Driving through the road widening works at junction ten, I noticed a horse being ridden down a muddy passageway that was about to become the hard shoulder.
It had not yet been tarmacked, but the diggers had cleared away the trees from the slice of heathland and it was being flattened, in readiness for surfacing works.
A woman with a determined look on her face was coaxing her mount along this clearing, next to the machinery and the workers in their Day-Glo outfits, the Portaloos and logging machines, the lorries taking vast piles of felled trees away, and the hundreds of cones dividing this stretch of cleared woodland from the existing dual carriageway.
One should never live in a county that sounds like an apology
A few days later, I was again driving home along the A3 where it interchanges with the M25 at Wisley when I noticed a group walk going along the same stretch of cleared land: half a dozen people with walking poles and backpacks, again wearing implacable expressions, as if to say: ‘These roadworks aren’t going to beat us! We’re going to enjoy the Surrey heathlands until the very second they disappear!’
It came to me at that moment that Surrey is the capital of denial.
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