You see them here and there. Gaps in the tarmac containing shallow gravel bottomed puddles. Potholes like that are everywhere in Britain as a result of reduced spending on maintenance and some harsh weather. Here in Swindon though we have another type of road cavity. I saw another one opening in the exit road from the old college car park. A round hole, about three inches across, and you can see a hollowed out cavity underneath. I have this mental image of the new shopping arcade disappearing down a big dark pit in a few years time. You sort of know that's inevitable one way or another.

Then again, Swindon has always had a love affair with subterranean tunnels. When they redeveloped land once part of the Great Western Railway Works, the builders uncovered old cellars left forgotten since World War Two. Tons of archives had been stored there for safe-keeping when the war began and work continues on cataloguing all the stuff they found. There's that tunnel under Old Town started by the Swindon & Andover Railway, one end of which now forming Queens Park. All the tools are still there, buried where the unpaid navvies left them.

Then there's the smugglers tunnels under Old Town streets, linking various properties so liquor could be moved around literally under the noses of the 18th century customs & excise men. Local folklore still persists about a long tunnel remaining undisturbed since that period in the Rodbourne area, which at that time was largely rural land.

Swindon is a known haunt of rats. I've nearly stepped on the things in broad daylight once or twice, but never in my area, which is odd because apparently Old Town is said to be full of them. Don't laugh. My letting agent asked me to report any subsidence, and guess what who's the cause of that? I've heard it said that in urban Britain you're never more than six feet away from a rat. So if you want to visit Britain, please enjoy our quaint and medieval culture. Only two groats for adults. Special offer.

Get A Life, Phil

I don't watch Eastenders. As television soap operas go, it manages to be the most consistently depressing of them all. At least Crossroads used to be unintentionally funny. That said, I can't escape the hype. The news item is telling me that Phil Mitchell, one of the two hard boy brothers whose escapades help form the backbone of the program, is suffering from life subsidence. It's all falling to bits.

Erm... I know that. It was falling to bits from episode one. It's called drama.

More Classics

I'm starting to wonder if I've dropped through some sort of hole in time. I know this is summer and so you'd expect the presence of treasured old-timer vehicles, but classic cars, lorries, coaches, and buses keep on travelling through Swindon. It is peculiar. I've heard it said, and repeated on this blog often enough, that Swindon is a town that knows how to live with the future, but not with the past. So much of our victorian gothic heritage has been bulldozed. Besides the characterless flats squeezed into every nook and cranny, the developers have been laying those incredibly naff neon strips in the shopping mall pavement that they warned us about. Nonetheless, it seems the pace of modernisation isn't fast enough. We're being colonised by classic cars. I've even seen a rag-and-bone man driving his horse and cart up the hill where I live. What is going on?