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.
