To say the roads round here are bad would be an understatement: some of the potholes are so deep they contain sharks and submarines. To make things more entertaining the council has started putting speed bumps on the roads, which means going to the shops is a bit like driving from the highlands of Scotland to the south of France without getting on a ferry. However, the council’s road budget is brimming with cash, so logically enough they’ve decided to do the sensible thing and fix the roads. Sorry, I mean they’ve gone completely and utterly nuts.

My street is up the hill from a ridiculously busy main road, which is one of the major arteries into the north of Glasgow. Getting from a side street onto the road can take forever, and as a result there are all kinds of near-misses from dawn to dusk. The council has clearly looked at the problem and thought “Yes! Let’s put the pavements right across the side roads!” So they did: when you get to the Give Way sign that joins onto the main road, you now have four feet of pavement between you and the main road.

The result is a major contribution to road safety: where previously you’d sit at the Give Way and wait for a gap in the traffic, you now sit four feet back from the junction, unable to see the traffic at all.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. This is, after all, the same council that pedestrianised the high street but lets disabled elderly drivers zoom around the closed streets, despite the precinct’s obvious unsuitability for any form of motorised transport. The results are pretty much what you’d expect: half-dead pensioners peering myopically through the windscreen, driving like maniacs and scattering children, pregnant women and people in wheelchairs all over the place.