Has anyone noticed how random and pointless road works have become? My youngest son and I have worked out what’s going on. We’ve been doing a survey, well some serious research. It started years ago, when we crashed into a little man dressed in safety gear. He was holding this big stick with a red rimmed blob on top. It was white on the inside, but because of that big red fringe I kept dreaming of lollypops and speeding towards him.

He was already blocking this road, so I swung out. He jumped and stretched out the giant lollypop even further. It looked delicious, the type your granny brings back from the seaside.  I’d already avoided his giant white truck, but I had to swing out even further, then I noticed, in the middle of the great blob, was written the word – STOP. I forgot lollops and slammed on my breaks, but sadly I set that sign a spinning, STOP, GO, STOP, GO, STOP. Coo, he did look cross, but he stood firm, held his position and I for once, had to stop.

Well, it was this very delay that began a lifetime of research and I can safely say – things have got worse. We studied him, well the whole scenario. Strange it was too. If he’d hadn’t blinged up his truck, with luminous yellow and red stripes, he’d have quite a nice truck. There were lodes of bollards and cones in his truck too and more worryingly, great pieces of metal, which could have been large signs posts. Anyway as we waited, but we noticed he could nothing, because he was standing in front of us with the giant lollypop. Finally, as cars stopped coming towards us, he flipped his lollypop to the Go side, and we move on.

My older son’s leaning to drive. He reckons there’s meaning behind these funny shapes and signs that they put on the side of the road. He even recons the bollards and beacons are put out for a reason. Whereas I think men are sticking them round and about randomly. I’ve even seen that mad chap putting them up in the middle of the night. Well he can’t get around to doing much during the day because he’s standing around holding up a giant lollypop.

These days driving with my teenage sons is becoming a nightmare. My teenagers are forever teaching me how to drive, like,

“Mum, when you’re not driving around London and you see a red light, you have to stop.” Funny boy, the other day when I was quietly zooming past a long line of cars to get beyond the red light, he kept saying, “Mum, all those cars are actually traffic jam.”

“Oh,” I said, “I thought they were just a lode of people who’d stopped to chat on their phones.” I couldn’t believe it, then gradually I began to notice that northern folk stop at red lights. Whereas, when I find long que of cars I pull out and drive quickly along the other side of the road, but if it’s busy I carve out a middle line. Anyway, once you get past that red light you can swerve between the pedestrians and swing back onto your own side of the road. Then drive along in peace, until you hit the row of cars.

My oldest son is always taking the weal now. He makes me sit in the passenger seat and he’s not even got his test. He say’s what he’s doing is all in his highway code, but it’s like driving with a bloody text book. Well at least he let me drive on the motorways.

Anyway, I not ranting on here to tell you about Yorkshire drivers’ dangerous practices, but they do have this strange thing called a traffic jam. I first experience one on the M25, that’s the vast place where London stops. We fondly call it the biggest car park in England. The only way you move on the M25 is in the hard shoulder or by swinging into the green belt, but you have to avoid the children playing outside their forever breaking down, family cars.

Sorry, I keep getting sidelined, what I’m meant to be ranting about is this even stranger Yorkshire phenomenon. You’ll understand if you shop online because these days you can purchase just about anything, from bollards, to generators, to traffic lights to sign posts. Doesn’t anyone else realise that these road and traffic blocks are simply eccentric nutters, who’ve never got beyond their own childhood. He’s one that I described earlier.

Well I come from a generation of train spotters. Little boys who loved Tomans. When my son was young it was all Bob the Builder, but somewhere in-between, those babies born in the eighties, they were all into Scalextric and those plastic garages with red routs, and endless blockages. Well they’ve all grown up into a very dangerous generation of problematic, bonkers, road blockers. It must be them, with their strange notions of private enterprise.

It couldn’t possibly be the undecided pre-millenniums, those sentimental boys born in the 90s. They are all lost souls who wouldn’t buy white trucks and flash them up with enormous red and yellow strips or get themselves PVC construction clothes then stay up all night setting up random traps for the day of drivers.

I mean do you ever see anyone actually doing any work? Where I live, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a worker. No, it’s simply random endless cornered off sections, road blockages, and temporary  traffic lights that remain permanently red. I think the Scalextric of this would are so used to waiting, well these toys never worked beyond Christmas day the rest of the year was simply about batterie charging. Now they’re punishing, making us all wait for the Bob the Builders to grow up and do some work?

But the thing that worries me most is eBay, well the online market place, because now every eighties boy is now hitting his midlife crises and there’s no such thing as coordination through local government owned services. All these middle age chaps have been privatised, so were getting more and more randomly placing road signs, bollards and temporarily blocks. The worse types boys are the ones who find themselves in police cars, if they’re not seeding at 120 miles an hour down the motorway, there simply parking their cars across roads and making you U-turn.

If you’ve got here you’ve probably worked out that most of this is fantasy or should I call it fictions. But it does horrify me, because roadworks have actually become confusing and dangerous, they’re simply not showing any signs of coordination. For many years in the UK, on average, one roadworker got killed every month but these figures have been increasing last year it was twenty and that’s  almost double.

https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/fatals.htm