I saw this story on the BBC News website yesterday. At first, the date made me think ‘yeah, right’ – but the BBC has used some examples which would put the whole story in very poor taste if it turned out to be an April 1st prank.
Some old bloke in Ashford, Kent (Ted Relf) has apparently been told to take a sign down that he erected himself warning of potholes on the road outside his property.
But it made me wonder if a real sign warning for potholes ought to be created and erected. After all, the local councils have spent all their money on ridiculously wasteful new pedestrian islands and road layouts (if Nottingham’s City and County councils are anything to go by), so they aren’t going to be fixing the extremely serious pothole problem anytime soon.
So all they would have to do is put a few of these up and it’d save them doing anything meaningful at all for years. OK, I know that’s not much different to the way it is now, but you get the idea. They could save millions, which they could then waste on routes for cyclists and new pedestrian islands in areas where the pedestrians are too stupid to use crossings at all.
If the BBC story is true, I suspect the man in question probably did do something wrong – so much as we might smile at his antics, it is quite likely he is somehow making a political statement. People usually are when they do stuff like this.