Yesterday the BBC reported that the East Midlands Regional Assembly failed to get government spending to dual the A46 between Newark and Widmerpool.
The section of road has a high number of accidents and sees 23,000 vehicles a day.
One of the big issues for the East Midlands and Lincolnshire is that we have lots of major A roads, but they are only single carrigageway. The costs and disruption to upgrade these road are massive, however could there be a compromise.
The main problem with these roads is slow moving vehicles and impatient drivers. If we had frequent overtaking spots (a bit like crawler lanes without the hills), you would only need to gain an extra lane (which in some places can be taken from the two lanes already there). By telling drivers who wish to travel at the speed limit that they can overtake in half a mile they will be more likely to wait and then overtake safely.
Will we see this happen? Who knows.

Today I received a Final Annual Statement from the Student Loans Company. Unlike any other bank that I’ve dealt with this statement seems to be a bit out of date.
The statement is dated June 2006 (seems OK at this point), but when I looked at the statement something seemed wrong. I had paid £442.00 this year. Now this couldn’t be correct, since moving to Lincoln in Jan 2005 I took a pay cut which resulted in my annual salary being less than the £15,000 threshold. Only since this tax year through overtime have I started to begin to repay this loan (also now I have my annual pay rise plus my Council allowance, which clearly takes me above the threshold).
It was only then when looking closer did I realise that this statement refers to the period 06/04/2004 – 05/04/2005. That’s a period that ended some 14 months ago!
With the statement you get a lovely leaflet telling me what to do if I think that within the next 52 weeks my loan will have been paid off. This is to ensure that my employees and HM Revenue & Customs don’t take more than necessary. I can only contact the Student Loans Company if my repayments will be completed within the year, but if they don’t tell me how much I owe them for over 14 months there’s a possibility that I’ve already paid everything off (although very unlikely at the moment).
Finally the other issue I have is with the Government and not the Student Loans Company themselves. The amount of money I paid in during the last period was near enough equal to the amount of interest on the loan, and with the 2005 period of zero repayments my total loan will be higher on the next statement than the one I got last year.

I’ve just been to Sainsbury’s to buy some wine. I’ve been saving up my Nectar points for some years now, and after cashing some in at Warwick Castle, I decided to spend some on wine. I’ve selected 12 random bottles, varying in cost from £3.99 to £7.49 (reduced from £10.99) coming to a total of £61.15.
I plan to drink them with Heather over the coming months (we’re not real big drinkers) and hopeful they will all be nice.

This meme is going around the blogs at the moment.

My earliest political memory is at the age of 9 being informed that Margaret Thatcher had thrown in the towel and resigned as Prime Minister.

I then proceeded to run around the school field in celebration.

According to the main BBC Sport website Dietmar Hamann wants to leave Bolton to join Bolton!

I’ve tweaked the background and style sheet to make the left column slightly wider, whilst taking the pixels from the right hand side.
By doing this, it allows me to whore my blog to the advertising world with 468×60 pixel ads. I’ve made a script which rotates the order and changes the ads for each company on each reload. It also places an add at the bottom of the item page, and I’ll work on getting the archive pages pimped.
I also played about with the flickr badge, so I now show all my pictures instead of my Cullen photoset, and they also have a “shake it like a Polaroid” background.
You may need to do a Ctrl+F5 to load the modified style sheet.

Some Tories are suggesting that we should allow left turns on red lights.
I can see advantages and disadvantages of this, however it is reported as some new idea from a Tory policy group, yet I’m pretty sure that this was included or being spoke about during the 2001 general election.