[SV650rules]

I have been out today driving in Shropshire and there are patches of road where it is literally impossible to dodge potholes because they have bred into a rash and cover pretty much the whole width of road. Some you can dodge as long as there is no-one coming the other way as you need to take up most of the other half of road to miss them. I have been driving and riding for more years than I want to remember and cannot honestly think of a time when roads were in such a bad state. A lot of the road signs and names are becoming unreadable because they don't get cleaned any more, road marking are disappearing.

It is not just this time of year either, but seems to be all year round and I bet some potholes are celebrating their first or second birthday. We have just come back from Wales and their roads looked in better condition, as do Scotlands roads when we have been up there. It is often hard to see potholes when they are full of water, so as well as avoiding obvious ones you have to avoid driving through any water on the road - it gets pretty tiring after a while.

There is plenty of money around (if the worlds 5th largest economy cannot spare a few bob to tidy the roads up there is no hope for anyone).

I have lived in both South Africa and Australia where dirt roads were common outside of main urban areas, and paved roads were called 'all weather roads' - sure you were happy to get off the 'washboard' surface onto tarmac or concrete no matter if they had a few potholes (you had to go above 60mph on the straights of dirt roads so that you just kept hitting the top of the ripples and they felt quite smooth, but try to go around a bend at that speed and you literally 'vibrated off the road', and many unwary people did just that). But we are talking about large countries with small populations, so you can understand they may not have had a lot of money for roads except the main highways.