23 January 2006

on 23 January 2006 at 12:05

Surrounded by flint, but lost in Admiration

In the Norfolk countryside it is easy to get lost – if only in Admiration, which, in case you were wondering, is near East Carleton. Maps are useful, but it’s hard to make what appears to be the distance on the map correspond with feet on the ground.

The group I occasionally walk with has introduced an added complication, in that the miles walked vary according to who is measuring them. There is the brisk Martin stride and the measured Parker step, not to mention the occasional Robinson pedometer. And they all work out differently. Nothing ever seems to quite add up.

Still, a walk is a walk. You never know what you will find, apart from mud. In the wide open fields of Admiration the other day, for instance, there were a lot of flint tools.

As far as I’m concerned, every bit of flint is a tool. I have never seen a bit of flint that is not a tool, because they are all sharp or hammer-shaped. If by some freak of nature a piece of flint does not look like a tool, you simply have to throw it in the air above a hard surface, and when it comes down it will be a tool.

I offer this observation to archaeologists: it may be a breakthrough. Meanwhile I am puzzling over the exact meaning of a solitary post discovered far from Admiration – in the forests of Breckland, to be precise.

It bore just one exciting word: THE. Pretty definite. I suspect that further posts were planned bearing words like WAY and HOME, but government money ran out. Of course, I could be wrong. Not as wrong, however, as the two friendly gentlemen in a van who pulled up next to me just outside East Carleton and asked me if I knew where Carleton St Peter was.

All sorts of Carletons flicked through my mind. Lower East Carleton just up the street; Carleton Rode, down near Bunwell; and Carleton Forehoe, the other side of the A11. But Carleton St Peter?

Confusingly, the old church at East Carleton was St Peter’s, but that’s another story. I couldn’t pin Carleton St Peter down in my ageing mind…until the van had disappeared round the corner, looking for someone who knew something. Then it clicked.

Carleton St Peter was somewhere else entirely – out Loddon way, near Ashby St Mary. Bit of a mess really. It’s time the county council did something useful and got all those Carletons grouped together tidily, or at least on the same side of Norwich. Then we’ll know where we are. Maybe.

Parking signs not exactly watertight

It doesn’t come as a surprise any more when I arrive at the University of East Anglia to find nowhere left to park my car. But I was slightly taken aback the other day to discover a new notice blocking the entrance to the car park. “UEA full,” it read. “Use Costessey Park and Ride.”

Just the sort of help you need when you’re late for an appointment. It’s not as if Costessey Park and Ride is anywhere close. In fact it’s rather like arriving at the outskirts of Norwich to find a sign reading “Norwich full. Use King’s Lynn.”

If the UEA authorities just want to put visitors off I suggest they switch to a more inventive sign, like the one I pass regularly when travelling through a town in Hertfordshire. It reads: “Hitchin Swimming Centre overflow parking.” Not exactly watertight, but lots of fun, I should imagine.

Giant squirrels blameless in speed limit fiasco

As part of my campaign to alert readers to the forces of nature, I can report that a giant grey squirrel has been spotted by a reader in Rackheath. Happily, it was not exceeding the speed limit, but the same could not be said of drivers approaching Norwich on the A11.

They are greeted by another force of nature – the local scamera partnership, who recently realised that drivers were habitually ignoring the 30mph limit and workers on the road were being “endangered”.

The mobile speed camera immediately raked in so much money that it proved to be embarrassing, and complaints were made. As usual someone wrote to the EDP and said that drivers would not be fined if they obeyed the law.

Of course this is a really helpful observation. But it is even more helpful to ask why drivers break this limit. And the answer is that the limit has been imposed in such a way that it is quite obvious to drivers that it is inappropriate.

For weeks drivers approaching Norwich were asked to drive at 30mph down a clear dual carriageway for more than two-thirds of a mile for no apparent reason. No workers, and very few giant squirrels. When you have been driving for many miles at 70mph, this feels ludicrously slow.

No good driver minds driving slowly to ensure the safety of others. In this case, a 40mph limit much closer to the roundabout might have been appropriate and would surely have been observed by most. Instead we have a limit that is much too slow for much too long.

Even a squirrel could see that. Of course squirrels don’t need the money.

How coast erosion could have been avoided

Another reader has shown interest in the ground-breaking suggestion by the West Norfolk Mountain Rescue Team that people bring back soil and stones from holiday to construct a hill in the area. He prefers to remain anonymous, but he writes: “When my boys were youngsters they would always bring stones and rocks back from the seaside. I realised at the time that if this was going on with other families, in time England would become a large hill.

“To rectify this I made the boys take stones and rocks back on our visits to the seaside. Had other families done this I'm sure there would have been no problem with coast erosion.”

It is hard to argue with this.

9 January 2006

on 9 January 2006 at 05:00

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.