Surely potholes were never this bad before?
Maybe I’m just getting older, but it seems there are more potholes than ever – big, deep, ruinous and a metaphor for Britain today
If you’re in the UK, anywhere in the UK, please imagine yourself levitating, rising on a light mist of my despair. Don’t rise too high, for the clouds are low, and I don’t want your aerial view obscured. Look at the roads – the grey ribbons snaking their way through the grey-green February countryside. Note how scarred are these roads, with dark, irregularly shaped marks, big and small. If the road was your skin, you’d be off to the doctor soonest. See how cars and bikes try to negotiate these lesions. Bobbing and swerving, gingerly they’ll try to slalom their way through the minefield. This isn’t driving, it’s dodgems. Some drivers, either oblivious to the danger or because their patience has snapped, will hold their line and proceed straight over or into one of them. Wince as you watch. Cast your eye wider and you’ll see stricken victims, cars and bikes strewn around, motionless. Recovery vehicles do brisk business; the queues outside tyre places are long. It’s hell down there. Because this, my friends, is peak pothole season.
It’s wet, it’s freezing and then not freezing, and then it rains some more. And so surfaces fracture and craters deepen. And there’s not the money or the people to either fill the holes or stop them happening in the first place.
It might be that I’m getting older and, just like police constables look younger all the time, potholes seem ever greater in number. But surely they were never this bad, this many of them, this big and deep and ruinous to tyres, wheels, pockets and lives. Yes, lives. Trust me, stopping and starting and slaloming all over the place is dangerous. Hit one of the bastard things at speed and things can get very nasty; hit one if you’re riding two wheels and you’re certainly more likely than not to be in a world of pain.
I can’t have this moan without seeing a version of myself on the back row of the Question Time audience, a middle-aged bloke from central casting with steam coming out of his earholes. But, sod it, I’ll rant on. Because the alternative to ranting on is shrugging, giving up and accepting that this is the way things are. I keep meeting people, hundreds of pounds down after multiple tyre bursts, whose fury has given way to resignation. This is just how it must be.
Potholes are more than just holes in the road. They stand for something greater. I have a friend who was a news correspondent in Washington DC. He lived in a swanky place in Georgetown next door to a bloke who did hedge fund private equity blah. Anyway, some money-moving manoeuvre earned this chap a handsome bonus. Well done, fella. He went out and bought himself a low-slung supercar. Only to find that the roads were too shit to drive on without knackering the stupid thing. Keeping my schadenfreude at bay as best I can, I suggest potholes are a metaphor; potholes are policy failure.
I try not to subscribe to the idea of Britain being broken, but looking into a pothole which just shredded a front tyre, it’s hard not to succumb. It shouldn’t be there. It’s not my fault. Someone has blundered. Or someone – on local roads the local council – hasn’t got the resources not to blunder. This might be their fault, it might not. If it’s a big road, it’ll probably be some agency or other responsible. Either way, there’s no one to call, certainly no one to say: “Oh, I’m sorry, we better pay for your tyre to be fixed.” There’s probably some mechanism for suing someone, but I doubt it would get anywhere and it shouldn’t come to that anyway. How about my car insurance? Hilarious suggestion. Just calling them to ask could count against me come renewal time. A pox on the whole sorry business. Moan over. I motor slowly on.