A fishy tale

Sometimes you come across something that you couldn’t make up. This is one such time.

In deepest darkest Derbyshire they are currently spending vast sums of taxpayer largesse to widen the Via to reduce congestion. No doubt the driving population there can’t wait to get to where they are going without snarl ups and hold ups. 

No doubt too the roadworks are adding to aforesaid snarl ups and hold ups. And everyone will be pleased to see the back of the diggers, cones and men standing around leaning on spades that typify building works on the viae, no matter in what part of the country you live. It is the price we pay for a smooth travel experience by chariot.

However it now appears that this multi-million pound socially useful scheme has been held up because the navvies have found….wait for it….a colony of…….are you sitting down?......crayfish. Well admittedly White Clawed Crayfish as if that makes a difference.

And because of this all digging and standing-around-leaning-on-shovels work has ground to a halt while the eco-mentalists celebrate this find as if we had just opened Tutankhamun's tomb.

To the drivers of Derbyshire, Cicero feels your pain. To everyone else, you really could not make this sort of stuff up.

It surely is not beyond the wit of man, who after all can send rockets into outer space to arrange in short order the technology to lift and transfer said fish from the roadworks to some other stretch of H2O nearby. It is not as if Derbyshire is short of H20.

And nor is the technology all that complex. When Cicero was a lad he used regularly to transfer goldfish from the fair to home. And some were even still managing to swim around by the time home was reached.

Cicero estimates that this could be done in half an hour at the outside. The cost impact would be minimal.

But once again we are in thrall of the eco- and enviro-mentalists who no doubt believe that in their warped logic the destruction of this crayfish habitat will no doubt lead to more wonky weather and the demise of the polar bear.

Cicero often does wonder who and when these greenie sandal wearing bearded vegans (Bill Oddie is pictured in the article Cicero read on this narrowly averted ecological disaster which proves the point) were given the power and responsibility to hold up, delay and even postpone anything they like just because they think a tadpole is going to be crushed. Did you vote for these people? No. Neither did Cicero. So where does this power without accountability come from?

So bag up the fish and let’s get back to work and get the via finished. Can you imagine Thomas Telford or John Macadam or Isambard Kingdom Brunel stopping work because there was a little fishie in the way? Mercifully they didn’t.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.