New Road! New Road!

There's a new road outside my flat. Brand spanking new, they installed it today - I even saw them do it.

Well, maybe it's not technically a new road as such but it is a new road surface where the old road surface used to be. I don't know what was wrong with the old road surface - perhaps it was scratched or dirty. Or maybe scratched and dirty! Imagine that - a scratched and dirty road! It would definitely need replacing.

So the men come with their machines and their diggers and their steam rollers and they work their tarmac-gic and new road appears.

This brings an important question to mind. Do steam rollers still use steam in any way? The workings of large mechanical vehicles is not one of my specialist subjects (*) so I'm unable to say whether steam rollers got their name because they used to run on a steam engine in the old days or for some other reason. One I saw today looked like it was pouring water onto the hot tarmac and then rolling over it as the water turned to steam. Perhaps therefore a steam roller is more akin to a steam iron. After all, they do essentially the same job, just on a different scale (And on a different material. I don't recommend the old tar jacket routine).

Anyway. The cycle of road renewal continues.

(* Note: my specialist subjects are: 1. The role of Rasputin in 20th century conspiracy theories; 2. How to pleasure a lady using only bees and; 3. The noises an air hockey table makes in the flat above.)