Take your own line
Afew weeks ago there appeared in a British newspaper an article entitled “ Is this the UK ' s most pot-holed stretch of road ?” above which was a picture of some 500m of suburban road in some Midland town with six ~ SIX ~ potholes visible . When I saw it I laughed and laughed . Now I ' ve said it before , but it ' s worth observing again : the problems which exercise the minds of citizens of First World countries like Great Britain are very different to those that we contend with daily . Nowadays , of course , the Brits are obsessed ~ quite rightly ~ with Brexit . But there ' s also hearty debate about multiculturalism , the state of the National Health Service , whether grammar schools are classist , and transgenderism . And in rural England Brits deal with much the same problems that we do in terms of infrastructure . Their telephones sometimes don ' t work . Low-lying parts are subject to occasional flooding . Power failures are not unheard of . And their rural roads , many of which are centuries old and have been tarred for more than 100 years , aren ' t as smooth as one might like . ( I have a rural-English friend who , annoyed by a pothole on a country road on which he travels frequently , stopped his Landrover one day beside it , whipped out a can of yellow spray paint and painted a large , bright circle around the hole . As if the hole had been invisible before , within 24 hours , he was pleased to find that a county road crew had repaired the hole . He now travels nowhere without a can of paint in his car .) One wonders what one would have to do to attract the attention of South African road repair crews so that they attended to a pothole within 24 hours . I doubt that a daubing of the perimeter with gaudy paint would help . Maybe if one erected a colonial flag in the centre of the hole ? In South Africa , we tend to think that we have taken potholed roads to a new level of destruction . We haven ' t of course , as anybody who has travelled in Africa will attest . North of the Limpopo one finds potholes that are , literally , years old and will quite comfortably accommodate and totally conceal a small car , its passengers and a couple of wild animals together . But what happens north of our borders should not be a yardstick for what happens here and we should all be railing on to our municipal and provincial authorities to be more diligent in their road repair operations . But having said that , getting angry about little things like the state of our roads is not going to make our lives more pleasant .
THE BACK PAGE
One just needs to learn to cope . And here ' s where a background as a showjumper is useful . As a child I much enjoyed a jumping competition named “ takeyour-own-line .” In this event , a number of jumps would be erected seemingly at random in an arena , and a start and finish line added . The riders themselves would decide in which order to jump the obstacles , aiming for the fastest possible time , and without knocking down any poles . It was no-holds-barred riding , the only stipulations being that you had to enter through the starting poles , jump all the obstacles and exit through the finish poles . Apart from any other skills learnt ( like how to ride like hell without killing oneself or one ' s pony ) a take-your-own-line class taught one memory skills , because the jumps were not numbered ( in a normal showjumping class one goes from No1 to No2 to No3 and so on ) and thus one needed to remember when to turn left and right , made all the more difficult that one had chosen one ' s own route around the obstacles , making watching the route of competitors who went before one just more confusing . Driving on a potholed road is much like a take-your-own-line competition if you ’ re to have any hope of keeping your tyres intact and your false teeth in place . You have to remember where the holes are , and whether to dodge left or right , sometimes mounting the verge , other times crossing over to the opposite side of the road . But there ' s added fun in the road-version of take-your-own-line . First , there are randomly added obstacles . After every rainfall new potholes emerge and one ' s previously-memorised route must then be extemporaneously altered on the fly to avoid a bone-jarring jolt . And then of course there ' s the possibility of on-coming cars . It ' s like take your-own-line with jumps being added as one rides the course , and with another rider or two riding the course backwards as one completes one ' s round . It ’ s all fun under the African sun !
WRITTEN BY SMALLHOLDERS , FOR SMALLHOLDERS