Take your own line
Afew weeks ago there appeared in a British newspaper an article entitled“ Is this the UK ' s most pot-holed stretch of road?” above which was a picture of some 500m of suburban road in some Midland town with six ~ SIX ~ potholes visible. When I saw it I laughed and laughed. Now I ' ve said it before, but it ' s worth observing again: the problems which exercise the minds of citizens of First World countries like Great Britain are very different to those that we contend with daily. Nowadays, of course, the Brits are obsessed ~ quite rightly ~ with Brexit. But there ' s also hearty debate about multiculturalism, the state of the National Health Service, whether grammar schools are classist, and transgenderism. And in rural England Brits deal with much the same problems that we do in terms of infrastructure. Their telephones sometimes don ' t work. Low-lying parts are subject to occasional flooding. Power failures are not unheard of. And their rural roads, many of which are centuries old and have been tarred for more than 100 years, aren ' t as smooth as one might like.( I have a rural-English friend who, annoyed by a pothole on a country road on which he travels frequently, stopped his Landrover one day beside it, whipped out a can of yellow spray paint and painted a large, bright circle around the hole. As if the hole had been invisible before, within 24 hours, he was pleased to find that a county road crew had repaired the hole. He now travels nowhere without a can of paint in his car.) One wonders what one would have to do to attract the attention of South African road repair crews so that they attended to a pothole within 24 hours. I doubt that a daubing of the perimeter with gaudy paint would help. Maybe if one erected a colonial flag in the centre of the hole? In South Africa, we tend to think that we have taken potholed roads to a new level of destruction. We haven ' t of course, as anybody who has travelled in Africa will attest. North of the Limpopo one finds potholes that are, literally, years old and will quite comfortably accommodate and totally conceal a small car, its passengers and a couple of wild animals together. But what happens north of our borders should not be a yardstick for what happens here and we should all be railing on to our municipal and provincial authorities to be more diligent in their road repair operations. But having said that, getting angry about little things like the state of our roads is not going to make our lives more pleasant.
THE BACK PAGE
One just needs to learn to cope. And here ' s where a background as a showjumper is useful. As a child I much enjoyed a jumping competition named“ takeyour-own-line.” In this event, a number of jumps would be erected seemingly at random in an arena, and a start and finish line added. The riders themselves would decide in which order to jump the obstacles, aiming for the fastest possible time, and without knocking down any poles. It was no-holds-barred riding, the only stipulations being that you had to enter through the starting poles, jump all the obstacles and exit through the finish poles. Apart from any other skills learnt( like how to ride like hell without killing oneself or one ' s pony) a take-your-own-line class taught one memory skills, because the jumps were not numbered( in a normal showjumping class one goes from No1 to No2 to No3 and so on) and thus one needed to remember when to turn left and right, made all the more difficult that one had chosen one ' s own route around the obstacles, making watching the route of competitors who went before one just more confusing. Driving on a potholed road is much like a take-your-own-line competition if you’ re to have any hope of keeping your tyres intact and your false teeth in place. You have to remember where the holes are, and whether to dodge left or right, sometimes mounting the verge, other times crossing over to the opposite side of the road. But there ' s added fun in the road-version of take-your-own-line. First, there are randomly added obstacles. After every rainfall new potholes emerge and one ' s previously-memorised route must then be extemporaneously altered on the fly to avoid a bone-jarring jolt. And then of course there ' s the possibility of on-coming cars. It ' s like take your-own-line with jumps being added as one rides the course, and with another rider or two riding the course backwards as one completes one ' s round. It’ s all fun under the African sun!
WRITTEN BY SMALLHOLDERS, FOR SMALLHOLDERS