9 January 2006
Volcano on Suffolk border still holds water
Following the inspirational suggestion by the West Norfolk Mountain Rescue Team that a mountain might be erected in their area if everyone brought home a bucketful of soil from their holidays, I received an indignant letter from Richard “Volcano” Meek, the fairly intrepid Norfolk explorer, who has been outside for some time.
He exploded: “Sir, your purportedly original idea to erect a manufactured mountain – or, as we experts say, a Montagne-Nouveau – in West Norfolk owes much to my own largely ignored proposal first aired in your very own column on April 8, 2002.
“My fully researched and costed plan is still being considered by Norfolk County Council (vertical amenities sub-group). The audacious idea – a result of thinking inside, outside and underneath the box – came to me while engaged in newt-spotting during a particularly slow ride along the A140. “The idea – which you originally described as ‘stunning in its elegant simplicity’ – involves using unemployed artisans to excavate a cave system in South Norfolk, and in turn using the spoil produced to throw up a range of mountains along the border with Suffolk.
“Benefits are as obvious now as when first hatched: a defensible border, a reduction in unemployment, pot-holing vacations, enhanced aquifers for Anglian Water and, not least, a winter sports centre in Val Diss'ere. It may in fact not be too late to bid for the next Winter Olympics.”
Mr Meek asks me to give credit where it is due, and as president of the West Norfolk Mountain Rescue Team I am happy to do so unreservedly. He tells me he is hoping that his plan and the attendant Lottery bid may reach the agenda of the county council sub-group within the next five years, “shortly before my bid to construct a waterfall to rival Niagara, adjacent to Reedham ferry”.
We wish him well. No, very well.
Slippery for too long
The question of slippery roads is one that remains firmly in focus, despite the temporary absence of snow and ice from this part of the world.
A Gorleston reader, Jeremy Caborn, is particularly concerned about the A12 where it passes through the delightful seaside resort of Lowestoft. Here it is “slippery to drive on from start to finish”, he writes.
He knows this, not because he keeps sliding off it, but because of the warning signs – 14 of them on the road itself over a distance of about nine miles, and others on side roads approaching the A12. He has categorised these carefully, and they make an impressive list.
He has also formulated a number of questions. Here are some of them.
Why was such an important road allowed to become slippery in the first place, and remain slippery for so long?
Does the highway authority ever intend to reduce its slipperiness, or is it fated to remain slippery for the rest of its life? Is this further confirmation of Lowestoft’s “poor relation” status?
Given that much of the northern end of this road has recently been resurfaced, is it still actually slippery? If so, shouldn’t the contractors be taken to task? If not, why haven’t many of the signs been removed?
How, in any case, are we supposed to adjust the way we drive to take account of the slipperiness, other than observe the speed limits?
How many people actually take the slightest notice of these signs? Don’t they just illustrate the danger of cluttering up the road with far too many “warnings”, which people just become immune to – causing them to pay insufficient attention to the one or two signs that really matter?
Mr Caborn has asked these questions before, but the people he asked were too slippery to reply.
Pedestrian thinking too slow for conditions
Some people seem to be taking those “Think Pedestrian” signs too seriously, if the amount of pedestrian thinking evident over the snowy festive season was anything to go by.
You ache for a bit of lively thinking, but no, the same tottering old phrases are trotted out.
Predictably, the police announced that people were driving too quickly, and I have no doubt that some people were. They should be locked up immediately. But where were the warnings that far more people were driving too slowly?
Timid, dithering driving in snowy conditions – or even conditions that look as though they might possibly become snowy soon – is much more likely to result in accidents and snarl-ups than a more positive, confident approach. If you aren’t sure you can cope with the conditions, you shouldn’t be on the roads, even if the sales are so compelling that it requires near-superhuman powers (or, outrageously, a couple of moments’ thought) to resist them.
Ironically, the pedestrian police speed warning that I heard on Anglia TV news was followed immediately by a frozen reporter standing on one road in Norwich where there had been half of all recorded collisions that day.
Clearly a racetrack? Not exactly. It was Christchurch Road, which has a 20mph limit and – ahem – speed humps.
Driving a coach and horses through Christmas
A Wicklewood man who operates a Christmas card monitoring system of some meticulousness reports that this festive season he received only one displaying the traditional scene of coach and horses in the snow.
“Is this the end of an era?” he asks.
Recent research has revealed that while coaches are prevalent in the Bethlehem area at most times of the year, they are rarely pulled by horses and almost never accompanied by snow.
But this seems a petty, nitpicking observation, typical of PR spin-doctors. Surely this is just another example of the Church of England dispensing with the essentials of Christianity in an attempt to lure people back into namby-pamby centrally-heated churches for gimmicky guitar music and ten-minute stand-up humour.
We must demand coaches and horses, as much snow as possible and a return to genuine stout-hearted, freezing cold worship with an organ, as it was in the beginning.
It is still not too late, writes Disgusted, of Little Tuddenham.