France This Way...the blog!!

Today it’s cold and snowy (shame, I thought winter was over last week) so I can’t be out on the roads – so I thought I’d write about them instead.

Last year I mentioned a curious ‘road mending’ program that was underway around here that seemed to involve little more than emptying enormous quantities of grit all over the road, often several centimetres deep, making cycling almost impossible and causing cars to slide into ditches, while doing very little to improve the roads themselves.

Unfortunately my criticism seems to have been well founded and many of the roads that were ‘patched’ at great expense last year promptly fell to pieces during the winter and are now back to their original potholed condition.

Happily the council seem to have learned from this very expensive mistake, but rather than setting out to mend the roads properly, which would presumably have required a rather embarrassing admission of wasting public funds, the road department have been scouting around for other ways to waste our taxes. I’m pleased to confirm they have found it.

A few hundred yards from our house, on a quiet country road, there is a side track that leads to perhaps half a dozen properties. The track never has any traffic except occasional local cars, and even if someone gets confused or drunk and drives along it accidentally the track just loops round and rejoins the same road again a couple of hundred yards further along.

So if the challenge was to waste money I could hardly have thought of a better idea than to spend thousands of euros on road signs for the junction. Cars emerging from the track now have a choice of three large signposts to look at, each showing multiple destinations to tell them where they might like to go next – one on each corner of the junction. Each carefully bolted to a sturdy concrete base and taking a great deal of effort and manpower to install.

I guarantee that every single person who lives on the track has already known for at least 10 years how to find every single place indicated. Meanwhile the much talked about ’100% internet coverage’ that might actually prove effective at attracting entrepreneurs to the area is proving rather slower to arrive than the signpost lorries and gritting trucks.

Unfortunately it’s not just this junction, I’ve seen a lot of these new signs going up in the area – some in sensible places, some not. There are presumably whole teams of people getting paid to drive around the department looking for places where they can stick a few more signposts.

Perhaps the local council is offering some kind of bonus payments to whoever can find the most junctions. Sounds like my kind of job, I’ll get an application form in shortly.