SWINDON’S road and path maintenance budget has almost halved since last year, according to the latest figures.

Of course, there will be those among you who have guessed this already.

Perhaps you were merrily trundling to a favourite supermarket, landmark or other destination of choice when the entire undercarriage of your vehicle was torn off and left in some dirty great hole in the highway.

Failing that, perhaps you were left fearing for another type of undercarriage altogether when a sudden bump threatened to ram a spring, driveshaft or shock absorber through the floorpan beneath your seat.

Or maybe your child has a new playmate, an eyeless, fanged and translucent little humanoid who emerged from a fathoms-deep void in the pavement as they strolled to school one spring morning.

The council says the cut, like so many others, is the direct result of reduced Whitehall grants and the ordering of local authorities to reduce their spending.

Personally, I see it as more of a ‘blue sky thinking’ opportunity. So what if some of our roads look like the sort of thoroughfare we associate with news footage of pick-up trucks with anti-aircraft guns on the back? Let’s embrace the situation instead of just moaning about it. There are opportunities aplenty here for people filled with entrepreneurial spirit. I thought of several in a few minutes flat, and I’m not even an entrepreneur.

If you’re a massage therapist, some of our roads could be a real time-saver when there’s a rush on and you have more prospective clients than time in which to give ‘em a good pummelling.

All you need to do is buy an old Transit van for a couple of hundred quid, bolt five or six therapy tables in the back, strap in some patients and drive up and down the street for a couple of hours. You could do about 30mph for ordinary massages and about 50 for really difficult cases.

Mind you, you might want to alert the police in advance, so nobody watching mistakes you for a member of the CIA or our security services transporting people between torture appointments. But then again, if a member of the public does accuse you of being a member of the CIA or the security services, you could always just deny your own existence or threaten to send their granny to Guantanamo.

There are also opportunities for all of you mountaineers out there. Just because the Link Centre is ditching its climbing wall in favour of a trampoline park, there’s no need to venture out of town with your crampons, carabiners and whatnot.

Instead of climbing up and down a wall in a leisure centre, you could simply climb into and out of some enormous pothole in a suburban neighbourhood. You should watch out for those translucent humanoids I mentioned earlier, though, and so should any cavers tempted to explore the caverns.

(Incidentally, if any cavers stage an expedition, perhaps they could draw some maps of where all the underground pipes, cables and things are, so they won’t be hacked through every time some utility company digs a hole. Might as well kill two birds with one stone, eh?) The council itself might want to get in on the act by inviting Monster Truck promoters over from the States to stage a series of tournaments. The revenues could be used to offset the cost of legal settlements to ordinary motorists with damaged vehicles.

Failing that, the council could just send those bills to Whitehall, whose creatures are the true authors of this issue.