It's January, it's winter and an acne-like rash - of the deep crater-forming, scarring kind - is afflicting the local roads. It begins with a hairline crack in the tarmac, like the fissures that appear on the cooling surface of a baked cheesecake. Water pools in the crack, expanding and scabbing over as the temperature drops. The icy crust then shatters beneath vehicle wheels, throwing lumps of broken tarmac across the road. Repeated freezing, expansion and plucking of grit from its edges digs a deeper and wider fissure that grows into a vehicle-destroying, passenger-tossing hole.
The school run is no longer simply a tootle-along-practicing-tables-and-singing-songs run, but has become an avoiding-the-pot-holes run. And trying-to-remember-where-the-deepest-ones-are run. As if trying to remember anything in the morning wasn't difficult enough already - games kit? Water bottle? Piano music? Cello? Where are the dogs? Have they been fed? Did we lock the front door? And now, having remembered most of that list ... some of it ... any of it ... the children! ... can I recall the exact location of the worst pot-holes ... most ... some ... any of them? ...
... "Mum, you hit that one yesterday!"
Eye strain and headache are the consequence of each evading-the-pot-holes journey. Along with huge irritation that it is always me, in my little car, that has to take avoiding action, on a narrow road, when a 4x4 is coming the other way. Maybe the 4x4 driver is trying to avoid the pot-holes too, maybe she has a teeny, tiny, precious Pomeranian sleeping on a slippery, silk cushion, on her front passenger seat.
4x4s are designed to cope with pot-holes - to take a bit of corrugated ditch in their stride, to flirt with deep puddles, and to cocoon passengers in a jolt-free, luxury, leather-lined cabin where sleeping toy dogs are rocked gently and snore contentedly in their sweet, pot-hole-free dreams. My little car is not. It does none of these things. Of narrow wheel and limited road clearance, it shudders, when forced to plumb the muddy depths of the road's recent winter ulcerations. Such bangs and crashes that would wake a cat, on its inaugural car ride home, after being collected from the taxidermist.
This tarmac affliction is a disease so virulent that there is a now a 'Fill that Hole' app (fillthathole.co.uk) developed by the national cycling charity (ctc.org.uk) which uses satellite location to pin-point and report new holes. If pot-holes can bend, jolt and smash cars, then pity the poor cyclist who descends into one - lycra and a helmet don't do much to cushion the collision between flesh and tarmac.
Thus it was that at the beginning of last week, "Phew!" and "Hurrah!" and "About time!" greeted the appearance of a 'warning of a road closure for resurfacing' sign. We went to bed dreaming of smooth roads and un-jarred bones.
They road repair men came. They saw. They filled all the cheesecake cracks.
But failed to conquer the pot-hole.
Didn't they notice it? Were they instructed only to do half a job? Maybe, they like pot-holes. Maybe, they saw the mouse guarding the hole - look at the photo again if you didn't see it. Maybe, they have a scrap book of pot-holes that look like other things. And they thought this was a good one - and want to revisit it to see what it evolves into - that nose is going to go first, perhaps it will break off leaving a gaping mouth, perhaps the snout will be blunted and instead, it will look like a pig, perhaps it will suddenly look like a celebrity and get a twitter profile. Maybe, there is a secret pot-hole preservation society. Or a competition between road gangs to find the deepest, widest hole and fill it - maybe, their victory will be to return in a few months, when that hole has notched up a list of punctured tyres, lost trims, entire cars wrecked by bent wheel arches and smashed bumpers. And they will conquer the beast, by flooding it with a massive volume of fresh tarmac, which they'll measure and record in their on-line 'We Filled the Biggest Hole' trophy book.
Meanwhile, we avoid it.
When we remember.
Well-behaved dogs posing for pictures of roadway 'seaming' (the technical term for all the sticky lines painted on the road, apparently) ... well-behaved because of their newish harnesses.
Walking the dogs has been transformed. Bertie Baggins and Four-legged-friend no longer pull. I don't have to haul back on their leads. I no longer have chronic arm, shoulder and neck strain, all down my left side. Such a simple solution, but one that they seem pretty happy with, too. Walking is no longer a competition to pull the hardest and be the dog in front. They even wait patiently to be unhitched - perhaps, remembering the time when they raced off before the strap joining them had been removed and ran round different sides of a tree.
Anyhow - though I'm not one who normally does product placement, if your dog walk is more a tug-of-war exercise, I definitely recommend one of these harnesses. These are from Petface, but there are lots of other anti-pull systems.
And finally, if I didn't lose you down a pot-hole, and if you're on the ball and noticed the title, 'fingers' - specifically finger classification. This has no particular link to the above, apart from that this conversation occurred while I was scanning the road ahead for pot-holes, and Littlest was bending silver wire in the back seat (yes ... in-car entertainment in my world requires jewellery pliers, wire cutters and bags of beads and wire - our journeys being measured in time to make a ring or design a new pendant for an earing).
Littlest : "I can't remember what the fourth finger is called."
Me: "Ring. It's the ring finger." (Brief, no time to elaborate ... I'm watching the road. Concentrating harder than usual due to the rain - pot-hole or puddle? Swerve. Pot-hole or puddle? ...)
Littlest: " Oh, yes! So it's Thumb, Pointing, Swearing, Ring and Pinkie-finger."
... "Swearing" !!!!!!!!!
The school run is no longer simply a tootle-along-practicing-tables-and-singing-songs run, but has become an avoiding-the-pot-holes run. And trying-to-remember-where-the-deepest-ones-are run. As if trying to remember anything in the morning wasn't difficult enough already - games kit? Water bottle? Piano music? Cello? Where are the dogs? Have they been fed? Did we lock the front door? And now, having remembered most of that list ... some of it ... any of it ... the children! ... can I recall the exact location of the worst pot-holes ... most ... some ... any of them? ...
... "Mum, you hit that one yesterday!"
Eye strain and headache are the consequence of each evading-the-pot-holes journey. Along with huge irritation that it is always me, in my little car, that has to take avoiding action, on a narrow road, when a 4x4 is coming the other way. Maybe the 4x4 driver is trying to avoid the pot-holes too, maybe she has a teeny, tiny, precious Pomeranian sleeping on a slippery, silk cushion, on her front passenger seat.
4x4s are designed to cope with pot-holes - to take a bit of corrugated ditch in their stride, to flirt with deep puddles, and to cocoon passengers in a jolt-free, luxury, leather-lined cabin where sleeping toy dogs are rocked gently and snore contentedly in their sweet, pot-hole-free dreams. My little car is not. It does none of these things. Of narrow wheel and limited road clearance, it shudders, when forced to plumb the muddy depths of the road's recent winter ulcerations. Such bangs and crashes that would wake a cat, on its inaugural car ride home, after being collected from the taxidermist.
This tarmac affliction is a disease so virulent that there is a now a 'Fill that Hole' app (fillthathole.co.uk) developed by the national cycling charity (ctc.org.uk) which uses satellite location to pin-point and report new holes. If pot-holes can bend, jolt and smash cars, then pity the poor cyclist who descends into one - lycra and a helmet don't do much to cushion the collision between flesh and tarmac.
Thus it was that at the beginning of last week, "Phew!" and "Hurrah!" and "About time!" greeted the appearance of a 'warning of a road closure for resurfacing' sign. We went to bed dreaming of smooth roads and un-jarred bones.
They road repair men came. They saw. They filled all the cheesecake cracks.
But failed to conquer the pot-hole.
Didn't they notice it? Were they instructed only to do half a job? Maybe, they like pot-holes. Maybe, they saw the mouse guarding the hole - look at the photo again if you didn't see it. Maybe, they have a scrap book of pot-holes that look like other things. And they thought this was a good one - and want to revisit it to see what it evolves into - that nose is going to go first, perhaps it will break off leaving a gaping mouth, perhaps the snout will be blunted and instead, it will look like a pig, perhaps it will suddenly look like a celebrity and get a twitter profile. Maybe, there is a secret pot-hole preservation society. Or a competition between road gangs to find the deepest, widest hole and fill it - maybe, their victory will be to return in a few months, when that hole has notched up a list of punctured tyres, lost trims, entire cars wrecked by bent wheel arches and smashed bumpers. And they will conquer the beast, by flooding it with a massive volume of fresh tarmac, which they'll measure and record in their on-line 'We Filled the Biggest Hole' trophy book.
Meanwhile, we avoid it.
When we remember.
Well-behaved dogs posing for pictures of roadway 'seaming' (the technical term for all the sticky lines painted on the road, apparently) ... well-behaved because of their newish harnesses.
Walking the dogs has been transformed. Bertie Baggins and Four-legged-friend no longer pull. I don't have to haul back on their leads. I no longer have chronic arm, shoulder and neck strain, all down my left side. Such a simple solution, but one that they seem pretty happy with, too. Walking is no longer a competition to pull the hardest and be the dog in front. They even wait patiently to be unhitched - perhaps, remembering the time when they raced off before the strap joining them had been removed and ran round different sides of a tree.
Anyhow - though I'm not one who normally does product placement, if your dog walk is more a tug-of-war exercise, I definitely recommend one of these harnesses. These are from Petface, but there are lots of other anti-pull systems.
And finally, if I didn't lose you down a pot-hole, and if you're on the ball and noticed the title, 'fingers' - specifically finger classification. This has no particular link to the above, apart from that this conversation occurred while I was scanning the road ahead for pot-holes, and Littlest was bending silver wire in the back seat (yes ... in-car entertainment in my world requires jewellery pliers, wire cutters and bags of beads and wire - our journeys being measured in time to make a ring or design a new pendant for an earing).
Littlest : "I can't remember what the fourth finger is called."
Me: "Ring. It's the ring finger." (Brief, no time to elaborate ... I'm watching the road. Concentrating harder than usual due to the rain - pot-hole or puddle? Swerve. Pot-hole or puddle? ...)
Littlest: " Oh, yes! So it's Thumb, Pointing, Swearing, Ring and Pinkie-finger."
... "Swearing" !!!!!!!!!
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