I AM now a seasoned veteran of the current outbreak of flamboyant digger-pokery in Douglas.
I can’t avoid it. I call in at the Examiner office next to Pulrose Bridge every weekday morning, largely in the forlorn hope that one day they’re going to offer me more money. There is no escape for me.
What the Department of Infrastructure is doing on Peel Road is resurfacing it from the Brown Bobby to Quarter Bridge.
This means the end for what are known to veteran motorists as the Corporation Bumps.
As I understand it they were a series of transverse rises built into the road surface on the approach to Pulrose Bridge by Douglas Corporation when it still had digger-pokery within its fiefdom.
They were designed to slow us down; they must be the first traffic calming system ever seen in the town.
But they are not what I have in mind today. It’s about traffic cones.
There’s a lot of them resident in the Isle of Man in these turbulent times. In fact I have been wondering fretfully if they are taking over, that there are now more of them than there are of us, the Manx people. It’s a compelling thought.
I took this up with the DoI’s director of highways, Mr Richard Pearson, known more informally as the Colossus of Roads.
A busy man, he was kind enough to consider the question with as much seriousness as he could muster.
But all he could tell me was that while our cones (and they are ours) do run into thousands he hasn’t had time to count them.
They also have adventurous lives. As Mr Pearson put it, they often go walkabout. ‘Cone With the Wind’ so to speak.
After convivial nights out, people turn them into hats for public statues or send them out to sea. They get kidnapped by householders who want to station a pair in the road outside their front doors to falsely declare a private parking space which has DoI authority.
All this means the DoI has to send out search parties to round up and re-capture its traffic cones. It cannot afford to run out of them if digger-pokery is to continue.
It was people playing naughty games with traffic cones in the UK which led Prime Minister John Major to set up his Cones Hotline, where people could report cone crime.
We don’t have one in the Isle of Man so far. There is a risk that frivolous persons will ring up to order a double raspberry ripple.
But if anybody wants a traffic cone or two of their very own, how much do they cost?
The patient Mr Pearson was game to the last. ‘I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘Let’s say somewhere between a fiver and a tenner. OK?’
Lastly, let us consider the DoI Minister Mr David Cretney MHK. I can assure embittered Manx motorists that he is good man, a dedicated public servant. When he was Tourism Minister a while back he was known as the Minister of Fun.
Try and go on thinking of him like that.
• RICHARD Hetherington emails to report renting a hire car at Faro Airport. The paperwork had his Manx address and postcode correct – with the words Isle of Man followed by ‘Aberdeen City.’
He asks: ‘Should we be worried?’
Only if we see Alex Salmond knocking about asking for referendum signatures.
• MARJORIE Higgins says she saw in the Examiner a house for rent at Saddle Mews surrounded by ‘many cured lawns.’
Smokers seem to be welcome.
• A MANX crossword clue has come in from Redvers Skillicorn in Bristol. It was in the Western Mail, as follows: Was head of island when old (7) – managed