Don't dilly-Dali, keep on the straight and narrow

Maurice O'Brien • Published 22 Oct 2009 09:00 0 Comments

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VETERANS of Reading's roads have seen it all since the surrealists hijacked the highways department a few decades back.

Salvador Dali himself surely envied the cool way the original stretch of the IDR used to end literally in mid air, some 20 feet above Mill Lane. And, since that curiosity vanished, we've had the middle lane in Castle Hill which you only use in the rush hour if absolutely certain that your watch is correct.

We've survived a rash of mini-roundabouts, a positive pandemic of speed humps which seemingly only frighten drivers with acute intestinal sensitivity or the smug users of giant all-terrain 4x4s, traffic lights designed to create jams where they're not, and road markings which would appear to have been painted by Dali and his mate Picasso during a contest to find which of them was the weirdest.

But suddenly last month we got the white lines. Neat but not gaudy, barely two feet out from the kerb along a newly resurfaced stretch of the Oxford Road in Tilehurst. No explanatory signs, no clues in the Highway Code, just a couple of bicycle logos painted on the road.

Was the nanny state finally getting to grips with the obese cyclist crisis? Bulky bikers could never squeeze inside the white line, especially with a wobbly, legs akimbo pedalling position.

That said, even Mark Cavendish wouldn't have managed a legal sprint finish past Waitrose with arms and legs pumping. Making crash slimming courses compulsory for rotund riders would clearly be the only answer.

Poised to take up the libertarian fight on behalf of all chunky cyclists, we were stopped in our tracks, as it were, by council intelligence received from down Dusseldorf Way.

Apparently it's all an illusion, or maybe a delusion. Those white lines are supposed to trick us into thinking the road is narrower than it is, so we'll slow down. Wasn't a simple '30' sign sufficiently surreal?

And what next? Multi-coloured buses powered with homemade moonshine? A one-way IDR?

- WHY is it every time I see car boot salesman and world saviour Gordon Brown spitting bile at the banking fraternity I'm reminded of a soppy animal lover who cuddles and fondles a cat to excess and then looks shocked when it leaps into his lap and sinks its claws in something fleshy?

- IT'S that time of the year when no MP would dream of letting themselves wander within range of a television camera without one essential, seasonal addition to their wardrobe; to wit a Royal British Legion poppy.

Wouldn't it be nice this year if every last one of them pledged to buy their own? Instead of sticking it on their exes.

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