I had lunch recently with a good friend and business contact of mine, Andy Stern. As it was a lovely day, I booked to eat outside at a local Thai restaurant based on Clerkenwell Road. Everything was perfect apart from the road works going on adjacent to where we were sitting as some utility company, a Gas one I think, were working down a large hole.
Now I have nothing against people engaging in good honest hard work on a hot day –that’s exactly what these gentlemen were doing. My problem is the fact that this part of the road has already been dug up and filled 3 times in the last year, most recently about 8 weeks ago when some other utility was being dealt with.
In this day and age, it can’t be beyond the ingenuity of mankind to come up with a solution to this. It just doesn’t make sense to dig a hole, work in it, fill it, and then do it again 6 or 8 weeks later.
I have come up with a solution and if my tongue weren’t placed firmly in my cheek, I would actually send this on to the government. I really believe that we need a Ministry for Holes or at least a department within some other Ministry. Once some utility company applied to dig up one bit of road, my new Ministry would simply contact all the other utility companies, and place some public notices in appropriate media to announce that hole was going to be dug at some stage in the future and if they want to do anything with it, now is their chance. Failing any response, they would not be permitted to do so for another year. Of course I hear you say, what about emergencies and of course these would have to be dealt with. However, I am convinced that it’s just a matter of planning in most cases. It’s a well known fact that a lot of this work is carried out in the summer and some simple coordination of planning would save this country considerable sums and enable me to drive home without sitting in traffic and of course, most importantly, eat my Thai meal on the sidewalk, (that’s a pavement for you anglophiles), without the smell and noise of a large hole.
Anyway, that’s the end of this rant. But here’s a short video of something I found confirming to me that I’m not the first to have dreamt up this outlandish concept: remember this?