The state of our crumbling roads in Scotland is pretty awful. In my own experience, however, we are lucky here in the islands.
I have reported potholes several times here in lovely Plasterfield-on-the-Hill. They have been speedily filled in by the sticky tar squad from Comhairle nan Eilean Siar.
A few months ago, they were here within 30 minutes of my email. I know that other areas are not so lucky. Around 9,700 potholes have been reported in Glasgow since 2007, and only a third have been fixed. Edinburgh has had 5,500 reports in the last 17 years, and less than a quarter of them have been sorted.
I’ve been looking into potholes. If you are unlucky enough to live in an area with a badly-run council, unlike those of us with the prestigious HS postcode, I have some advice. That is because many people have been asking online about what constitutes a pothole and a road defect.
All potholes are defects, but not all defects are potholes. How so? How deep does a pothole have to be to cause damage? I hear you ask. I can tell you that the general rule when making a pothole compensation claim is that the hole will need to be deeper than 25 millimetres, or one inch in old money.
That means if you have driven into one and burst your tyre or mangled your suspension, you should take photos or videos of the hole from various angles. Here’s a good tip: use a ruler or tape measure to prove its depth in the images you take.
Plenty still to find out about Post Office scandal
From the images in that docudrama, which we all paused our Yuletide festivities to watch, we know that the Post Office was telling porkies when it claimed the Horizon system could not be accessed by anyone in the entire universe but postmasters, who the PO claimed were fraudsters and thieves.
We know that one witness, a union organiser, saw for himself that figures were being altered by Fujitsu staff. He confirmed that afterwards, and then Fujitsu admitted it could access the systems whenever it wanted.
Of course, it’s right the focus should be on the unqualified thugs hired by the Post Office to bully small businesspeople with threats of jail – which were being carried out. Let us not forget that if Fujitsu staff could manipulate the postmasters’ figures, we need to ask if they actually did.
Weren’t they the ones with the power to defraud on an almighty scale? Were they able to whisk these funds away? Being computer whizz-kids, they may also have taken vast sums for themselves and covered their tracks. If some gave into temptation, and a percentage may always tend to, is that being investigated?
I cannot find any up-to-date news about this. Everyone’s unable to comment due to the ongoing investigation. They won’t say anything.
The £64,000 question
We should always say something when we get a correct answer in a TV quiz. There are a lot of them on just now. It’s what happens in the bleak midwinter.
Jeremy, whose car show was taken away and who was offered a quiz show as a consolation prize, asked this question the other night: “The term nidification refers to the building of what? Webs, dams, reefs, or nests.”
Do you know? I sure didn’t. The question was worth £64,000.
Wait. I realised I probably knew. The Gaelic for nest is nead – that’s not dissimilar to nidi, even to a Sassenach. Yeah, that could be where nidi comes from. The contestant had no idea but guessed. Nest, final answer. Correct.
I jumped up, did a victory dance, whooped out the window to a startled neighbour who thought someone was having a baby, and I startled Mrs X who had been sleeping with what my mum used to call her friend from Dundee. Sorry, I’ll write that again. She had fallen asleep while reading The People’s Friend.
That was such a difficult question, but I got it. I got a £64,000 one.
I also got quick service when that council squad came out to fix our potholes. They arrived here, looked into the big hole and went to get their stuff out of the back of the pick-up. They then realised they had a problem.
The foreman got on the phone, called the supervisor, and said: “We are in Plasterfield, but there are no shovels in the pick-up.” The supervisor replied: “The other squad can’t have put them back when they finished yesterday. Just sit tight and I’ll bring some out to you.”
The foreman asked: “What are we supposed to do until you get here?” The supervisor sighed: “I guess you’ll just have to lean on each other until I can get you some shovels.”
Iain Maciver is a former broadcaster and news reporter from the Outer Hebrides
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