NOT so long ago if you’d asked me what a sinkhole was I would have stared at you blankly.

Yet now the term seems to have entered the public consciousness.

Given the number of sinkholes hitting the headlines you could be forgiven for thinking the world was collapsing in on itself, a portent of Dante’s Descent Into Hell.

A few weeks ago a gaping cavern opened up on Mancunian Way in Manchester. Scarily, this vast hole appeared without warning (but then I guess that’s the nature of sinkholes: they give no advance notice).

Measuring around 15 feet across and 40 feet deep, the pit opened up after the pavement began to crumble, bringing chaos to city centre traffic. The authorities said it followed heavy rainfall in Manchester (not sure that’s unusual) and was the result of a culvert of water eroding underneath the road.

And this past week saw another similar incident, albeit on a smaller scale. A road collapsed at the junction of Whitworth Street and Oxford Road again in the centre of Manchester. It makes you wonder about the state of Manchester’s roads.

What’s going on? I’ve been trying to think whether these things happened when I was a kid. And I can’t remember anything like it. It could be that they happen all the time but are topical right now, of course.

The Mancunian Way sinkhole generated media headlines all over the world, with pictures and videos of the gaping hole.

Sinkholes seem to be the new natural disaster fascinating users of social media.

Some amazing images emerged recently, too, when a 20-ft deep hole opened up near a children’s play area in West Cumbria.

Can you imagine such a cavern appearing in the middle of your lawn? Well, that’s exactly what happened in Kent last year. Engineers told homeowner Gretel Davidson the 17-ft deep hole was an ‘act of God’, which seems an inadequate explanation, a bit like the same engineer describing a bridge as a ‘stony, crossing thing over the river’.

And I was fascinated by a TV documentary – called something like ‘Blow Me, Where Did That Big Hole Come From?’ – that outlined just how common sinkholes are in America. In one particularly upsetting sequence, a man told how he watched his brother plummet to his death in an avalanche of rubble and soil as the ground underneath his home opened up.

There was also CCTV footage of a hole opening up under the feet of a woman as she walked along the pavement.

With that happy thought, I’ll bid you adieu.

Mind how you go.