HOLE IN THE GROUND

Absolutely everywhere

It’s that time of year when the sun comes out, the excavating machines are taken out of mothballs, the contractors dust off their hard hats, slip on their fluorescent tops, work boots and gravitationally over-active jeans and set out to dig holes in the roads.

Suddenly, on any journey I have to take anywhere, there are roadworks, roadworks everywhere, where recently there were none, and I’m beginning to think that it can’t be a coincidence.

It’s as if, during the rainy and icy months, there’s nothing at all wrong with the pothole-marked crusts we move around upon, and the road workers all hibernate in the little stripy tents that they construct for themselves, drinking tea, playing cards and comparing tattoos, and then, there’s a glint of sunlight in the air and the cones are out, the temporary traffic lights are tested to make sure they are all set to “red” and, like those tiny little workers in the “Snow White” story, “hi-hoh, hi-hoh”, it’s off to work they go.

Well, off to somewhere, anyway…

The cones are there, the machinery is there, the lights are on red and there’s nobody home, except for some road users trying to work out whether the contra-flow is clear enough to risk a head on collision with the traffic coming from the other direction and which will be wondering thinking exactly the same thing.

And so, you carefully manoeuvre your way around one hole in the ground, relax and tootle along on a bright sunny morning, only to find there’s another one half a mile up the road and another, and another, and each time you go through the same routines, relieved in a way that it’s early enough that there’s not yet much traffic about and also thinking, with increasing dread, about the journey home.

You might be heading different direction, but it’s the same set of holes and, even if you manage to avoid the tail end of the “school run” you’ll have slipped into the “rush hour” instead and you begin to wonder whether you’ll ever see that warm bed you so recently vacated ever again as you continually hold the car on the clutch, no doubt chipping even more of the notches off the cogs in your overworked gearbox.

They seem to pop up at random, too, almost as if they’ve slipped through from some alternate  “roadworks fixated” universe, designed to snarl up the free-flow of movement in our world and so not have to face the ignominy of winning the “Most Tetchy Version of Reality” award for the umpteenth year in succession.

Not only that, but these holes in the ground, or – possibly - routes to adventure (which might explain where the contractors actually are…), always seem to appear at the most inconvenient spot - the three-way junction, the blind corner or the only route to town - and never where that huge pothole causes you to swerve out of the way and into the path of the traffic coming the other way on the one morning in three that you remember in advance that it’s actually there before you feel that familiar clunk as you hit it full tilt.

I know, like my journeys, they are a “strictly necessary” evil, as things do, unfortunately, still fall apart in our own “entropic” universe. Perhaps we need to work out a way of sending our entropy over to “roadworks world” as a kind of big “thank you” for all the joy they’ve given to us over the years…?

Sometimes a hole in the ground becomes necessary because the water pipe they dug up the road to mend last month has leaked and damaged the nearby electricity feed, or corroded the gas pipe, or interfered with the optical cabling, and you can feel pretty sure that once one part of your journey has been has been dug up, the same spot will be getting dug up fairly regularly for the next few years, and, even when the autumn clouds have started to gather and the roadworks have all gone back to sleep for another winter, you know that, even as you sail across that new laid tarmac that somehow never manages to quite match the road surface around it, one day you’ll be greeting it again like an old friend.

The kind of old friend that you really wish wouldn’t keep coming around and stealing all of the beer from out of your fridge.