If you were given half an hour in a locked room with one person so that you could berate, lambast, harangue and generally verbally abuse the bounder, who would you choose? Personally, I’d go with Arthur Holly Compton.
But before we go any further, let me just say welcome to my 150th blog post and thank you all for taking the time to read my output on this here website. Thank you so very much.
Now, back to the erstwhile Arthur Compton. The reason I’d like half an hour to orally castigate the man is because it is he who invented the monstrosity that is the speed bump.
I’ll elucidate.
Ange and I have just spent four (mostly pleasant) nights cat sitting for our friends Debbie and Barry in their lovely West Yorkshire home. It was a thoroughly pleasant and relaxing time and it gave us both a bit of fur therapy with those two charming felines – Degan and Fizz, boy and girl respectively – in a rural setting by a babbling brook and surrounded by trees and fields. It would almost have been idyllic…
…if it hadn’t been for Arthur Compton and his vile invention.
You may have noticed me mentioning from time to time that I suffer from the condition known as fibromyalgia and the near constant pain my muscles are in. Well, speed bumps do not do it any favours whatsoever. Quite the opposite as it happens. And the road leading up to Debbie and Barry’s home is festooned with the bloody things!!!
They are horrible, amateurish, snotty little piles of tarmac that seemed to have been conceived by either the Marquis de Sade whilst having a bad day or an absolute, raving, psychotic maniac and whoever it was couldn’t simply create bumps, oh no, he had to make them as difficult to avoid as humanly possible. There are certain speed bumps that you will encounter, that with bit of careful driving you can negotiate around without too much shaking about, but these examples of man’s brutality to his fellow man are impossible to go around and so the driver and his unfortunate passengers have to have their fillings knocked loose every single time they go down that (otherwise delightful) road.
And there’s about ten of these abominations for good measure. I mean, well, if you’re going to make other people’s lives a misery then you really ought to make a damn good job of it – and they have.
My body feels as if all the component parts have been separated, shaken up in a bag, and then reattached in all the wrong places by a blind welder. Horrendous it is.
I’m sure that there are many amongst you who would argue that speed bumps are responsible for fewer road traffic accidents and that they help the police when in pursuit of escaping villainy. I don’t concur though, and I will tell you why.
The vast majority of drivers in the UK are sensible types who do not want to steal cars or acquire speeding fines or damage their vehicle in any way. They drive over speed bumps slowly and carefully. However, they’re not the ones we should worry about.
Career boy racers and other vehicular based criminals, when faced with being hotly pursued by the local constabulary, tend to go over speed bumps as if they weren’t actually there. Believe me, most speed bumps in the UK are not going to have a slowing down effect on those kinds of people. It just doesn’t happen. Think about it, if you’ve just stolen a car from someone’s drive and the boys in blue are on your tail, are you really going to slow down for a speed bump and let them catch up with you? Well, I wouldn’t, but then I’ve never stolen a car so I couldn’t say for certain.
So I have to ask the question, what actual purpose do they serve beyond sending all us motorists scurrying to the mechanic once a year to have our car suspensions repaired?
I mean potholes are one thing, that’s wear and tear on our increasingly busy roads. But to deliberately come up with an idea that basically punishes sensible road users for the criminal actions of the few seems almost maniacal to me.
We still enjoyed our time with the two adorable cats, who made such a fuss of us you’d have thought we were there all the time, and if it hadn’t been for those blasted speed bumps it could have been the perfect week. But those bumps were there and they were nasty, heinous, spiteful little beasts and I hated going over the damnable things every time we went out in the car.
So yes, I’d love to have the chance of telling Mr Compton what I think of his invention in explicit and graphic detail.
PS – Oh yes, before I forget, we also saw a badger on that road one night, which, whilst being an absolute treat, didn’t compensate for how my body was feeling at the time.
