23 August 2004

on 27 August 2004 at 16:42

Signs of a far different culture

I took a last chance to holiday in America this month, before it becomes not worth the effort to break through the bureaucracy barrier at the border. And my trip to New England held a few surprises. Not just the kind you get when you walk on the pavement (hit by truck) or say you are staying for a fortnight (total incomprehension). Nor the even more mysterious linguistic conundrums that leave you wondering what on earth, for instance, “native ice cubes” might be.

No, the big surprise was the trees. Of course even I had heard that autumn in New England is spectacularly bright because of the gloriously technicoloured leaves heading for a fall, but I was unprepared for quite how many trees there are. Even the 4000-foot mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont are completely covered by them, so that the only view a climber can hope to get is at the top.

Don’t get me wrong – I love trees, and I loved New England, but there were times when I yearned for the majestic bleakness of a Scottish Munro.

The other big surprise came on the stunning shoreline of Maine and Massachusetts, where I made a few fruitless forays down side roads before I realised that the vast majority of it was privately owned. In the land of the free, beauty has a price. We should be grateful that much of our own compelling coast is open to anyone.

But because I spent so much time travelling, what really made an impact on me was the road signs, some of which I would like to see introduced into Norfolk. “Watch for moose in roadway”, for instance.

Then there was the brutal frankness of “Wrong way”, which sounds a lot more helpful than it is. Perhaps Norfolk County Council could use it to replace the much less useful “Byroad”.

More in the Norfolk style was the mid-highway “Bump”, which made you wonder why they didn’t spend the sign money on smoothing the road.

I enjoyed “Thickly settled”, which I took to be like Brundall, and the pretty well essential “Bridge freezes before road” – for some reason quite common in Vermont, where people freeze before bridges.

I can think of a number of prominent Norfolk citizens who would appreciate “Give way to Rotary traffic”, though they might be bemused by the healthy “Reduced salt area”.

But perhaps my favourite was the reassuring “No tolls ahead”. I don’t know why this should be especially noteworthy. There were no elephants either. Moose, of course, are another matter.

Ways to keep traffic flowing

What a joy to drive hundreds of miles through Ontario, Quebec, New York State and New England without seeing a single speed camera or road hump.

Ontario, of course, abandoned its cameras after finding they did not reduce road deaths, as indeed they haven’t in this country. And for some reason putting obstacles in the middle of the road has never caught on across the Atlantic.

Two things common in most areas, though, are worth introducing here. One is the ability to overtake on both sides, which might help avert the frustration caused by slow drivers religiously avoiding the inside lane.

It will do nothing, unfortunately, to avoid the real plague of driving in the United Kingdom, which is selfish lorry drivers overtaking other lorries painfully slowly on dual carriageways – clots causing clots, as it were.

The other innovation across the Atlantic is the simple proviso that, after stopping, you can turn right on a red light if the road is clear. Don’t panic; that would be left in this country, and it would also be a safe, cheap and easy way to keep traffic flowing.

So no chance of that happening.

Making exploration much easier

I am delighted to be able to report another breakthrough by intrepid Norfolk explorer Richard “Volcano” Meek, who has discovered why most people have trouble finding the source of rivers.

He writes: “Most explorers seem, somewhat perversely in my view, to spend a lot of time and trouble looking for the thin end of rivers – the bits where they are little more than a damp spot in a field of mangolds. “It should be obvious to all that the easiest bit to find is the thick end, which is bigger, wetter and usually marked on a map. I set out about two weeks ago and followed a well-marked trail along the banks of the River Nar from Gressenhall to King’s Lynn.

“Lo and behold, there was the mouth of the river – stuck on the side of the Ouse, just as the helpful notes supplied by the Setchey and Upper Wormegay Tourist Board said that it would be!

“May I commend this method to other would-be explorers as a far more productive and reliable way to actually find something after all that hard work?”

We are all grateful to Mr Meek for his ground-breaking excavations in so many areas; so it was sad to hear that he was confined to hospital for a few days after his latest adventure. He attributes his recovery to “the Angels of Necton Ward”, an organisation so obscure that I have not managed to uncover anything about it, except that it is probably underpaid.

Impediments up for abolition

While I was away, I see that a reader suggested to the editor that when speed cameras are abolished I might turn my attention to the removal of “other irritating impediments to the motorist”, like traffic lights, keep-left signs and zebra crossings.

These are interesting ideas. Keep-left signs would often be unnecessary if the obstruction put up to support the sign was removed, and zebra crossings would be redundant if motorists had the respect for pedestrians that they should have: some countries make do with simpler indications of pedestrian priority. Unfortunately many Britons seem to collect a rather pathetic aura of superiority every time they get in a car, much as they do when they drink a can of beer, so I could not support abolition of zebras.

Traffic lights are a moot point. They often keep you waiting unnecessarily and thus cause frustration. I seem to remember that a former Transport Secretary said that traffic lights caused most of the delays in London (that was before Ken Livingstone, of course).

He may have been joking. I personally would love to see the idiotic lights on the Trowse bypass replaced by a roundabout, but it is probably too late for that, as it is for so many things.

9 August 2004

on 9 August 2004 at 04:30

Unhelpful, but is it true?

George Orwell may not have quite hit the target with his predictions for 1984, but he would certainly have no difficulty recognising the attempts to manipulate society 20 years on through the misuse of statistics, “expert” analysis and half-truths.

Use of the word “unhelpful” is often a key clue that this may be going on. The first question we used to ask was whether something was true or not. Now this does not seem to be so important; we ask instead whether it serves to push people in a certain direction.

So when a few weeks back a study warned that fruit and vegetables are now less nutritious than they used to be, this was denounced as not wrong but “unhelpful…because we are trying to get people to eat more fruit and vegetables”. When Colin Powell went to the United Nations to try to persuade them to approve war in Iraq, Picasso’s anti-war picture, Guernica, was covered up, no doubt because it was unhelpful.

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children is against parents smacking their children because it is unhelpful for professional child care workers – quite astonishing arrogance.

And now a Norwich headmaster is attacked because he had the nerve to point out, quite accurately in many people’s view, that a lot of university courses were lightweight.

This was “deeply unhelpful”, he was told by Jonathan Whitehead, of the Association of University Teachers – not because it was not true, but because “lots of academics are working hard to encourage people to go to university”.

I wonder why they are doing that. Sorry, that’s extremely unhelpful. Clearly, we mustn’t discuss it.

MP in custard is good food policy

Our dictatorial government likes nothing better than to tell us what to say, do and think.

And schools – as if they don’t have enough to do – now have to make sure they are turning out thousands of little Identikit kiddies who all do, say and think the right things. Schools have a policy on almost everything. It is not their idea: they have to. Like almost every part of institutional or business life, they are drowning in a sea of rules and regulations.

A financial manager told me recently that he employed people from Eastern Europe who had fled Communism to escape from the ever-present rule-book without which they could do nothing. And – you’ve guessed it – it’s now even worse here.

Not long ago Labour MP David Kidney said in the House that “every school should have a food policy” covering not just school meals but the content of children’s lunch boxes. He wanted to “embed good attitudes to food”.

In my view a good attitude to food would be tipping Mr Kidney into some custard, and I am sure many head teachers would back such an idea.

In a similar spirit and as part of a national scheme, Norfolk is providing some schools with free fruit for children next term. Let’s hope we don’t get to the stage reached in another county where teachers speak of the specially bred School Fruit Tree, which produces distinctively soft, tasteless apples.

Bumping along in a bouncy way

If speed humps are the answer, we are asking the wrong question. But sadly, it doesn’t matter how ludicrous a proposition is; if enough people get behind it, it will gradually become accepted.

In this case, a conglomeration of power-hungry parish councillors, bad drivers, joyless individuals and, presumably, hump-makers have got behind the crazy idea of putting obstructions in the road to make them safer, to such an extent that the authorities have abandoned all responsibility and complied in a particularly mindless way.

I don’t intend to go again into the reasons why humps are such a ridiculous idea. If you can’t see it, you can’t see it. But when I am told by everyone I meet that they are hated, and that they are so bad in some areas that parents “have to use a 4x4 to get to the nursery”, it must be time to think again. If the policy-light Tories want an issue on which to sweep back to power, I suggest that roads and transport is it.

But is it too late? My small grandson, without the slightest prompting by anyone, pushes his toy buggy along the pavement and periodically bounces it over imaginary bumps. Sadly, he may never find out what proper streets were like.

Better treatment of humans demanded

A newly formed branch of BETH (Birds for the Ethical Treatment of Humans) is planning a number of demonstrations in Norfolk in a bid to prevent exploitation of humans by animals of all kinds.

One of the organisers, who wanted to be known simply as the Pondhenge Goose, said: “It is shocking the way some animals exploit humans for their own selfish purposes. Crocodiles, for instance.

“But nearer home, cats and dogs shamelessly demand constant attention, feeding, pampering and in some cases totally disrupting their owners’ holidays.

“I was told only yesterday of the appalling case of a woman who had to come home three days early from the South of France because she was concerned about her dogs.”

The Goose claimed that thousands of innocent humans were forced to sleep in the same rooms as their pets, and some particularly demanding canines had been seen pulling their owners along on what could only be described as leads, while at the same time fouling up the pathways that children had to walk along.

“If something isn’t done soon, they will take over,” the bird warned.

Not grasping the fundamentals, part 53

When it comes down to it, the real cause of most accidents is bad driving – but maybe it’s bad teaching too. I came across a gentleman the other day who passed his test some time ago but has not quite grasped one or two basic points. He still thinks, for instance, that putting his vehicle in a high gear will enable him to pull away from a junction more quickly.

Given that pulling away from junctions is one of the most dangerous moments on the road, you might think that someone would have felt the need to put him right.