COUNCIL IN A HOLE AGAIN
BACK in the news, and for the wrong reason, again. Kirklees had the highest number of potholes in Yorkshire last year.
44.055 in the Huddersfieldcentred borough, according to the RAC, thankfully a 7% drop on 2015.
That’s an awful lot of holes on the ground, and an oddly precise number. I wonder who counts them. Are they on bonus?
Bring back Bernard Cribbins – 90 at the weekend – whose 1962 hit song hymned the ‘umble ‘ole. But he dug that himself, not the traffic. FLASHBACK to 3 January, 2018 – and Olde Routledge’s Almanack’s predictions that came true.
The Winter Olympics in South Korea “bring a welcome unfreezing of relations with the communist North”. Dead right.
“But at home there’s a colossal fall-out with EU negotiators”, also correct, if utterly predictable.
A second son for the Duchess of Cambridge. I predicted that too, though not his name, Louis Arthur. Riots in the Occupied Territories when Israel celebrates 70 years of the Jewish state, “put down with customary brutality”, also, alas, true. A heatwave in July, vicious political in-fighting at the Tory Party conference - both came about.
In November, I prophesied, Buckingham Palace would announce that Meghan Markle, aka the Duchess of Sussex, was pregnant with her first child. I was a few days early, but my forecast that the tabloids would go into overdrive proved all too accurate.
My prediction of December doubts and Tory turmoil over Theresa May’s Brexit deal bore fruit, but thankfully not the Boxing Day general election.
Like any soothsayer, I’ll gloss over the howling non-events. But not bad for an amateur.