The Tarmac Fairy is Dead. Long Live the Tarmac Fairy

In my role as secretary of the community council (fortunately – or unfortunately* – ours survived the night of the long knives which saw 38 of them axed by the coonsil due to failure to fill in the correct paperwork in the right order, something which I predicted as far back as December when we realised the evilly bureaucratic genius of the process involved in not having your community council dissolved) I have received what I believe to be the ur-specimen of a coonsil email:

1. It has been openly copied to 53 separate email addresses (I think I probably have access to every email address in the county by now due to the coonsil’s inability to master the use of the bcc field), although to be fair, that’s actually quite parsimonious for a coonsil email distribution list.

2. The email itself says nothing much except to direct me to an attachment which I then have to download to read. There was nothing in the email to suggest that this might be quite an important and relevant email, in contrast to most of the other regular emails I get from the council which are almost entirely irrelevant. But then I suppose if the coonsil thinks that all the emails it sends are vitally important even the ones attaching a newsletter which summarises the feedback it’s had on its strategy for the consultation over its strategy for the proposed merging of social and medical care.**

3. On downloading the attachment, because I’m diligent like that, I discover it is written in pure coonsil (‘undernoted’ anyone?), but on careful parsing I realise it’s a road closure notice – for our own road, as it happens – for the period of a month (I might have been tipped off about this by the weekly email I get which tells me about road works across the whole of the county, but which is fairly useless to anyone who doesn’t know their U33Bs from their C25Ns and so I’ve stopped reading it with any real attention).

4. On further inspection, this road closure notice appears to be an arse-covering exercise on the part of the council who have decided they’re going to be mending the road at some point during the next month but aren’t sure when, so they’re just going for a blanket order so they can close the road when they need to, which is wonderfully convenient for them, but slightly less convenient for the people who actually live on the road. When it comes to following the letter rather than the spirit of the law, this coonsil wrote the book…

5. Just to add injury to insult (from a cyclist’s point of view) they’re not actually mending the road, they’re just surface dressing it.

6. And finally, if we have any comments, we have to respond ‘within five working days’. Which would be great, if the road closure wasn’t due to start the day after tomorrow.

I have sent them some full and frank feedback all the same.

* Encouragingly, at least one of the axed bodies has effectively gone feral and has been busy spending the money it had built up in its account on useful things like bus shelters so the coonsil can’t get its hands on it. I bet being secretary of a rogue community council involves a hell of a lot less paperwork and more actual doing stuff. I wonder how many guerrilla bike lanes we could have got installed before anyone stopped us …

** I really wish I was making that up.