29 July 2002
Author takes steps to follow road back
Roads have been wallowing for quite a while now in the slough of negative publicity, orchestrated by strange beings who feel we would be much better without them.
But the romance of the road has a long history. While a road under construction is an eyesore, a completed road quickly becomes a pleasing part of the landscape.
Only if there are too many of them in too small a place is the picture different – and the same is true of people, but sooner.
Bruce Robinson, an author who used to work on the EDP, is a bit of an expert on roads. Among many other books, he has written The Nowhere Road, which surprisingly is not the A47 but Peddars Way.
Norfolk County Council was so taken by this title that it has decided – by judicious use of signposting – to create many more nowhere roads in the county.
Unfazed by this brush with fame, Mr Robinson has spent some time recently following The Norwich Road, which is not a road at all, but a book he unearthed in a second-hand bookshop.
Written by Charles G Harper a century ago as one of a series, it tells stories of the 112-mile coaching route from Whitechapel and Stratford in east London through Ingatestone, Chelmsford, Colchester, Ipswich, Scole and Long Stratton to Norwich.
Inside the book he found the original sales invoice and receipt. The volume had been purchased by a Mr G E Cower of Gower Street in London, in June 1902.
How can you follow a book? Mr Robinson, something of a romantic, chose to return to the bookshop that sold it exactly 100 years to the day after it was sold.
“Astonishingly,” he says, “the bookshop is still there. At least, a bookshop now occupies the same site in Marylebone, though it is no longer Francis Edwards but Daunt Books, which specialises in publications for travellers.”
In an area of London that has changed little, he then decided to go to the heart of the matter, and knocked on the door of the house once occupied by Mr Cower, the purchaser of the book. Sadly, it was empty, though a nameplate described it as the Bloomsbury Centre.
It was clearly a step too far. He had run out of clues. Or had he? Just down the road from his home in Wicklewood was a milestone bearing the inscription “London 100 miles”. The plot thickened. He reached for his walking boots.
Glimpse of the future through blurred glasses
Obviously I was as reassured as everyone else to read that BT was removing only “surplus” phone boxes from our countryside – in much the same way, presumably, that Dr Beeching removed surplus railway lines back in the 60s because they would never, ever be needed again.
That was one of the more spectacular examples of getting the future wrong in recent history. No doubt many others are in the pipeline, disguised as white papers, visionary targets and economy measures.
Reducing everything to the bare essentials is never the right policy. If the world had been created with the bare essentials for survival, we would certainly not be here now. Nor would the world.
I do hope that in 10 years’ time someone doesn’t discover that mobile phones really are killing us and are bad for the environment too. In that case the search would be on for the phone box graveyard to which the 174 uprooted Norfolk boxes will presumably be consigned, in an environmentally friendly sort of way.
Or will they be used to hold the tonnes of mail that it will soon become too expensive to deliver?
Short-sightedness is the curse of the age. When it is linked with the plague of measuring everything with money, disaster is the only possible outcome.
Road number? Hang on, let's see if I'm really here
It was revealed in the EDP recently that the police find it hard to cope with 999 calls outside urban areas unless you can tell them the number of the road you are on.
Not only that, they are apparently under the impression that “most members of the public know road numbers”. This is in fact only true if they are following a map, and then only sometimes.
A correspondent observed that “it is my experience, culled from 45 years working with the public, that a large percentage of the population cannot even give you their own address adequately, never mind name roads they rarely, if ever, travel on”.
Surprisingly, things are even worse than that. I can reveal that in a gathering of 14-year-olds, many of them do not even know if they are there or not.
This became clear when teachers in a school I know attempted to allocate Year 9 children to groups, for reasons that need not detain us.
Many were creatively absent, and so it was necessary to call a register. The inability of most to call out “Yes” in a way that made it distinct from “No, she’s absent” was wonderful to behold. And of course it wasn’t their fault.
I do hope they have no cause to make a 999 call. The police would have a real problem on their hands.
Fast food for woodpeckers
![[Cartoon] Woodpecker fast food](/articles/images/020729tim.gif)
An alarming trend has been spotted by woodpecker-watcher Richard “Volcano” Meek.
Apparently woodpeckers have turned their backs on their traditional summer food of insects – notably ants and beetle larvae – and are flocking to bird tables in search of fast food items like peanuts. Ornithologists, I undertand, are worried on two main counts:
Will we be plagued by reprieved ants and beetles? Will the woodpeckers become hyperactive through excessive use of junk food and turn into juvenile delinquents – boring holes in doors, instead of just knocking and flying away?
I myself will not be losing any sleep over it. Before we know where we are the bird tables will be taken over by a chain, and the peanuts will reach the table so slowly that it will be quicker to go to a pub.
Or back to the trees, of course.