POSITIVELY POTTY

Alexander McCall Smith struggles to see the positives in potholes

“I saw two ducks and a heron nesting in a water-filled pothole

W.H. Auden’s poetry touches on an extraordinarily wide range of topics, including theology, art, cats, lead mining and the weather. His references to the last of these, the weather, often focus on the wind. ‘Winds make weather,’ he writes, ‘and weather is what nasty people are nasty about/and nice people share a common joy in observing.’

Like so many of Auden’s insights, this striking observation is applicable more generally. Moaners will moan about whatever they can. They resolutely refuse to see the bright side; they are, as the metaphor has it, the glass-half-empty type.

Ideally, we should try to avoid falling into the moaners’ camp. Nothing is so bad that one cannot find a positive side to it. Take microbial disease: yes, it is highly likely that the microbes will eventually wreak their revenge on humanity but… at the risk of being thought heartless, think of the positive side of grossly reduced human populations; our over-burdened earth would certainly breathe a sigh of relief.

And it’s not just epidemics that can be seen in this light. My late German friend, the essayist Michael von Poser, took the view that one should let buildings age in dignity. So if one’s roof fell in, then one had lost a room but had gained a courtyard. That always struck me as being refreshingly positive.

And yet… potholes. Like any driver on Scotland’s roads, I am becoming adept at dodging the gaping potholes that now erode the national tarmac. We spend a lot of time in Argyll, where we use an obscure B-road to get to our house. That road recently became all but impassable, so extensive is the potholing. Whole chunks of the road seemed to have disappeared, leaving holes that, given Argyll’s notoriously wet climate, rapidly and permanently fill with water. I imagine that aquatic life has already moved in. Indeed, I saw two tufted ducks and a heron nesting in a water-filled pothole recently. That is perhaps not entirely true, but it could be. In some potholes, I believe, trout populations have been established; others might now be marked on ordnance survey maps as minor lochans.

Bearing in mind Auden’s observation, I would not wish to moan about the situation. So we have an epidemic of potholes, but just think of their traffic calming effect. If potholes slow motorists down, this will lead to fewer accidents, and those that do happen will be less serious, as they will occur at lower speeds. So potholes are actually saving human life.

There is an economic argument as well. Speed bumps are expensive things to install as you have costly materials. You have the tar and, well, you have tar. But you also have men, as you cannot have a speed bump without men to make it, or women, of course. And these men and women have to be paid, whereas a pothole is made by nature, in an organic way. A pothole’s carbon footprint, therefore is negligible, and they certainly do the job of enforcing the speed limit.

Hold on, you point out: potholes cause damage to wheel-bearings, suspension, and other bits and pieces that cars appear to need. Yes, they do, but once again that’s the negative view. Potholes do indeed put cars off the road, but isn’t that exactly what the authorities want? Currently there exist all sorts of disincentives to having a car on the road – costly parking permits being an obvious example. Potholes do the same thing for free, and possibly more effectively.

However, having given due weight to the positive side, I can hardly help but conclude that potholes are nasty and that it is scandalous that our roads are in that state. The only solution is to pay more road tax. This should be applied across the board, although there should be exemptions for pensioners, those on benefits, readers of Scottish Field, and everyone living in Scotland. That money should be ringfenced, or even potholed, and applied solely to getting our roads back into shape. There really is no alternative.

Which brings me back to Auden. He makes no mention of potholes in his poems. He was, of course, a famously bad driver, and had there been any potholes, he would almost certainly have driven into them. He did mention erosion, though, in that lovely poem

In Praise of Limestone. He said that the reason we love limestone is chiefly because it dissolves in water. He was a nice man, and was predictably nice about erosion.