19 November 2001

on 19 November 2001 at 08:00

Mystery of the bridge to nowhere

Some people call Peddars Way the nowhere road, because it is unclear where it comes from or where it is going to, and therefore the reason for its construction remains uncertain.

Norwich now has a nowhere bridge.

It is an extremely pretty bridge, and provides me with an alternative walk home. But I cannot believe that the city council went to all that expense just for me. Indeed, if we are to believe reports, the Novi Sad Friendship Bridge was built to provide a link between the city centre and Riverside.

Not a bad idea, if it was built in the right place. What it actually provides is a link between the bottom of Rouen Road (main architectural feature: a tower block) and the back wall of Boots’ warehouse-style superstore on Riverside (main architectural feature: well, nothing really).

So if you actually want to get from, say, a restaurant or cinema on Riverside to the city centre you have to venture out into the wilds of something that looks like an industrial estate, cross the river and then struggle all the way up to the top of Rouen Road before you hit even the prospect of a shop.

Intriguingly the new bridge is also supposed to help ease traffic congestion, presumably because you can get out your bike and cycle across it instead of taking your car. Unfortunately, super-stores tend to sell things that you can’t carry on a bike. Superstores are designed for car users, which is why it is odd to find them in such an inaccessible place as Riverside.

The only way you can get there by car is on the city’s inner link road, which the council promises to make even less usable by blocking alternative routes through the city centre. When the Big W monster opened, hordes of lemming-like drivers who couldn’t think of anything better to do on a delightfully sunny Sunday than go to a superstore totally blocked the traffic-light-strewn link road for hours from beyond County Hall to somewhere near Anglia Square. I wonder what plans the council has to deal with this. Build another cycle bridge, perhaps?

One final question. If the council really wants to discourage people from using cars, as it claims, why does it connive in the creation of such a car-friendly enormity in a strategic and potentially beautiful spot that could have provided a delightful pedestrian haven – not to mention a bus station? We should be told.

Knocking showers on the head

Fellow walker and diarist Robin Limmer – editor of the Merry Mawkin – shares my concern at showers that gang up and get organised. But he has noted that weather forecasters have gone further in their attempt to explain the vagaries of weather to us: they are telling us that these showers are now getting knocked on the head. Well, sometimes.

Reassuring, no doubt, but the similarity to Saturday nights on Prince of Wales Road, Norwich, is disturbing. There, too, showers of drunken youths gang up, occasionally get organised and are often knocked on the head.

Is meteorology imitating human behaviour?

One thing you can rely on: whatever happens in the way of weather can be put down to global warming. The mild October was a result of global warming; so was the stormy weather that followed, and the rainfall. No doubt a prolonged freeze next spring would have the same cause.

Everyone “knows” that rising sea levels are also caused by global warming, despite the fact that in some parts of the world sea levels are falling. And I suppose all those heavy goods vehicles and power stations in Roman Britain caused the influx of the sea over so much of what is now dry land.

So of course it’s worth spending millions of pounds on jolly environmental conferences in places like Morocco to make jolly pointless protocols which, even if everyone kept to them, would have no effect on climate whatsoever.

Climate will always change for various reasons. Sea levels will rise and fall. Using the money to feed the starving would make a great deal more sense. It would probably also have a much more profound effect on our future.

Website propaganda plan by warty newts

Readers familiar with the long-running campaign by great-crested newts to destroy Norfolk life as we know it will be as disturbed as I was to discover that there is a BBC website featuring the devious amphibians.

It reveals, however, that the newts – who are determined to expand across the county, preferably using dual newtways – are also called warty newts, which is much more appropriate somehow.

To show how fair-minded I am, I will reveal that the newt site can be viewed by mature adults at www.bbc.co.uk/norfolk/your/extra/newts.shtml.

Anyone wishing to read about the fight against newt expansion waged by Norfolk veteran Henry (Fred) “Shrimp” Houseago can read his diaries exclusively on this site at http://back2sq1.co.uk/houseago/default.htm. You can’t say fairer than that.

Moving mountains

It was not until last week that I realised the Norfolk Mountain Rescue Team was set up to rescue mountains and not, as I had thought, to rescue people.

The idea, apparently, is to remove mountains piece by piece from places that have plenty, and place them carefully in Norfolk, where we need them desperately. Winterton and Caister have been suggested.

Meanwhile at Hopton the 60 steel steps carefully installed at a cost of £5000 by the parish council to make access to the beach safer have been deemed dangerous by the Health and Safety Executive because the treads are too narrow.

It’s a good job the mountains haven’t been fully transferred yet, or the HSE would have them taken back on the grounds that they are too high and steep. The words “waste” and “space” spring to mind.

Buses' extraordinary behaviour

The Autonomous Republic of Hingham, near Norfolk, is being hit again by mysterious fluctuations in space and time. I am told by an unimpeachable source close to the parish council that the bus stop moves for no good reason.

The official timetable claims it is outside the garage, but it has been seen near the church and at other unexpected spots. Residents wishing to travel into Norwich therefore have to gamble.

Hingham expert Professor V A R Scheinlich puts it down to “a new wormhole phenomenon upsetting the fabric of space-time”, but others blame the bus drivers. I personally find that hard to believe.

Reports reach me from elsewhere, however, suggesting that Hingham may not be alone in encountering bus troubles. Readers of the EDP Saturday magazine will know that my colleague Neil Haverson is encountering extraordinary bus behaviour.

In fact I could scarcely get beyond mentioning the word “bus” to any regular bus user without provoking a stream of extraordinary stories: Extra-dimensional buses that appear only fleetingly and then vanish; Whole series of buses that do not exist at all in the physical world; Buses that do not relate in any way to real time.

These phenomena pale into insignificance compared with the overwhelming impression that the entire bus network is a joke being played on people without cars.

5 November 2001

on 5 November 2001 at 08:00

Untrained teenagers in search of a brain

Every time I live through a school holiday, my sympathy for teachers deepens – as does my anger at that ever-growing band of parents who seem to think that bringing up children to behave in a reasonable way is an option, and not a responsibility.

At half term, I took a train from Yarmouth to Norwich. In the seats in front of me were four young teenagers – two of each sex – who were not exactly unpleasant. They were more or less unpleasant.

They spent the journey jumping around from seat to seat, occasionally simulating sex in an unconvincing way and keeping up a permanent, shouted conversation with each other, using a variety of monotonous swearing and blasphemy. Eventually they switched to ringing each other up on their mobile phones and continuing the same pointless talk.

During the entire journey there was no sign from them of intelligent life. They behaved as if they didn’t have a brain between them, or if they had, they had never been told how to use it and had mislaid the instruction booklet.

It was not their fault. Someone should have told them what life was about – and how fortunate they were even to be alive, especially in a country like this.

Some parent or other responsible adult might have added that respect for other people is in fact rewarding, that scenery or reading can be interesting and that thinking has its supporters.

But what comes across is barely restrained anger – as if they know that there is more to life than this, but no one will tell them what it is. Unfortunately it takes a parent to do that properly. It is a pity that so many of them can’t be bothered.

Teachers may be their only chance: but they are hamstrung by paperwork and by the insane removal of the means to enforce discipline.

Later I passed a woman sitting on a fence outside the Social Security office, speaking on a mobile phone. Her son, aged about 10, was trying to ask her something. She told him to go away. She did not use those words.

Blinkered way to lose battle for hearts

I see the Pedestrian Association has changed its name to Living Streets, presumably so that it appears less...well, pedestrian. Since over-pedestrianisation frequently leads to closed shops and a fall-off in trade, a more appropriate title might be Dead Streets, but I can see that this might not be so attractive.

More might be achieved if so-called sustainable transport groups like this were not so fanatically anti-motorist.

Cars are perfectly sustainable. They pollute less than buses and lorries, are the right size for roads, and if we all stopped using cars tomorrow it would make virtually no difference to carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Asthma is frequently blamed on cars, but in fact is much worse in the countryside than in cities.

Car use will grow far less than these groups suggest, and most of the congestion we are familiar with is created by anti-car policies like street closures, ludicrously low speed limits and traffic “calming”. (I was delighted to hear that the citizens of one South Coast town are planning to burn an effigy of a road hump tonight.)

And yet when the Norfolk Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty Community Conference discussed transport last week, they apparently chose to spend much of their time discussing getting people out of cars generally.

They would probably have been more usefully employed discussing how to give a conference a sensible title – or even how people were going to get to the North Norfolk Coast without cars – but their actual preoccupation was not surprising, given the heavy input by Transport 2000. This “sustainable transport group” is about as blinkered as it is possible to be, as a survey of its website will quickly reveal.

We are told constantly that the battle is for hearts and minds. As a keen walker, frequent traveller by train and rare car user, I can tell Transport 2000, Living Streets and their friends that they are losing it, because of their misdirected carpet bombing of what they think is the opposition. We are all on the same side really – human, more or less.

Four miles away from Mundesley

Readers prone to wandering in North Norfolk have reported an unusual phenomenon: according to a number of signposts, almost everywhere is four miles from Mundesley.

Various explanations have been offered to account for this, but it seems likely that a deterioration in the quality of anchor is to blame.

Anchor is a mineral which keeps Norfolk communities stable, and it can be affected by unusual atmospheric conditions, like global warming and asteroid impact.

A spokesman for Explaining Away Inc said his best guess was that an apprentice at the signmakers had become too enthusiastic, and the results of his labours had been offloaded at random. This is unusual, even in the Mundesley area.

Finely calculated parking levels

Close observers of the new Forum in Norwich will be aware that there are three levels of parking underground. I know this because I watched a BBC2 programme on the construction process, and one of the building supervisors said: “It has three levels of car parking. The lower level, the upper level and the middle level.”

I suppose that rules out the possibility that it could have a middle, an upper middle and a fifth level, though I wouldn’t put it past the council to signpost it like that.

Bonfire on loose

A bonfire is believed to be on the loose in Norfolk. Sightings have been reported from areas as far apart as Holt, Sheringham, Briston, Hempnall and Diss, and concerned groups have told reporters that they are concerned.

Henry (Fred) “Shrimp” Houseago, 101, who runs the Society for the Protection of Bonfires, told a reporter today: “People don’t stop and think. Bonfires are delicate things that can be easily frightened by cats, dogs and even hedgehogs. Not to mention newts.

“This one is obviously terrified. It’s all over the place.”

Police have warned readers to stay on the alert and not be complacent. If they see the bonfire they should not approach it but call the emergency services, who will soothe it by letting off fireworks.

An expert bonfire trapper, Prof V A R Scheinlich of the Hingham Autonomous Republic, has been contacted and should reach Norfolk within days, wormholes permitting.