Beating The Drum

I’ve droned on about the daughter’s boyfriend’s Tom Tom before. Retailers expect to sell record numbers of these satellite navigation systems this Christmas and new cars are being offered with (typically) £1,200-worth of Sat-Nav kit thrown in.

Now I could easily rant about the inherent dangers of the things - the daughter’s boyfriend often pays much more attention to the Tom Tom screen than he does to the road when driving, and having a bossy woman telling you which way to go at the next roundabout is liking having an extra person (daughter/wife?) in the car. The state of Britain’s roads however inclines me the other way.

At present my usual route to work is blocked by a bridge closure (8 weeks) on the old A3 south of Liphook. My secondary route (via the outskirts of Petersfield) has now been shut off by road closure (8 weeks), and I’m beginning to wonder where the next set of roadworks is being planned for my pre-Christmas entertainment. In circumstances like this a Sat Nav system might well be useful, or for when you are unexpectedly diverted off your intended course. The daughter’s boyfriend looked positively gleeful the other week when an articulated lorry flipped on the M20 (sideways across three lanes) and it looked as if the motorway would be closed – forcing traffic such as ourselves to be diverted off the motorway and onto the narrow lanes of East Kent. Happily for me we were too far up the queue (the motorway was indeed closed at Ashford) and we were able to squeeze around the stricken lorry on the hard shoulder, and thence home without further ado.

No blog on roadworks and Sat Nav systems would be complete for me without mention of the stupidest piece of road planning management ever known – the A3 at Hindhead. Anyone heading from London in the direction of Portsmouth will know that from Putney the A3 provides a serviceable dual carriageway heading south and connecting with the main coastal arterial (the A27) near Southsea. The problem is (and always has been) the Hindhead bottle-neck – a couple of miles where the dual carriageway stops and normal two-direction traffic winds around one corner of the Devil’s Punch Bowl before grinding to a halt at traffic lights where the A3 crosses the Haslemere-Churt road at Hindhead. Queues several miles long are to be found here on every day of the week. Breakdowns and accidents can paralyse the area completely and it has long been on Mr Darling’s list of priorities to sort out. We have passed the years and years of consultations and public enquiries, contractors have been appointed and all that has to be done is to build a 1.8 kilometre tunnel to sort the matter out. However nothing is to happen until at least 2009. The plans are stuck on the desks of three different ministers (yes, John Prescott is one of them), and the financial go-ahead is unlikely ever to be granted. The South is just not worth the penny to a government that knows that the North is where its votes come from. Bah!

Dynamite

Such has been my blog-writer’s-block in recent weeks that it required something really special to force me back into the writing habit. It came this cold Sunday morning in the form (not surprisingly) of the Right Honourable Geoffrey William Hoon, Member of Parliament for Ashfield and Leader of the House of Commons, talking about education on BBC TV. Asked by Andrew Marr about the number of Labour MPs who might be expected to offer immediate support for the new education reforms, Mr Hoon replied with the normal politician’s workaround: Labour has apparently doubled expenditure on education in its term of office; there are thirty thousand new teachers and, supporting them, one hundred and thirty-eight thousand new administrative staff. Whaaaaaat? I must have misheard – I’ll have to have the ears syringed again!

There has been so much to blog about recently that you have missed my musings on many subjects. So like enacting the works of Shakespeare in an hour long radio drama, I’ll list some of the subjects I have intended to blog about, but failed to so.

• Cameron – Davis

My Mum says “Cameron”. The wife says “Cameron”. Who am I to argue?

• Alastair Cook (not Cooke)

Well done England for summoning the young Essex cricketer to Pakistan. Let’s hope he gets a match or two. (And will Brett Lee sign for Essex?)

• Cheese and Supermarkets

How unsurprising that a supermarket can boast a range of over 150 different cheeses including many “small farm” items by ordering from just a handful of suppliers – Altria (Kraft), Lactel (President, etc.), Dairy Crest (St Ivel, Cathedral City, etc.) and one or two other megacorps.

• Sudoku Etiquette

“Bollocks!” intoned the younger brother when I told him that members of my family keep telling me off for pencilling possible numbers and connections onto my Sudoku puzzle. Sudoku is meant to train the brain, so you should keep all those marginal notes in your head and only enter “assured” numbers on the grid, not scrawl in the corners of the squares. Seeing that there is so much Sudoku merchandise in the shops this Christmas I have it in mind to find the younger brother a roll of Sudoku (Times-Killer-Fiendish) loo paper for Christmas.

• All Blacks Rugby

I was proud of England’s great performance against the New Zealanders yesterday. Sad about the result, though.

• Tony Blair

Now that he is being written off I have (finally) come to approve of him as a Prime Minister. He seems to be taking on major issues with great courage, usually confronting his stupid colleagues head-on regarding policies on health, education, terrorism, etc. Bravo!

• Bird Flu

The bantams have been giving me strange looks recently, and a small robin is trying to nest in our bedroom (totally ignored by the cat). I think vaccinations are called for.