Fifty is now the new seventy on motorways across our country. Perhaps it is just me being an old cynic or perhaps it is the inefficiency of over-burdened business these days but it seems to me, that only a year or so on from three years of roadworks on the M1 that one might have hoped to enjoy travelling in one's chauffeur driven limousine at seventy rather than fifty as soon as one got a few miles north of the original site for these interminable works.
It looks like a government sponsored scheme to catch frustrated motorists with the towering yellow "average speed cameras" that lurk along our roadsides like something out of "War of the Worlds" only without the grace to die off from the common cold and bother us no more. I have seen some with notices leaned against them stating they are not in use, so thinking about it, perhaps they are invaders from the red planet put to use in an alliance with the highways agency and the Department of Meanness & Disservice.
It wouldn't be so bad if these chaps were working all along the stretch which they close down but I saw a few hundred yards of work and plant and then twenty odd miles of cones before there were three machines in a fifty yard space and then nothing until the torture ceased.
Have you also noticed that even when they do finish, they leave signage and other stuff around. Often you will come into a patch with two fifty signs still standing before you realise, they have just been abandoned when the invasion ended and enough motorists had been defeated. Obviously, the profits from this roadside extortion and grief are sufficient that you can idly chuck away equipment when you are done.
I must look up the old school list and see if any of my chaps have jobs as civil servants or ministers in the DoMD. Otherwise I'll have to bang on at our local mp, again. Ah for the times when my ancestors would have hounded after the progenitor of such mean-spirited and badly organised works with a riding crop or a blunderbuss!
