JOHN DODD North of up there...Potholes driving you potty? Learn to love them in austere times

Mine is much more philosophic. Potholes are here to stay so perhaps we should learn to love them, even commercially exploit their amazing potential. Here comes ‘Adopt-a-Pot’.

I mean potholes don’t want to be potholes any more than you want to end up in them.

So perhaps the first thing we should do is to try to love them. Potholes are very lonely souls, hollow you might even say, so the first step is to give them the names that fit the locality in which they find themselves.

Now I think you should get the right to name your own pothole after you’ve hit it three times in a sort of ‘I-bags-it’ approach everyone understands.

I always think George is a good name for a pothole in those posh avenues leading into Chichester with the occasional Lutyens house snoozing behind beech hedges.

In the kinds of streets filled with honest, hard-working, artisans, I suggest Vincent has the ring of being a decent reliable sort of pothole, a bit edgy perhaps, but even-handed in its attitude towards Ford Fiestas and Audi TTSs.

Out in the villages here where David Cameron is trying to unleash his ‘big’ society, I think Eric is the kind of community name for a yo-ho-ho country bump-and-bang pothole.

But of course, in these delicate times, we must be careful about the new gender laws that give everyone a fair chance. All hurricanes used to have female names until the 1970s feminists got at them. Now you get hurricanes called Bert.

And what about those potholes which straddle the middle of the road? Well, Elton seems a nice kind of name for them or, for a really squelchy one, what about Sal?

If we are naming potholes, then it’s only logical we should spend some time counselling them and inserting little roadside wooden stakes with their names on. If enough people did this, it would herald a new era of pothole freaks taking pictures of their favourites and beaming across the world on their latest ‘apps’.

In no time at all weekend office ‘treasure hunts’, would be replaced by ‘Pothole Peepers’, gangs of IT girls trying to get splashed by giant waves from juggernauts hitting potholes on the A259.

Someone somewhere would establish a Pothole Dating site where pothole groupies can chat and ones from Wagga Wagga can fall in love with Tweeting twits in The Witterings.

We could have Pothole-of-the-Week contests and everyone could add a Pothole Memoir to their Facebook page. ‘I (symbol of heart) my Pothole’ stickers would appear in car windscreens.

There could be pothole tours of North Wales. Shoppers in ASDA could stop and hold up their iPods and say, ‘Just look at this one we found in Ynyntrisyangyn!’

But we’d better be quick about it. An economic recovery would mean it’s all gone down the plughole.