THE battered roads of south Bucks finally took their toll on my car’s exhaust over the last week, as part of it gave up the ghost and clunked free from the rest of the chassis.

It’s not an enormous surprise – for years now we have been contending with a non-stop barrage of potholes on our roads. Like the Hydra serpent of Greek myth, sort out one crater and two more take its place.

Of course, it isn’t just the bone shaking cracks and crevices that cause the damage – it is the dreadful speedbumps that line so many roads now. Not that I particularly object to measures being in place to stopping moronic drivers using the likes of Kingsmead Road in Loudwater, Daws Hill Lane in High Wycombe and parts of Flackwell Heath as speedways.

It’s just that these crumbling bumps are so poorly maintained it is virtually impossible to take them smoothly most of the time. In fact, it frequently feels like our tyres are negotiating oversized cheese graters instead. Buckinghamshire County Council frequently provide updates on how much funding they are allocating to road repairs, which routes are being targeted for maintenance from week to week and how the work is being carried out.

The council has only limited funds these days, of course, and it is unreasonable to expect them to be able to wave a magic wand and fix everything, regardless of money and manpower. But this is a problem that is never going to go away unless it is addressed properly. Certainly some of the resurfacing work is being done sturdily enough to keep the holes at bay for a decent length of time. But we still, all too often, see the same old holes emerging from one year to the next.

There is a line in a great film called Glengarry Glen Ross (originally a stage play by the fine American playwright David Mamet) in which a cutthroat real estate salesman played by Al Pacino tells one of his targets that the worst thing he can confess about life is that all train carriages smell vaguely of sewage (although he uses stronger terms, as you can imagine) – and it gets so you don’t mind anymore.

Regardless of what that may say about Al’s shaky moral compass in that film, perhaps that is how drivers are coming to see Bucks. Our roads have been so grotty for so long that we have become numb to them.

The prospect of being able to drive along smooth and well maintained surfaces is now nothing more than a long-forgotten past that we don’t even deign to dream about anymore. Perhaps, then, that is the real reason why fewer people may be submitting claims to the council (if, indeed, that is the case).

Or it could simply be the fact that it must be so hard to prove that any single crater inflicted the killer blow. It is rarely one sole pothole that causes the crippling damage these days – instead it’s a steady barrage that takes its toll over a period of weeks, months or even years.

So it seems we drivers face not intense skirmishes on isolated stretches of our roads anymore, but instead a steady, county-wide war of pothole attrition that shows no sign of ending.