Busy, busy street

Today was the day the road resurfacing finally began. Our street had legendary potholes, and had done for years. Yesterday, Steve cleared our hard standing of the weeds and weed matting, so we could take the car off the road. However, when I looked out at eight this morning, I saw that our neighbour still had not moved his red van. I went out and spoke to the workmen, and said that he might not have realized that the road closure order applied to him, because he's not quite all there. They said they would speak to him, and by the next time I looked out, the van was gone, with only a dry patch on the road to indicate where it had been.

I was trying to work, but the constant comings and goings were distracting. At one point I saw a truck tip a load of black stuff onto our corner of the road, and the lesser spotted blippper, Steve, observing the process. 

Fortunately I had to go out to meet a client. She bought me a coffee! That's rare in my line of work. She dropped me back off, and I retired to the bedroom for my money guidance webinar,  group supervision, and the rest of my working day. The bedroom is not as noisy as the rooms at the front or side of the house, but the trucks seemed to leave quite early. All in all, it was not as horrendously noisy as I had feared. Work is supposed to be finished by Tuesday 12th 3.30 pm, and ordinary traffic is allowed in the streets before 9.30 and after 3.30, as well as at the weekend.

Resurfacing is supposed to be good for about twenty years. We have lived here for twenty-one, so this is the first time we've seen it, though there is often a pipe being laid or the houses being blasted with cavity wall insulation (noisy!).  Aged council schemes often have  some repairs being carried out, and the oldest houses here are eighty nine. 

Update: the road surface is in much worse condition than anyone imagined. It has proved impossible to rip off the top layer in one piece, so they are filling in the edges before depositing a layer of black stuff on top of the whole road. Or something like that. The contactors are from Staffordshire and Derbyshire. Clearly the local ones are too expensive. Watch this space....
 

Until recently, we had neighbours two doors down who had lived in the street since the 1940s. They died in 2017 and 2020. I pass their memorial stone in the graveyard, near the gate, but I never see their ghosts in the street. They've moved on.

Why does of any of this matter? My grandparents had a similar type of house, ex-Forestry commission, in Barcaldine, Argyll. There I spent many summer holidays in the 1970s. When Maggie Thatcher said council houses could be bought and sold, my mother and her brother actually bought it for my grandparents. I was too young to have an opinion on such matters, and if I had, it wouldn't have carried weight. After they died, various family members lived in it, until it seemed  that no one else had need of it, and eventually it was sold at the height of a recession. (I believe that one of my stranger cousins then became my mother's lodger. I remember her describing him as 'eighteen, going on forty'. Still, he and his girlfriend played Gaelic Scrabble very quietly). About twenty five years later, some other cousins and their family bought a house on the same scheme! The children who leave the  west highlands in their teens and twenties do return, sometimes,  especially the ones that grew up in the shadow of the mighty forest.