Tour de Essex

I'm impressed by the effort they're putting into the Tour de France in Yorkshire, all those multi-coloured dyed sheep, the yards and yards of bunting, and humorous yellow bicycles and upended pairs of legs inserted into hedges and manure heaps.  They're really taking it seriously, though the Systems Administrator, who likes the Tour de France as a sporting spectacle and read up on the Yorkshire leg, says that grafting the official Tour terminology (en Francais, naturelment) on to the northern English place names has led to some incongruous pairings, as the Cote de Buttertubs is followed by the Cote de Grinton Moor.

It's more than we seem to be doing in Essex, where the only publicity I've seen is a warning on the electronic traffic information signs around Colchester's inner ring road that the Tour de France visits Essex on Monday 7 July.  At least it makes a change from exhortations not to drink and drive, not to drive when tired, to watch mirrors for bikes, or (for the first half of 2012) to prepare for the Olympics.  I presume the original purpose of the signs was to give advance notice of major delays on the main roads in the region, to allow us to alter our plans if we wanted to instead of charging on to the A12 or M11 to join the ten mile line of stationary traffic, but they don't usually, even when the radio traffic updates are warning of trouble on the region's roads.  Probably there is no budget to pay anybody to put real time information in.

The SA, who is better informed than I am about the Essex leg as well, says that it is going through Finchingfield.  That's a sensible place to send it.  Finchingfield is a quite ridiculously pretty village, and will give a far more benign impression of Essex to any potential tourists watching on the telly than if the Tour had gone through (with no disrespect to the inhabitants) Harlow or Thundersley.  As far as I can remember there isn't room in Finchingfield for more than a few dozen spectators to park, but never mind.

I did read on the BBC website back in April that an artist had been commissioned to come up with ideas for artworks to enliven Essex's roads during the Tour.  She suggested the three seaxes which are the county symbol done in the colours of the Tour jerseys, yellow, green, and white with red spots.  The council said that they loved the idea but it was too colourful and the seaxes would have to be in red.  The artist's reaction was that she was not really interested in painting the county logo on the roads.  A quick Google search has revealed that someone is also mowing some bicycle shapes into the North Weald Airfield with the help of some Writtle students, which will be visible from the air, but I had to look that up.  It wasn't in the Essex County Standard, when I browsed through it in the normal way, or the East Anglian Daily Times (though that should more accurately be named the Suffolk Daily Times.  It's a good paper, but very Suffolk oriented).

So maybe they're getting more excited about the Essex leg of the Tour down in Chelmsford and Epping, but it hasn't made it on to Sky News like Yorkshire has.  In north east Essex I'm afraid it is largely passing us by.