Monday, June 11, 2007

A busy time

On occasion I invoke that great Chinese god Foo King, on Saturday it was his son Foo King Idiot. I was driving into Kidderminster along the dual-carriageway and got to the railway bridge. Now there's a junction on the left and some car-dealership/repair places and then another junction on the right.

I'm near the head of a stream of traffic and there's another stream of traffic coming towards us. The lead car approaching me signals right to turn into the junction and thus needs to cut across our lane. As I pass the junction this car passes me and stops, and thus causes the cars behind them to stop also. Now the car behind me who is has just crossed the junction also begins to indicate that he wants to turn right. Not right at the junction further up, no no; right at the car-site.

The car-site entrance that is now blocked by the cars stopped because of the original car that wants to turn right at the junction. The car that can't turn right into the junction because of the sudden stoppage of cars caused by the car that wants to turn right into the car-site. The car that can't turn right because... well you see the fun.

Looking back I think a car in the queue managed to squeeze past the one trying to turn into the junction and thus create a hole large enough for the other car to get through. easily avoided by the car-site car indicating in a timely fashion or better yet letting the other car turn into the junction first. He could see that the car wanted to turn, he could see the other cars blocking his entrance; but instead of taking pre-emptive action he just blindly carried on and stopped expecting someone else to sort it out.

On Sunday morning I had to go into Kiddy again and while there took some pictures of St Mary's (uploaded as per) and then on the way back to Stourport stopped off at Millfields Drive (Lane, Road, whatever) and took some more pictures of the terrible state of the roads and pavements (again as per). If this were a council road or pavements you'd have the HSE cordoning it all off.

The houses look great. Their drives, the pavings around them all looked fine; but the roads and pavements. Holes in roads - yeah well you get those though not often to this extent, but holes in pavements, unsurfaced, kerbstones not flush. As a (hopefully) temporary measure you could see that owners had used thin balks of wood to sit against the kerbstones so they could pull their cars onto the drives the current level being too high to so so. Walking along one pavement between houses that had actually been surfaced I reached its connection to the main pavement to discover a minor raised kerb and what appeared to be an almost surface level sheared off concrete post. If I were to go around with a set of trip-hazard stickers I'd need one of those big reel dispensers to cope. As an unadopted, private road-way and pavement it's not up to the council to fix, but as an open publicly accessible site they might want to send someone to look at it.

While there I also took the opportunity to have a wander along the Leapgate footpath that leads down to the canal; yes photos to be uploaded.

In the afternoon I wandered down to the riverside and noted that the skate-park was being used, by bikers; I'm also unsure whether it's been officially opened yet (the Keep Out signs vanished on my last photo trip). Nevertheless they seemed to be having fun, so that's good.

Heading back I diverted through Redstone Marsh, which brung back memories.

All-in-all a nice trek on a gloriously bloody hot Sunday.

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