The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
The PM’s span of attention
You might not have noticed but we’re bringing the nation together. Only connecting (to paraphrase EM Forster) with others with whom we have lost contact. Levelling up and reaching out and crossing divides so that we are
(in the words of a previous prime minister who didn’t manage to keep his promises, either): “All in this together.”
It’s all about building bridges, apparently. Having called upon the cultural aptness of Simon & Garfunkel only last week, I feel bound to consult their works yet again, this time in the form of Bridge Over Troubled Water. Or Trouble Over Bridged Water, which I’d like to claim is an original gag but which I must attribute to a late and witty colleague.
Anyway, our current political landscape being littered, as it is, with the decaying bones of previous failed or curtailed infrastructure projects, it seems only right to point out in the week that HS2 finally got the go-ahead to join the northern (or the northern English) dots, we here even further up the map than Manchester and Leeds have been fairly festooned with news about existing and potential bridges.
Never mind the future possibility, not to be contemplated in these times of unchallengeable ebullience and optimism emanating from our southern seat of power, that HS2 may at some point fall foul of the wrong kind of leaves on the line. Here in Scotland where, if your life experience is anything like mine, it tends to come on a trifle nippy fairly often, we are suffering from the wrong kind of ice on the overhead wires of our latest piece of hi-tech engineering.
The kind, it appears, that has a nasty habit of plummeting unheralded earthwards to knock seven bells and several dents out of passing motor vehicles. Not content with taking on board that the congestion levels on the admittedly aesthetically-pleasing Queensferry Crossing come built in, as it were, the beleaguered Scottish Government has had to cope with closing it completely to investigate why and how blocks of frozen stuff have descended on the heads of motorists wondering why they can’t just divert to the old, creaking but still extant Forth Road Bridge (roadworks and “increased public transport” capability, apparently). Something they tend to wonder about as they hit rush hour every day, it has to be said, even when the estuarial version of the melting ice cap isn’t making its presence felt.
And now, of course, with all this going on, we are faced with the prospect of a bridge connecting Scotland and Northern Ireland. All 28 miles of it. Think of the opportunities for disaster that might present for the prime ministerially-supported project. The PM, of course, has previous on this, as the “architect” (I use the term loosely) of the ill-fated Garden Bridge across the Thames, which cost
£43 million of taxpayers’ money without a pier appearing or a girder girding its loins.
And, even if you are not a raving Scottish Nat or a dedicated Irish Republican, is it not just conceivable that, by the time they get round to placing the first expansion joints, it might be connecting, not two parts of a “voluntary union of equal nations” but two completely different and technically foreign countries? Given the changing political landscape, the view from this particular bridge might be of an independent Scotland and a united
“The view from this bridge might be of an independent Scotland and a united Ireland
Ireland. Pick the bolts out of that, Mr Johnson.
Pick the bucket
Staggering out of Tesco with the big shop of the day. I pass the shelves at the front door with plants, containers and bags of tempting compost etc displayed upon them. Now, I am feeling a bit guilty about my garden at the moment as, for reasons with which I shall not bore you – reasons, mark you, not excuses – I have done beggar all with it for the best part of a year.
Any road up, I spot the aforementioned display of potential greenery, much of which is in handilysized and beautifully illustrated packets and boxes, pots and stylish metallic pails. “Tomato Bucket!” the label proclaims. “Cornflower Bucket!” “Sweet Pea Bucket!”
It shows you the parlous state of my mind at the moment (and the fact that instead of spending time and energy in the great outdoors of my suburban postage stamp, I have been staring vacantly at too much vintage telly) that my first thought is not: “Aha! Let me purchase some of these decorative and useful delights and restore my sorry little plot to colour, beauty and productivity in a trice!” Nope. It is: “I wonder if they have a Hyacinth Bucket?”
I really should get out more…