ON Tuesday, May 25, Crediton was taken over by the Invasion of the Traffids. A selection of anonymous black vans and cars took up battle lines at strategic positions all around the town.
They came in peace, though, no doubt mounting this expensive exercise in order to corroborate the census figures so painstakingly taken by members of the Crediton Traffic Action Group earlier this year.
Why, then, don't we trust them? It may have something to do with the fact that when CTAG figures were first sent to them they thought "this might have been exceptional".
So we did them all again and came up with even higher totals!
We await, with bated breath and not a little cynicism, to be told the outcome.
It is debatable, too, whether any figures taken were unsafe because of the traffic lights in Exeter Road.
It is impossible to say whether regular visitors to and from Crediton, who had previous experience of the usual chaos which traffic lights bring, were put off taking the Exeter Road route - or just put off coming.
In Exeter Road, though, there were no parked vans or cars. We were taken over by robots - sinister black boxes and cameras on poles.
It was probably thought safer than hanging around to be scraped by an HGV or choked by pollution.
No doubt all their data will now be lovingly loaded into the arms of their "sophisticated modelling software" and turned into "data and projection" as weapons to beat us down. We shall see.
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