A contraflow in the village!!!

I walk outside to find traffic lights outside my front gate. There is a tailback of one small car coming from the direction of the coast.

Behind some cones, two men dig a hole in the road. I study them suspiciously like the man in the Bernard Cribbins song.

They do not look like Al-Qaida, and being very English I do not ask to see their ID. They seem to be digging at a rate that might prompt an impatient poke in the ribs from Peter Ebdon. Another car joins the tailback. Soon we will have gridlock.

The electric traffic lights are highly exciting. Usually round here we have a man with a stop/go sign, but like so many people he has been automated out of existence, probably sent to retrain as a Golf Sale operative.

Either that or his job has been outsourced and there is a graduate chap in India standing with a sign in a reconstruction of an English country lane, turning it one way then another. It is a shame.

I walk to the Village Shop for my newspaper. I steal a glance into the hole as I pass. The labourer inside steals a glance back at me.

He knows that I am on to him.