmare road
A widower has described how his late wife's hearse could not get through a busy road and had to reverse because of bad parking. Angry residents in Spetchley Road in Worcester have slammed 'bullying' parents for blocking their driveways and verbally abusing them during the school-run. Cllr Elaine Willmore, a Labour city councillor for Nunnery, has been speaking to people about their concerns and pushing for Worcestershire County Council to find a solution. CONGESTED: Spetchley Road in Worcester where one man says his wife's hearse got stuck (Image: Emma Trimble / SWNS) Resident Michael Harding, 79, said the hearse carrying his late wife was forced to reverse down the street after being blocked by double-parked cars. He said: 'My wife had terminal cancer for two years and she sadly died in April this year. 'The hearse picked her up from the family home. It got around the corner but it couldn't get through as some idiot was parked on double yellow lines. 'We had to turn back, it made us late for the service. Both cars had to reverse back down the road and turn around. 'He was parked on double yellow lines on a bend with another car parked across from it. Sometimes I cannot get my car off the drive, they park way over the drive. SIGN: A sign from a resident in Spetchley Road in Worcester (Image: Emma Trimble / SWNS) 'I virtually have to park onto my neighbour's drive to get off, fortunately he's kind enough to let me. 'As well as the school-run parents it's the students leaving their cars on the road all day while they are at college. 'If you say anything to them, they swear at you. The language is foul, you get some really horrible responses. 'It's really everyone who is suffering here, it's not just me. They park across drives. You try to drive up Spetchley Road at 3pm and it's dangerous. We've had enough.' Arguments have broken out and signs erected begging parents to leave their cars elsewhere during the morning and afternoon rush. RECOMMENDED READING: 'Brazen parents park on our driveways - and some give us death stares' RECOMMENDED READING: Moment bungling burglar realises he is caught on camera before stealing laptops Retired Royal Navy engineer Royston Roberts, 82, said: 'People have parked on my drive which is never a good scenario. 'You can ask them to move but it's a civil matter. The police can't do anything. 'The problem for us is that I can't get access to the highway or get in or out of home a lot of the time. It's tight, too. It can be very inconvenient." Mr Roberts, who has lived on the street with his wife Maureen since 1983, said a suitable parking solution lies just 100 yards across the road in the form of the disused County Hall space. He added: 'The County Hall has a huge car park 100 yards away. There's no resolution - zigzag lines and warning people doesn't work. "If someone has arrived late, they'll park their car halfway across the drive. They'll dump their cars, but it's on both sides of the road – it's chaos.' A spokesperson for Worcestershire County Council said: 'We would need to consider the wider effects of adding more restrictions. 'As with all traffic management measures, parking restrictions involve a balance of benefits and drawbacks, and it is important to approach any change with this in mind.'
Telegraph
5 days ago
- Automotive
- Telegraph
‘Bullying parents making our lives a nightmare during school run'
Disgruntled residents have hit out at 'bullying' parents for blocking their driveways and verbally abusing them during the school run. Neighbours in Spetchley Road, Worcester, where the average house price is £555,000, say the situation is a 'nightmare'. Between 8am and 9am every morning, dozens of cars cram into the street as parents drop their children off at Nunnery Wood High School, which caters for 1,483 pupils. This is then repeated between 3pm and 4pm, with the rush becoming more difficult when some of the 1,750 students from the nearby Worcester Sixth Form arrive in the morning and leave in the afternoon. Some residents say they are so fed up that they are considering moving out of the area in a bid to escape the school run crush. Michael Harding, 79, said the hearse carrying his late wife was forced to reverse down the street after being blocked by double-parked cars. He explained: 'The hearse picked her up from the family home. 'It got around the corner, but it couldn't get through as some idiot was parked on double yellow lines. 'We had to turn back, it made us late for the service. Both cars had to reverse back down the road and turn around. 'He was parked on double yellow lines on a bend with another car parked across from it. 'Sometimes I cannot get my car off the drive, they park way over the drive... If you say anything to them, they swear at you. The language is foul, you get some really horrible responses. 'It's really everyone who is suffering here, it's not just me... We've had enough.' Royston Roberts, 82, a retired Royal Navy engineer, added: 'I have an older Land Rover and I can't access my drive because they park so far over blocking it. 'Deliveries are a problem for people on both sides of the road. If you want building materials, it's impossible. 'You have to work it out for a non-school day or a weekend, which is an inconvenience. 'Students can apparently use the car park at the college, but they're the worst offenders. 'I can't report them to the school because the cars they are driving are not often registered to them... The county hall has a huge car park 100 yards away. There's no resolution – zigzag lines and warning people doesn't work. 'If someone has arrived late, they'll park their car halfway across the drive. They'll dump their cars, but it's on both sides of the road – it's chaos.' Councillor Elaine Willmore, who is trying to resolve the situation, said: 'Driveways are blocked quite often and we even have people parking on the drives and, when residents have challenged them, they receive abuse.' 'It tends to be the parents parking on the driveway. They've gone out to tell them and they say 'I'm just waiting for my kids' or 'I'll only be five minutes'. 'There's been lots of near misses, too. I think this could definitely get worse.' A spokesman for Worcestershire County Council said they were implementing parking restrictions on the road. They said: 'We would need to consider the wider effects of adding more restrictions. 'As with all traffic management measures, parking restrictions involve a balance of benefits and drawbacks, and it is important to approach any change with this in mind.'
RTÉ News
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Na Féilte Tine: Michael Harding & 'Bealtaine'
RTE's four-part series Na Féilte Tine (The Fire Festivals) explores the four indigenous Irish festivals of Samhain, Imbolg, Bealtaine and Lúnasa. Bank Holiday Monday's programme explores the festival of 'Bealtaine' and the theme of Nature. Michael Harding features & joins us now from our Cork studio
Irish Examiner
22-04-2025
- Irish Examiner
Michael Harding: 'Cork is friendly, more like a country town than a big city'
Walking is a wonderful thing. Author and playwright Michael Harding has always been a good walker. When in Warsaw writing books, he walked the city's snow-covered streets to clear his mind and work through ideas. Where he lives near Arigna, on the Leitrim/Roscommon border, he's surrounded by fantastic wilderness for trekking. He describes walking as like a chanting in the body. 'The human brain can think in duality. You're always thinking of two things. While listening to the radio, you'll be thinking of something else. The way meditation works is you find a mantra, candle or icon in the image of a Buddha. If you focus on that, you'll notice your brain's other side is like a river flowing with thoughts. If you keep at it, you get disengaged with those thoughts and you reach a calm state." Harding says that, while walking, a similar thing happens. 'Your body takes the place of the icon or candle. The body gives you this repetitive rhythm that brings you into a calm trance. When you walk, you'll find a lot of thoughts flowing through your head. Gradually they die down. Then the interesting things in your mind surface. That's why writers like walking. Writers say if you've a problem with your writing, go out for an hour's walk and come back and it will be solved.' The problem Harding had was what to do with his father. He died in 1976 when Harding was 22 years' old. He was a sensitive man, but reserved, traumatised by a childhood of poverty in which his mother died when he was an infant; his father drank; and his only sibling, a sister, died young from TB. He clawed his way into the middle classes by doing correspondence courses in accounting, but the shame of covering up so much devastation in his family never left him. Part of Harding's dilemma was he never knew the warm, gregarious side of his father, who was a charmer in his younger days, but retreated into life's shadows in middle age, and the sanctuary of his drawing room, reading books, waited on by his wife, unknowable to his children. As a teenager – and later in his twenties in grief – Harding took to pubs to fill the void where 'every old man was,' as the poem says, 'my father'. Harding, one of the great soul food writers, resolved to do the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage to try and connect with his father's ghost, which he writes about in his memoir, I Loved Him from the Day He Died. 'When I got to the Camino, I felt my father had followed me even though he was 50 years dead,' he says. 'I was able to go back over memories and realise I never understood him. He was a remote character. He died when I was young. There was a gap in my life, and ever since. I filled it sometimes with the company of more boisterous men, men older than me who were passionate and romantic and full of camaraderie, all of which was not in my father. He was aloof. I Loved Him from the Day He Died: My Father, Forgiveness and a Final Pilgrimage, by Michael Harding. 'I was missing fatherhood, the experience of intimacy with him. I spent many hours in pubs with other men to substitute for that. I discovered on the Camino this idea of saying, 'I didn't understand him because he was too remote' was not as relevant as being able to say, 'I actually loved him' but it was an incomplete relationship.'' Harding's father wrote book reviews for the Irish Press newspaper, commissioned by David Marcus. There's a sense writing was where his heart lay, but those dreams were frustrated. Harding had a lightbulb moment in Cork – during three months he spent in the city in 1981 as a priest ministering at a nursing home in Montenotte – that writing should be his real vocation. He still thinks fondly of that summer. 'My abiding memory is cycling down the hill into the city on a summer's day. I remember it as gorgeous weather. I worked as a chaplain, but lived like a poet. I never really took the old institution seriously. I'd be cycling down the hill with a good shirt on, just being alive, having all these options of places to go like The Long Valley or Counihan's. 'There was another place called Café Lorca on Washington Street, across from an Augustine church. It was trendy. It was an old shop front and they turned it into a cool café. In the evenings, they served wine, lit candles, and played folk music. It was probably two people who'd lived in Spain who came back with some imaginative way to invent a Spanish café in Cork. It was lovely." Harding was plenty good things to say about the southern city. 'Cork isn't modernist or alienated from itself. It's friendly, more like a country town than a big city. It's a sophisticated city of the empire – the architecture, the style, the commerce and merchants. The irony is I've lived in places like Fermanagh, where people argue about Northern Ireland being British, and Fermanagh is not a quarter as British a city as Cork, but you're not supposed to say that. Cork is uniquely Irish within the context of Britishness. There's something special about Cork.' Michael Harding will read from I Loved Him from the Day He Died, Thursday, May 1, at the Everyman in Cork. See: Camino de Santiago The Camino de Santiago is a pilgrim route dating back to the tenth century. It concludes at Galicia's Cathedral de Santiago de Compostela in Spain's northwest where, it's believed, the Apostle St. James' remains reside, but it has no singular starting point. Camino routes begin as far away as France and Portugal. The most popular jumping-off point is Sarria, 126km from Santiago, where Michael Harding began his pilgrimage. He allowed himself 10 days to reach the great bell. Walkers on the Camino de Santiago, Galicia, Spain. Picture: iStock Harding travelled lightly and dressed idiosyncratically. Inside his yellow backpack, he kept his passport; underwear and socks; a light anorak which he discovered wasn't rainproof; medication and vitamin supplements; and the top half of a double-breasted suit, bought for €15 in a charity shop. He wore the bottom half for the walk. He couldn't bear wearing short pants. The suit, brown like a monk's robe, was 85 percent wool, but silk-lined, which had a cooling effect on his legs. On his feet, he wore sandals. 'On a pilgrimage, you embody faith rather than think it,' says Harding. 'Every mile walked is a prayer. You're moving closer towards the sanctuary in Santiago. You talk to people and have the craic. Nobody's religious in an overtly nineteenth century way, but at the same time you're walking to mass. 'A journey transforms people. You get it in Greek philosophy, Buddhism, in Sufi stories. They're outside their natural environment, at a distance from their families, children or partners, from their work, home and vegetable plot. They're taking time out from life to do a pilgrimage. A mentor deity is at the end of it, whether it's Buddha or Jesus. They get closer to this Jesus moment every day they get up. It's a beautiful intensity. Through interaction with people of common mind they're changed. 'On the Camino; everybody's there for a reason. People will tell you, 'Well, my mother died last year, and I promised her I'd do the Camino.' 'I've a sick child and I thought I'd do the Camino.' You do something like that, and in some way, you find a resolution to your grief, your pain or your anxiety.'
