All Our Roads Are Going to Pot

I know it's not just me that thinks this but are ALL our roads going to pot? As a cyclist my eye is trained in the fine art of detecting pot holes, not that it takes a genius to see them. Let's face it, it's easy enough to spot gaping chasms, cracks, dips, troughs, holes and overzealous drains, from a mile off and our roads are full of them.

With such a pothole-keen eye, I quickly spotted one such small and easily avoidable crack next to a drain, on a busy road. I'd never had any problems avoiding it as I'd taken the same route for well over a year and knew it well. On a fateful day last week I was cycling along as I always do when I was struck by surprise. They'd filled that particular pothole in! So many of our roads are riddled with gaping chasms of perilous danger and yet of all the atrocities of the other roads, this mediocre, menial, even harmless, hole was the one to meet its demise. Why this one? This puzzled me incessantly for the remainder of the journey as I tried to imagine the road maintenance committee having a meeting to discuss the most perilous holes that required attention. I bet none of them would have suspected that tiny hole would one day top the list of priorities. It's so small it looks as though it may have in fact been filled in by a random traveller with a home-made DIY pothole filler kit. Maybe it wasn't even acknowledged by the road maintenance committee at all. Some obsessive-compulsive person finally snapped. I know it intrigued me every day that I had to avoid it. Maybe it was a fellow cyclist who was tired of having to swerve to avoid it on his daily commute. Driven to near-madness he whipped up a DIY pothole repair kit and set off on a mission. There just can't be any other explanation for it. Surely the council couldn't have, in their brilliant foresight, have isolated this one small defect and flagged it for urgent action. When I say urgent I mean within 2-3 years of it being reported of course.

Ultimately I know we can't control the state of our roads, the council do their bit by being completely useless, and the rest is up to us to use what little common sense we have left to carefully manoeuvre round them in the best way possible. So if you're feeling particularly wound up by one particular part of road, there may be good news for you. You no longer need to be a mere passenger in this ordeal. Whip up your own pothole-fixing DIY kit and you too can combat the roads of tomorrow, today!