Timetoquit,andy
The £1.35 billion Queensferry Crossing was built with Chinese steel and foreign labour. The design of the approach roads is wrong and the bridge doesn’t do what it was designed to do. It should have been a developer’s dream, leading to massive housing projects in Fife, Kinross and Perthshire as Edinburgh spread its suburbs north of the Forth. We didn’t need a new Forth crossing, we needed intelligent development in Edinburgh. The SNP cancelled the planned train station at the Dunfermline Halbeath Park and Ride to save money.
The M8 upgrade was another wasted opportunity. We got another two-lane motorway where there was adequate room for three lanes. The M8/ M73 or M74 interchange is a roundabout. The cheap and nasty solution to any road problem. There was plenty of space for a proper flyover interchange to allow traffic to flow freely at 70mph instead of having to come to a complete stop.
There are daily traffic problems on the two-lane M8 at Harthill. The emergency lane could be used as a traffic lane in conjunction with limited access at Whitburn and Bathgate. This is done on motorways in Birmingham and London to ease congestion.
Every summer there are tailbacks at Stoneymollan at Balloch on the A82. A flyover northbound to Balloch would solve the problem. It took numerous deaths on the A9 at Ballinluig for the government to built a 20th century solution to a 21st century problem.
Can Keith Brown seriously suggest that Scotland’s railways under the Abellio franchise are fit for purpose? He was in charge when Abellio made the winning bid. Where are the grand plans from the offer to bid? In the days before tennis was a big-money sport, the great stars called it a day at 30 and Andy Murray will turn 31 in the spring.
He’s been plagued by injuries from the start and the fact that his congenital bipartite patella wasn’t diagnosed until he was 16, eight years after he started competing against adults, is illustrative.
It’s long been known that the double-handed backhand causes problems in the non-dominant wrist. But the focus on power and physicality in the modern game meant that Murray – like Djokovic and Nadal but unlike the onehander Federer – felt compelled to use it and the three have suffered from endless wrist injuries.
One of my three medic brothers (an international hammer-thrower in his youth) is an orthopaedic surgeon and reckons Andy’s hip problem is femoroacetabular impingement. Together with his age and chronic back problems, it’s a career-ender if he’s to have any chance of avoiding a grim future of osteoarthritis. (REV DR) JOHN CAMERON
Howard Place, St Andrews