The Yorkshireman

Tour de Potholes

I don’t know whose decision it was to hold part of the Tour de France in Yorkshire but it was a brave one.
Great, the whole world gets to see some of Britain’s finest and most diverse county, (he says without a trace of bias) but they’d better get a move on and get the bloody roads done.
Some of ours are awful.

The Tour de Yorkshire is skirting our village, climbing up some hills even my car moans about. One is called Jawbone Hill, probably because if you fall off you’ll break yours. We used to fly down it as kids on our bikes, it’s about a mile from top to bottom and our brakes would be like jelly by the time we reached the bottom. We pushed it up. Stuff that, it’s about a 33% incline in places or a one in three in old money.

Our roads have more holes in them than a Swiss cheese which will give the Swiss riders a slight advantage but they’ll need tank rims instead of the skinny little razor blade wheels they use normally.
Even the tractors are taking avoiding action around some potholes. I met a grit lorry coming out of one a few days ago, it had got stuck in there for a week.

The council used to install speed bumps to reduce speeding around the estates but have found it’s far cheaper to develop and nurture potholes, basically by abject neglect, resulting in average speeds dropping by the day. Moreso after a few days of downpour when miraculously the “speed holes” actually grow and become even more effective at no cost to the Council Tax payer. Apparently we should be happy.

Now they’ve got the cheek to put 20 mph signs up all round the village. Ha! Chance would be a fine thing, if you go over 20 mph you run the risk of your car falling to bits or at worst bouncing out of a pothole into the path of a tractor taking avoiding action coming in the opposite direction.

I’ve already broken one spring, the cost of £95 apparently not covered by the Council of Highways Agency because there was no conclusive evidence which of the ten thousand potholes it was in the village that caused the damage.

Sheffield Shitty Council’s Shiny Arsed Jobsworth’s Department grade potholes into three catagories: pinprick (3-6cm deep), dint (10-14cm deep) and slight indentation (double decker bus or larger). I actually park my car in one of the deeper ones, saves bothering about a theft alarm.

What the Highways Agency do is, send two blokes around with a lorry piled high with warm asphalt, two shovels and a map. Once they’ve found our village which usually takes them a couple of weeks, they look for potholes, and chuck a shovel load of asphalt into them, whack it flat with the shovel then find another one and so ad infinitum. We’ve got more patches on our road than a scale sized quilt of Yorkshire.

This is a cartoon, totally unrelated to speed bumps, pot holes or similar. My “step” niece sent it to me. Can there be a step niece?
Anyway, it basically says:
Hello, I’m a broccoli and I look like a tree.
Hello, I’m a walnut and I look like a brain.
Hello, I’m a mushroom and I don’t find this game funny.

Dutch vegetables

Have a good weekend.

10 comments

  2. To drive around in GB is the most interesting experience.
    Not only do they drive on the wrong side of the road but also you end up committing traffic offencese when swallowing yet another round about. In some cases they are not very visible as they are just painted on the ground. In England traffic people seem to paint interesting things on the street surface such as two yellow or red lines and white triangles. 🙂

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    • I have the same problem in Holland haha, then in Germany and Luxembourg there are these tiny yellow signs with really small writing on, like temporary roadworks signs, which tell me where I’m going to or the name of the town I’m in.
      Must say though, we have too many signs in Litte Tory Britain, one road near us has in 200 metres; a 40mph sign, then a 50, then a 40, then a 50 then another 40 and 50 almost making love to each other in a ménage à trois with a “bad bend max 45mph” sign. Roundabouts with cycle lanes as part of the roundabout are a nuisance as well. The yellow and red lines are so you can park in total privacy. :))

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      • I love it that you type hihihi, even though it does look to English eyes like high, high, high. I’ve got used to it, Astrid’s niece in Holland always puts a hihihi after her funny comments on our family WhatsApp group.

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  4. Monkish humour, I’d say.

    Pot holes are not the preserve of any part of the the kingdoms of Yorkshire. They are to be found in all parts of this island, some pot holes more dubious than others. The dubiety stems from their deception. Hole-filling with whatever the road departments use, is a very short term, relatively economic [cheap, the cheaper the better] measure, and fillers have a regular habit of settling. By the time they have been flattened, (and more) by traffic, they can become a more complex problem for an undercarriage than before, when at least, before the ‘beauty therapy’skim was applied, their entirety was visible and avoiding action could have been taken.

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