Pothole

Thursday was another quiet day. But there was a trolley in town and there was a very impressive pothole in Meadway, which last seems to have appeared since I was last there. Bigger than anything that we have had in our road and perhaps the result of the heavy use of this stretch of road by people with big cars do not care to pay to park them for the day while they are in London. Maybe helped along by the all building work round about.

Evidenced by a standard three bedroom estate house, quite near the pothole, which is morphing into a much larger house, leaving very little space between it and its neighbours, absorbing the garage - and no doubt a chunk of the back garden - into the house. I suppose that a lot of this is not any real need for a larger house, more people thinking that investing in a bigger house is a better bet that keeping their pension pot in the building society or in stocks & shares. I associate to my maternal grandfather who, after the north American custom, kept his savings in stocks & shares and was said to have been badly bitten by the depression before the second world war.

I guess it is also the case that we Brits like to tie up a lot of capital in houses, rather than in something more productive, possibly accounting for some of our difficulties on the economic front.

To close, I take the opportunity to record that after my recent holiday, I seem to be having a lot more senior moments - for example, a lot more attempts to put inappropriate objects into the refrigerator. A lot more minor lapses of memory. A tendency to walk out into the road without properly checking for silent cars coming up behind me. A tendency to sit around indoors doing absolutely nothing at all. Maybe the brain went on holiday too and is taking a while to get back into gear.

PS 1: I have not yet been to photograph the Screwfix whitebeam, of which lots are to be found at reference 1. Maybe they will be replaced by regular photographs of the Meadway pothole.

PS 2: interested to read in the Guardian over breakfast that India goes in for HS2s too. In their case, taking the form of an enormous motorway so that rich people working in the middle of Mumbai can get to their homes in the leafy suburbs in good order, without having to drive through the crowded slums in between. It seems that the people who live in the slums are not that impressed. For a different take, see reference 2, also the source of the snap above.

PS 3: just done my first YouGov survey of the year. The only point of interest being an AI generated segment tacked onto the end. It did not seem terribly intelligent yet, but it will be interesting to see where it goes - and in the meantime I can try and work it out for myself. How could AI help a questionnaire about brands of chocolate mousse along?

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/search?q=screwfix+whitebeam&max-results=20&by-date=true.

Reference 2: https://www.carandbike.com/news/mumbai-coastal-road-project-phase-1-opens-to-public-today-3212140.