I have to admire our Council’s initiative.

For years now I have admired their ability to stick temporary traffic lights up at every available opportunity.  It only takes one bloke with a pickaxe and the lights are erected and traffic is brought to a standstill. 

In the Good Old Days, they would send out a team of men to do some job or other, and they would bring the lights along as an afterthought.  Then they realised they were on to a good thing, and would start erecting lights on an arbitrary stretch of road and then invent some work to justify them.  Quite often they would stick up the lights and then just park a JCB in between them for effect.

Now, of course, the Council has run out of money.  They can no longer justify spending money on wages for blokes who are only there as an excuse for the traffic lights.  They can’t even afford to hire that clapped out JCB to decorate the roadside.

The Council has a problem.  They need to erect temporary lights, otherwise traffic will flow freely, and we can’t have that.  The lights are a necessary part of our culture now, and motorists feel deprived if they can make a journey from A to B without having to be delayed by fifteen minutes or so.

Fair play to them though.  They have come up with an ingenious solution.

Last week they erected a set of lights on a particularly tricky stretch of road.  This piece of road is on a steep hill and is very narrow.  They erected the lights, and to protect them from traffic, they surrounded them with cones, barrels and signs.  They then set them to a delay of about ten minutes, and left them there.

Can you not see the blinding simplicity, nay the utter genius of this? 

The lights are their own justification.

They are necessary, because the road has been narrowed by the lights themselves.

This is the stuff of Nobel Prizes.  This is a sure sign of Man’s intellectual evolution over the apes. This is a concept that surpasses Cold Fusion or Perpetual Motion.

Now, when I travel that stretch of road and have to wait my ten minutes behind the light that is protecting itself from itself, I have to marvel.

Sheer genius!