Terry Sarten: The curse of Cone Man the Barbarian

UNDER THREAT: The traditional NZ way of life is being undermined by the orange and white invaders.

WE HAVE just spent the past three days travelling by car around a particular corner of Europe. A friend was driving. The whole notion of navigating on the 'wrong' side of the road is too scary to contemplate, especially at speed on the Autobahn.

From our base in the south of Germany we have been in Switzerland, France and around the hills and valleys of the Black Forest and we have not seen a single road cone. We did see road workers and tractors mowing the road side but these where not heralded by a long string of road cones that slowed traffic to a crawl or directed cars onto diversions.

This seemed so strange in comparison with our frequent trips to Palmerston North and to Wellington where every few kilometres there is a sudden flourish of road cones. Sometimes these do indicate the potential for activity such as repair or construction but in many locations their presence is incomprehensible.

There may be hundreds of them marking out a stretch of highway with no discernible reason. They are just there with no workman in sight, filling some obscure function that defies ready identification. If the purpose is to slow traffic to a crawl, then this is mission accomplished. If the purpose is to fill the coffers of the companies that make road cones then investing in a road cone manufacturing company would be a wise move.

The question is that if large swathes of heavily used European highways can exist without road cones then so can NZ. It may be that Europe has already passed through the cone-alisation period and have now reached the post-cone-lisation stage while we in NZ are still being cone-alised by the ever increasing number of orange and white striped invaders.

This poses a greater threat to our national wellbeing than all the handwringing about whether foreigners are buying the houses and farms. These road cones are undermining our traditional way of life. They divert us from spending time with our families. They make many of us late for work which impacts on the economy. They threaten the very fabric of society with the way they impose their culture and beliefs on the population. There was a time, pre-cone-alisation when NZers could drive to the next city without hindrance or impediment from road cones. Now they obstruct the route, insisting we follow their directions, forcing us to adopt their culture and their beliefs in the sanctity of the merging lane, the closed shoulder, the change in road layout and of course the guarding of non-existed road works.

A two kilometre line, consisting of as many as a thousand road cones, is an ominous sign of how we have been too willing to accept this silent invasion of our land. It appears that European countries, having lived through centuries of invasions by foreign forces have been quicker to understand the threat and refused to let road cones proliferate.

I have a few gigs to play while I am here in Germany. They are all at lovely small venues with the first being this Saturday night, so taking into account the time difference, I will be standing on a stage with guitar in hand around about the time you are sitting down to read this column with your morning coffee.

-Terry Sarten is a Whanganui-based musician, writer and satirista - feedback: tgs@inspire.net.nz