SPIN/NOT BORN YESTERDAY
There's a hole in my argument
You may know this odd fact already, but the recently elected Ghanaian government got into power on the Pothole Infill ticket. I’m not entirely sure what this means they will have to do, having been swept in on a landslide – fill all the potholes with used Lottery tickets, perhaps – but allegedly the ongoing road condition problem situation in Ghana has reached crisis point: drivers are deemed to be sober only if they’re swerving to avoid the holes. Anyway, it’s one way to win an election.
You may think it doesn’t apply to a modern, hip-hop civilised place like Britain , and you’d be wrong. It seems that there are too many potholes on our roads too, and they’re growing in number. A long article I read the other day debated whether this was down to government tardiness, spending cuts, using poor materials in the first place or some form of climate change which, with more damp and warm weather, means accelerating pothole numbers. The piece concluded that it’s a combination of all these factors, and with a more ruthless editor, could have done it in a third of the length. However, it’s a fact - potholes are a growth sector.
The main road-users up in arms about them (when not over the handlebars) are cyclists. So busy are they, riding the wrong way down one way streets and jumping lights, that often the holes go unseen, and those on two wheels fall into them - at which point they too might become unseen, if the hole is suitably large. What we need is a pothole Tsar, a pothole summit. Bob-a-Hole for cubs and scouts. Or, as a Government minister put it last week, aggressive filling.
Quite what difference one’s manner makes when filling the things in is a tricky one, but words like ‘crackdown’, ‘tough’ and ‘aggressive’ are merely part of the linguistic lexicon of the ever-more devious and impotent politician. The new mordant sound is ‘aggressive’, and so that’s what we’re going to get. When a few hacks probed the junior Minister as to the nature of this move from assertion to aggression, it emerged that the new policy will be to turn up and draw a yellow circle round the hole.
Holier than Thou
Now why in the name of all that’s holey didn’t somebody think of that before? Well actually, they did: it happens in France (and has for years) - and what’s more, they then come back a few weeks later and put up a sign that says, roughly translated, Caution: Hole in Road. I’m obviously a couple of beats behind the music here, because it seems to me that navvy, one, for the useless of turning up with a yellow spray-can costs not a lot less than one navvy pitching up with a shovel, some debris and the odd bit of tarmac. What we would then have, of course, is a small molehill in the road, but at least this wouldn’t kill cyclists - merely buckle their wheels, and thus teach these foolhardy disobeyers of the Highway Code a lesson.
But the yellow circle thing making our hole more visible (and the notice saying look out, yellow line round hole dead ahead) are not, as it were, getting to the root of the problem. Why do all that when you can simply go all Ghana and fill them in? Hole filled, cost halved - result, happiness. Well hang on to your sphincters, because I’m about to tell you: the yellow line (officialdom says) will eventually itself fall into the hole, and this will mark out the hole as a hole sorely in need of aggressive filling and also a damn good smack and early to bed.
Now aside from the fact that, having fallen into the abyss, the yellow circle will not be marking anything very much, having heard this on the radio I was struggling (nay, screaming) for an explanation. And in a funny sort of way, there is one. A Councillor in Devon asserted that there are now so many potholes in Britain ’s roads, if we started tomorrow at oh-six-hundred sharp, it would take eight hundred years to fill them all. Thus, he concluded, we have to work on the major problems, and leave the smaller ones until they too become, er, equally large. Alarmingly, the phone-in cyclist seemed mollified by this – which just goes to prove what I’ve always thought about cyclists: they are easily led.
I write ‘in a funny sort of way’ because like most contemporary analyses, the Devon Councillor’s approach to the problem doesn’t bear interrogation. In fact it doesn’t bear thinking about, but that’s another question – let’s stick to the logic. Devonian Man set out a good old-fashioned 11-Plus equation which is meaningless on account of the missing integers here and there. For instance, how many people are working on his problem, how fast are they working, how many shifts are involved, what’s the weather like on average while they’re doing it, and why is the foreman’s name O’Connor? Surely, if the huge army of long-term unemployed were paid to fill in potholes instead of taking benefits, Mr Brown would be happy. The LTUs would be decidedly unhappy, but their self-esteem would rise at the realisation that they had, in just one year, solved the national pothole problem. Thus, the Councillor’s argument is full of holes, ba- boom.
And now, the hole story….
Sadly, being an advanced technological society, our holes issue doesn’t end at the roadside. Two further genres of hole present even bigger problems. The first involves the continuing three-card trick being employed by the caring, sharing people who run Britain ’s water companies: big, big bonuses, big, big price increases, big, big holes in pipes.
I’m not sure this particular maths problem is the toughie Ofwat and the water co’s would have us believe. Holes occur in pipes occasionally because developers and IT chaps wield their pickaxes with enthusiastic abandon, but primarily because big bonuses are not the way to invest in Victorian infrastructure. It’s been tried, and it falls short on the hole-plugging dimension. And no more with the standpipe gag, OK fellas? Hold the bans on washing cars and kids: this is down to you blokes getting chubbier and chubbier while the pipes get older and older.
Believers in a law-abiding culture might observe that Ofwat should fine the companies humungous amounts of money for ratting on the investment deals they signed, and possibly also send the fatter grinning Cheshires to the sort of Turkish prison that regularly fails its MOT. But that’s not going to happen, and so a more direct approach is in order. Quite simply, small holes should be plugged with bonus cash, and then sealed with the sticky substances usually found on the end of directors’ fingers. Larger holes could be stuffed with the rest of the directors, but I shrink from this as a firm recommendation, keen as I am not to alienate 98% of the readership.
The communications industry tool-wielders mentioned briefly above are, as we all know, great hole-causers in their own right. And while we must all accept that digging enormous holes everywhere all the time is a small price to pay in order to watch eight thousand channels selling jewellery, Godslots, and lots of Asians betting harmlessly on cricket, one might observe (walking round our cities and towns these days) that the ‘enough’ bit of ‘enough is enough’ has been reached.
Here too, all the spondoolicks being garnered are in the hands of a few lucky troughers, while the man who invented that orange plastic zig-zaggy cordon stuff to stop drunks falling into roadwork holes must be sitting on an isolated Pacific beach somewhere, enjoying the fact that no known hole would be big enough to contain all the money he’s made, even if the notes were Fifties. Also, it goes without saying that our cautious friends in Health & Safety would be at a loose end most days were it not for an infinite requirement for hole warnings. One day soon (towards the end of 2011, I reckon) Britain will just be one big hole. Many would observe wittily that it has been for years, but to do so is merely gratuitous.
Once again, I have an ingenious solution to this seemingly intractable problem: Trial by Water.
The methodology has an illustrious track-record, dating back to mediaeval times and the equally large danger presented at that time by the many thousands of witches causing wells (ie, holes) to dry up and oxen to die. Given the rather more complex nature of our contemporary hole epidemic, however, I have been obliged to expand the remit of this straightforward system of justice.
Basically, the bellied and bonused of the water industry would be required to collect all wasted H20 spotted above ground. This they would then haul to the nearest IT hole in the road and fill it. To survive the strain involved in doing so would be the first half of their trial. As for the mobile, pc and telly moguls, they would then be required to sit in the water-filled holes and experience an eclectic 24/7 variety of mobile ring tones, numbskull teenage conversations, jumping-bean website ads, email spam and Sky programmes. This in turn would represent their first-half trial.
All survivors at this point would be given a cwt of lead around the neck and dumped in the watery hole. If they float, they must be so fat, their buoyancy allows them to do so, and they are, ergo sum, witches. They will be taken away and burnt on a bonfire. Those that sink, well, that’s always the snag with Trial by Water: some of those who are guilty (but not witches) get hurt. Still, I estimate that dividing the big holes by the overly bonused should cancel out both problems at a stroke; or, to be more exact, filling the big holes with the unfeasibly bonused is pretty much the answer. And hey – if I’m a bit out, we can always take a few of the real witches off the bonfire as makeweights.