Roadworks and moonshine

I was on my way to town this morning, Oxford, not that other place with the parliamentary circus, but was delayed by another road works. It reminded me of a song Billy Cotton used to sing – ‘There’s another hole in the road, look there’s another one, just like the other one, there’s another hole in the road.’

They seem to modify, turn into new variants, like Covis, all the time.

Of course there are some that are benign, with no one working at them, just the equipment standing looking abandoned but there are others that are virulent with trucks and diggers racing about. Some are only small infestations and quite limited in the area they infect, but one feels the irritation of others for several miles beyond the active core, passive but annoying.

In years gone by, when the Americans found they were falling behind in the space race, they invented a thing called Critical Path Analysis which, by improved planning, reduced the time to get to the moon by years; in the interim, with the development of artificial intelligence and the disappearance of a man with a diary and a pencil he licked before writing, that technology seems to have been lost in cyber space when it comes to road works. As an old mine manager told me years ago – dinna confuse activity wi’ progress!