Road Works

Croeso Ready Writers, June 2011. 

There’s only one thing worse than a hole in the road and that’s the disruption caused by trying to repair it.

It isn’t the hole’s fault; neither can we blame the road. If we are honest the reason the hole appeared in the first place is the weight of  traffic  and a refusal to be prevented from enjoying that most basic of modern human rights - freedom to travel when, how and where we desire using the infernal combustion engine and its associated mechanology.

Whatever the size of the hole and however important the road, it could most simply be fixed by closing the highway for a few hours and allowing the workmen to do their job while we make alternative arrangements. This may mean staying at home for a change; discovering a more scenic route; considering why we actually drive any way or simply sharing our transport arrangements rather than continuing with our individualistic and private carriages which carry such a toxic premium for our descendants.

Common sense has never accompanied the nation’s locomotive aspirations. Each new mass transport system has been introduced by successive decisions which appease the fast buck rather than slow assurance of getting from A to B at minimum cost to the environment.

Horses, our original power source, were enhanced through track and canal bringing increased speed and loads but retaining that sense of tranquillity and co-existence with our natural environment. Then came the kettle’s curse as Mr. Watt realised that steam could be harnessed as well as horses and these beautiful creatures were eventually reduced to a mere definition of what a kettle on wheels could achieve.

So was born the industrial revolution - and what a revolution it was - as wheels upon wheels turned up and down the land and across the world. Each revolution dependant on fossil fuel, the legacy of our sunken past resurrected to bring in another judgement day.

We got used to steam and even grew to love these mighty engines as they romantically wove across the land knitting distant towns together into the same timeframe. Railways became synonymous with proper time-keeping and stations with the whole range of human emotions in the ‘meeting and greeting’, the ‘letting go’, and the ‘minding of the gap’. Brief encounters were rife and we all know what happened on the Orient Express.

This has been called the golden age of steam - but was it fool’s gold? It tarnished so quickly,  to be replaced by dirty diesel, un-manned and un-romantic stations, or those lonely ‘halts’, and timetables that could be trusted only to the extent that they would succumb to fallen leaves or the wrong kind of snow!

In the swinging sixties, when no-one who was there can remember what they were doing, the government, in its own hallucinogenic fog, reduced the community enhancing network to  model railway levels at a stroke and prepared the ground for the rise of that most potent of status symbols the private motor car. This may not have been so bad but the flood gates were also opened to the juggernaut, the leviathan of our day which shudders at seismic levels through now insomniac villages forcing us to build more motorways and by-passes on which they can wreak even more havoc. Many now carry a rear facing message inviting us to ring a number if they have been driven well. Not many people who have got close enough to read this have survived long enough to make the call!

To conclude. Each generation has to accommodate the technology of its day. Each generation also has to endure changes in technology which appear to herald a brighter future. The problem is that, until now, we haven’t lived long enough to see the effects of these ’improvements’. We are slowly awakening to the reality of what our industrial appetite and individual sense of freedom is doing to our planet, to our lives and to our heritage.

We need to stop, allow the hole to be repaired properly - and take this opportunity to consider what we can do to avoid making even bigger holes into which our children will inevitably fall.

© Graham Oakes.