How things Change

He told me once that he'd been a Desert Rat.
He was peering through the front window of Brook Street Pottery when I passed by, and he turned to me and said: "How things change. They used to keep the post vans in here."
He pointed across to the patch of grass beside the Library. "There was an electric shop just there, and between that and the Poetry Bookshop there were three houses - and nine houses going down where the Library is."
He shook his head at the Library. "Why did they have to put that there?" he asked. "And that grassy bit, just going to waste - they could have built old people's flats here. They'd have been just handy for the middle of town, instead of stuck out where they are now, that's too far to walk in."
The Library is a fairly modern building, but it's been there since before I arrived in Hay, yet there are still people who disagree with the decision to put it there. Some visitors to Hay are surprised to find a Library here at all - if they find it at all, tucked away down a side alley as it is. Why have a library when the town is overflowing with books? Yet the Library is well-used and well-stocked, and there are no plans to move it, as far as I know.

The Council Offices are a different matter, however. The County Council has decided to close the Hay offices, and presumably sell off the Victorian house by the Clock Tower where they are at the moment, and move the offices to the Community Centre. This is a far from ideal location, as the Community Centre needs a lot of work doing to it - it hasn't been done up for years. What the new owners would do with the impressive disabled toilet - which was built, for reasons known only to the Council, on the first floor, where no disabled person could get to it - is uncertain.
This will be happening in other small towns as well, and the Llandrindod Wells offices have already been moved.
There were plans to incorporate the Council offices in the new Community Centre - but at the moment, plans are all they are. There's no sign of anything actually being built to replace our existing crumbling buildings, for all the enthusiasm there was at the public meeting last year. (There was one dissenting voice - Anne Addyman, who disagreed with the plans for a small theatre as part of the community centre because she thought it should be bigger and have better facilities to be able to stage the sort of big community plays that Red Kite Theatre has been perfoming since the Millennium).

Meanwhile, the Inland Revenue wants to close the Brecon Tax Office and move everything to Cardiff. This idea has been put about before, but nothing happened last time. Kirsty Williams, our MEP, is against it. As she pointed out, in a column in the B&R last week, Cardiff is booming. Brecon isn't. The people who work in the Tax office here won't all be able to move down to Cardiff, and they won't be able to find comparable jobs in the Brecon area. They also have considerable local knowledge. When I ran my own (very small) book business, I always found them very helpful - and they understand the oddities of the book trade. This local knowledge would be lost, or at least diffused, if everything moved to Cardiff.