There was a sense of pride in having a road with it’s own soul. The road came to our village and stopped, as if it knew where it belonged. It was, in the end, never destined to be any old dirt road. It knew, somehow, it was part of the community and as such was aware of it’s obligations. Of course we are talking about a road here, which might interpret these obligations in a wholly original and unexpected way from the norm. Who knows, in the end, what a road thinks, what empirical conclusions it might arrive at? Not much I would think, if you are a vast freeway, laid out in the pitiless sun and being thundered upon by all and sundry. But a leafy mile or two stretch with shade and a view down to the vineyards is a different bottle of holy water altogether. Who knows what changes occur in a road’s neural pathways as it ponders the heavens?
For about half it’s length the road is flattish and dodders here and there amongst the trees. That’s where most of us live and where the Dip is. It wasn’t always there. The Shire came and had a look at it, put it down to subsidence and went away. The same subsidence brought down enough trees so we could bypass this sudden depression (which was filling with water), and stockpile firewood.
Do you know what Horry Flint reckoned? Horry reckoned that a crow in Croatia might have flapped it’s wings and caused assorted bits of the Earth’s surface to subside internationally. 
He’s a long time boating man and understands these things. By a system of triangulation he says, you could work out to within a couple of metres where the first wing flaps occurred. It would be then an easy matter to find the spot in Croatia, buy that piece of land and forbid the practice of flapping in the vicinity. In this way we could avoid further subsidence at home and at the same time, raise land values in Europe. The alternative, to breed wingless varieties of crows would be, in the end, impractical. Besides, you’d be forever running over them in your car.
The trouble is, as Horry says, this works both ways. If we were, as a protective measure, to develop Croatian no-fly landholdings this might engender a reciprocal arrangement in our neck of the woods. Awkward international incidents might follow, brought about by (for instance) erecting your privy in the wrong spot. Next minute your new dunny is centre stage, besieged by hundreds of irate foreigners with little or no regard for your mixed vegetables.
What if overseas pranksters begin to breed, in secret, vast flocks of experimental hummingbirds and such like? You could be enjoying a glass of red, or an innocent bout of rumply-pumply, and next minute not only is your best shirt awash with Cab.Sav. but you are six feet underground as well! And how on earth, when your wife comes home and finds the Fire Brigade digging you out, are you going to explain the other woman?
Horry has, he tells me, more to say on this subject but as he’d finished washing his car he got in and drove away.