The Doc’s friend Bernard has his brief moment of schadenfreude shattered upon choosing face-saving obstinacy over a sensible U-turn
It’s not all that long since I wrote a column in praise of the ‘Road Closed’ sign – and the nirvana of peace and quiet that almost always lies beyond.
Not long afterwards I was out for a ride with my friend Bernard, when, in deepest Hertfordshire, we came across a big red sign with ‘Emergency Road Closure’ written on it. If we’d had a Champagne glass each, we could have clinked them together as we breezed past. We were rewarded with glorious, empty road.
Then we passed a traffic cone in the road with a small blue ‘Police – Road Closed’ sign sticking out of it. This caused me a flicker of concern. Bernard, on the other hand, foresaw the only thing he likes better than a closed road; he foresaw the prospect of a car crash.
He sees himself as a sort of freelance crash investigator. “Well,” he’ll say, “the crash happened at 2pm exactly, so the issue here is clearly inattention caused by retuning the radio to get The Archers…” He’s the Sherlock Holmes of the crumpled bumper.
He got an even bigger treat. Round a corner we came to a flood. You could tell it was a proper flood because it had three cars stuck in it – two of them up to their windscreens in water and one of which was fully afloat. Bernard explained how stupid it was to drive into a flood that already featured a floating car. (If any drivers had come along, though, you can bet he’d have waved them through with one hand while videoing them on his phone with the other.)
It was funny, but it was still in our way. We started to pick our way along the verge, which seemed dry if muddy. Until we came to an intersecting ditch, which was now clearly a proper river, and no more easily forded than the main flood. “Let’s go back,” I said. But at that point two dog walkers arrived.
“You can go round – follow this ditch to that tree,” one pointed, “cross there, then through the woods to the road.”
So we waded on through the mud, and jumped over the flooded ditch. If you think walking compacts mud into your cleats, it’s nothing compared to what jumping across a stream does. Then the permanent mud on your cleats interacts (or rather, it doesn’t) with the mud on the ground to produce the sort of negligible coefficient of friction that Muc-Off has been striving after for years.
We clambere
