On holiday recently, we travelled to Scotland and back with my brother and sister in law to visit their two sons, one who lives in Cowdenbeath and the other in South Shields on the way back to York, where we were staying for our holiday. The journey to Scotland involved crossing the recently opened Queensferry Bridge spanning the Firth of Forth, the third iconic bridge cossing the expanse of water. The bridge is a real feat of engineering costing a staggering 1.3 billion pounds to build and maybe the experience got me thinking about bridges.
I think that the two bridges pictured above are quite a stark contrast of the options of crossing water. The first image is of a bridge in East Yorkshire and as I cross it, I always imagine the planning meeting where they decided on the design. Maybe one bright spark suggested bolting three girders together and repeating the process four times over to keep cost low “let’s not waste brass” a typical Yorkshireman might have said. With all the options open to them they decided to creatively paint it battleship grey! The second image is the bridge over the river Ure at Middleham in wensleydale, originally a gift to the people of Wensleydale by a benevolent Northumbrian and errected in 1830 and rebuilt soon afterwards when a stampeding heard of cattle badly damaged it.
Both structures serve exactly the same purpose, they transport people across the water, one is basic and practical, lowest mainenance I guess, the other is ornate, pretty, splendid, impressive, the best that money can buy, I guess. As I thought about those two bridges, I thought about how often in life, I do the least that I can to achieve results, scrape by, by the seat of my pants so to speak and maybe there is nothing wrong with that, the people of East Yorshire still get from one side of the river the same way that the people of North Yorshire do on the Middleham bridge, and maybe there is a time for saving money and doing the least we can get away with.
As a part of the Sermon on the mount in Matthew chapter 5 Jesus tells his listeners that if somebody forces you to walk a mile, walk two instead. He is talking in this chapter about loving others, particulalry those who persecute you, but I think that it is a good moral for life. Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield is credited with penning the words “if something is worth doing, it is worth doing well” and maybe my three bridges are a poigniant reminder of this valuable lesson.