The Doc bemoans the parlous state of our roads and evisages a tarmac rewilding that ends with a Day of the Triffids scenario
I was out for a ride with my friend Bernard a couple of weeks ago. He was ahead of me on a descent when he made an incomprehensible gesture with his right hand and shouted something I couldn’t hear.
Then he rode straight off the edge of the road, onto the grassy verge, indulged in a few seconds of ungainly road-bike cyclo-cross, and eventually bounced back onto the road.
He’d got himself the wrong side of a large fissure in the tarmac, which gradually eased him from right to left and off the edge of the road. It swept him into the vegetation like a group of journalists in a Tour de France media car.
A braver man might have attempted a sideways bunny-hop at 40mph, which is why brave men spend so much of their time in A&E having nurses remove their shorts with scissors. Bernard almost styled it out. The only thing that gave it away was the swearing.
I assumed it was just around our way that the roads were like this, but it seems to be almost universal in the UK. I think I’m now able to experience all the major hazards within just a few hundred yards of home. Things like the converging ruts of a badly patched-up trench left by a utility company, which get closer and closer together until your only choice is which side you want to crash on this time.
Or the invisible lip in the surface, that you can only detect by feel, the feeling in question being one of unexpected bluntforce impact.
And, of course, the traditional big old hole. I thought I knew potholes till last winter. Last winter there were holes around here so deep that if you stopped for a proper look you could see the last six road surfaces (every one of them better built than the current one), several Roman mosaics, and finally all the moving parts of planet Earth.
“The thing is,” Bernard said, explaining his latest verge-adventure, “you have to regard the roads these days as essentially ploughed fields. Just made out of something much harder. Road cycling is over. We’re hard-surface mountain bikers now.”
He’s right. You really have to look where you’re go
