Yesterday, we were visited by a mechanical brontosaurus which chewed up our old road surface to have it carted off by a stream of lorries. Today, we’d moved on from Jurassic Park into something more akin to Harry Potter when a fire-breathing dragon arrived to lay our new road surface. The lorries were now delivering tar which they fed into the gaping mouth of the dragon. Once sated, the dragon manoeuvred into position to begin spreading its load on our road.
The road laying machine was quite impressive in that it made a creditably smooth surface all by itself. Being as large as it was, though, like yesterday’s piece of kit, it had trouble dealing with the fine detail, getting into the corners and round drains, but the road already looked pretty good. Now the men with rakes and shovels, who seemed to be leaning around discussing life for much of yesterday, came into their own by spreading tar into the small gaps missed by the dragon. Fortunately for the chaps manually hefting heavy loads of tar about, it was not a hot day. They must get very uncomfortable in anything approaching a decent summer. We don’t, of course, get anything approaching a decent summer but I‘ve seen similar gangs slaving away in the heat of France.
In the wake of the dragon, rakers and shovelers, the ironing team leapt into action flattening everything to a silky smooth finish. The ironing team consisted of a couple of heavy duty rollers which, in common with all the other large mechanical kit, needed assistance from a manually controlled smaller compacting machine to tidy up the fine detail.
This has finally answered our “what’s happening?” question, the one that the council failed to answer; clearly our road is being finished in one three day visit.
Incidentally, having rung the helpline number to try to find out what was happening in relation to the original delay, a phone call which nobody answered, our neighbour subsequently tried the email approach. This did succeed in getting a response. The council said they’d get back to him within five days. Brilliant!
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