Taking the rough with the smooth

Somewhere on the road between Arnside and Milnthorpe are several of my fillings, plus bits of my car which rattled off.

I’m thinking of charging SLDC for repairs.

Unfortunately, it looks like they haven’t got any money for that kind of thing, or maybe they’re made of sterner stuff.

The early signs of spring are appearing. Snowdrops are out, daffodils are poking their heads warily through the soil, and lambs are frolicking in the fields, blissfully unaware that they might wind up wrongly labelled as something else altogether in a UK supermarket lasagne any time soon.

There’s another regular spring event too – crumbling roads. I’d started to figure out where they were during my journey to work, but swerving round so many of them causes motion sickness, and the likelihood of being stopped by the police for drink-driving. Not to mention the fact that it’s probably adding miles to my journey.

A nonsensical event seems to occur with a similar frequency to that of horses popping up in unexpected places too –random resurfacing. Several instances appeared towards the end of last year, the rationale seemingly being “This whole road looks like the surface of the moon – let’s randomly pick a short stretch and resurface it”.

Whilst it’s clear to anyone who actually drives that the whole road will only be passable in a tractor within a few weeks, the council tarmac a brief stretch, then seem surprised when the rest of it collapses shortly afterwards. Driving some of our local roads is like sitting on a particularly unbalanced washing machine. There’s an occasional quiet, still, moment, the tarmac equivalent of the eye of the storm, then all hell breaks loose again.

The other method currently employed is to send someone out to stick tarmac in a hole, tread on it a bit, then go away again. The surface around the new bit then disintegrates, leaving a rock-hard molehill that tests your suspension and nerves. On the edge of my village, a length of these repairs were done, leading to a washboard effect so violent, I’m frightened we might create some kind of rip in the fabric of space and time, and wind up back in the Dark Ages. Mind you, apart from scurvy, civil wars and lack of internet connection, they probably had smoother roads.

I’m guessing it’s a money thing. Whilst we get charged the earth for the tax on our petrol, and the tax disc on our cars, very little of this makes it back to the road surfaces we shake, rattle, and roll our way along. Either that, or we need fresh blood in the department that works out which roads to resurface.

Here’s my suggestion: If its starting to break up, it will almost certainly get worse, not better. Perhaps you could do something about that, before I need a climbing rope to get out of the next big pothole. Alternatively, put a ‘Big Dipper’ sign on it and charge a quid a go. You could then spend that on fixing it.

This post first appeared in my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column in the North West Evening Mail on Friday the 22nd of February 2013. You can view the version used online here

Strangely, only 9 words went missing: "the tarmac equivalent of the eye of the storm". Weird, huh? Just in case the readers didn't know what tarmac is, all references to it were replaced with "asphalt" or "surface". Yeah - I know.

I was surprised my suggested title was kept too - I thought it might be added to, making it more obvious that it was about road surfaces. Not tarmac though - no-one knows what THAT is.

(Listening to Queen again - the "Queen Rock Montreal" gig from 1981. Belting!)

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog