When I see something unusual and entertaining, I take a quick photo with my phone. If it sticks in my mind, I come back the next morning with my camera and take a proper photo. Well, this time you're stuck with the phone photo, because the Council must have spotted me taking it and moved like lightning to avoid further embarrassment. Councils moving like lightning may seem an unlikely concept, but it does happen when there's embarrassment at stake. Anyway, I took the photo you see at about nine in the evening, and the signs were gone at seven the following morning: amazing!
The main sign, which you may just be able to read, says "No access for LGV follow diversion". (LGV, by the way, is European for HGV.) This sign, you will see, is parked on the War Memorial outside the Parish Church on Eltham Hill. (As a digression, we might pause to note that at a time when we are giving new consideration on how to honour servicemen killed in foreign wars, our Council dumps traffic signs on our War Memorial.) The other sign, which you can't read in this photo, says "Diversion ends". It is in front of the traffic lights at the main junction: less than the length of two LGVs away! Could this short stretch of hill have similar properties to Harry Potter's Platform 9 ¾ at King's Cross. Have LGVs been diverted into some other dimension? Is Eltham the Bermuda Triangle of the LGV world? Or did the council put up a nonsense set of signs? What do you think? You're probably unpleasantly aware of the amazing abilities traffic engineers have with road signs. Like me, you will have made countless journeys desperately following diversion signs, only to find, at the most stressful junction, that you missed one. How do they do that so consistently? They must learn it in school, mustn't they? On the Traffic Engineers' course there must be a module on the subject: something like 'Application of the Poincaré Duality to Ensure Discontinuity in any Directed Transversal of an N-point Topology'. Or to put that in old money, they can get all of us lost all of the time; which we already knew. Put not your faith in traffic engineers: study a map beforehand.
They also think they know where you ought to be going. 'For Stoke, follow Newcastle' they say. So you do. And where do you end up? Well, Newcastle, of course. Then what? You start to follow 'Other Routes', in the forlorn hope that Stoke must be one of them. But it isn't: in what seems like no time at all, you come across a sign saying 'For Stoke, follow Newcastle'.
Then there are the signs so confounding, I hesitate to blame them on traffic engineers. There is a sign on the A102(M), just beyond Kidbrooke, which says "For the Dome, follow Blackwall Tunnel"! Now that must have been put there by Poplar pirates, hoping to lure out-of-town pop fans north of the Thames. Or perhaps the traffic engineers are still hoping to extend the Dome's failure by preventing people getting there by car.
Further down the A102(M), there is a sign so amazing, it must have won prizes at Traffic Engineering Conventions: "For the Dome", it reads," follow the Dome". This actually manages to produce a diversion inside my head! What can it possibly mean? Is it just deeply insulting, or have I missed something?
Of course, there are probably more prosaic explanations: where I started from, the signs on Eltham Hill, is really a question of councils having left and right hands, and the one not knowing what the other is doing. You see, a water main burst in Well Hall Road, and the council put up two diversion routes: one going north, and one going south. The left hand must have done the one going north, and the right hand the one going south. One sign is the beginning of one, and the other is the end of the other, if you see what I mean.
Question is: was it the council's left or right hand that profaned the War Memorial?
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