31 December 2001
Questions that have no answer
As a change from my usual festive quiz, I have put together a special New Year series of questions that have no answers at all. This is because, sadly, I have not been able to discover the answers, and if readers can help me, I would be grateful.
The basic question is why? The last question, in the spirit of the New Year, is more of a suggestion.
1)Why are so few people employed picking up litter? It is a fairly easy job, satisfying and one which I am sure taxpayers would put higher on their list of priorities than, say, parking attendants.
2)Why is one of the two main doors at Norwich rail station always broken? One side was shut for months; suddenly it was open, and the other one was inaccessible. Is it the wrong kind of hinge, or leaves in the lock?
3)Why do supermarkets place screw-topped light bulbs next to bayonet-topped ones, when nobody that I know uses screw-topped ones, and thousands of people buy the wrong ones by mistake because they didn’t know there was any other sort?
4)Why does my computer tell me that it is “writing unsaved data to disk” when I attempt to switch it off? If I wanted to write data to disk, I would have saved it. Is this something to do with the Data Protection Act?
5)Why does an organisation set up to promote the widespread use of speed cameras call itself the Norfolk Casualty Reduction Partnership? Why not the Speed Camera Promotion Partnership, or is that a little bit too honest?
6)Why does it take so long to complete road works? Does it have something to do with cone storage?
7)Why bother with window envelopes? By the time you have positioned the address so that it shows through the window, you will have creased the letter out of recognition and put it in the wrong way round twice.
8)Why are some town or village road signs absolutely huge, and some small and discreet? Does it reflect the ego of the parish council?
9)Why can’t anyone – the Strategic Rail Authority, for instance – accept that not changing something is often the best idea?
10)Why don’t pedestrians use cycle paths? After all, cyclists ride on the pavement, and cycle paths are almost always empty.
Time-wasting of fairly early man
I am not sure exactly how staggered I was to be told that people may have arrived in Norfolk up to 200,000 years earlier than was believed.
Clearly, it would have been earlier if there had been a decent bus service, but I was probably more staggered to be informed that early man, astonishingly, experienced warm summers and cold winters.
Artefacts unearthed on the coast reveal that the most popular job at the time was warning of global warming or, alternatively, an Ice Age, and there were periodic pleas for people to stop using flint axes in order to preserve the environment. This theory is backed up by the extraordinary number of flint axes found periodically, and by the remains of computer models in operation at the time.
Obviously, if early humans arrived in Britain 700,000 years ago instead of 500,000, as was formerly believed by some people, it raises profound questions, such as why there was such a delay in setting up a usable transport infrastructure and a second footbridge over the Wensum, not to mention dualling of the Acle Straight.
Early man was unavailable for comment late last night.
Car-free day every week not such a bad idea
Sometimes, when I walk through Norwich city centre, I think how nice it would be if we could abolish motor vehicles. Then I recover, and after a while I feel better.
A question, however, lingers on. If we are so keen on making the motorist extinct, why don't we have a day a week when the city centre is kept clear of cars? A day when we can wander where we will and enjoy the unpolluted atmosphere of our fine and ancient city.
Nice idea? Well, let’s do it. We could call it Sunday.
Funnily enough, Sunday used to be fairly car-free in the city until we switched from worshipping God to worshipping shopping instead. Now we go hurtling around seven days a week in the hope that somehow, somewhere, we will stumble on satisfaction.
Off and on, we might realise that a day of rest is actually quite a good idea, but no sooner do we suspect this than the politicians and the businessmen persuade us that we have to go on buying.
So we are lured into this race to nowhere – nowhere in this case being a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week city. If we wonder what it will look like we have only to glance at Prince of Wales Road, described recently as a powder keg and the most dangerous street in the county. It may not yet be seven-day, but it is close to 24 hours a day at the weekends – and as close to soulless as makes no difference.
A day off from all this is not something to be discarded lightly.
Relief as 'lost' buses turn up somewhere
Last time I was astonished that a reported one in 10 buses in Norfolk failed to reach its destination, and wondered what happened to them. Happily, things are not as bad as I feared. In fact what should have been reported is that the destination board on one in 10 buses shows the wrong destination – which may not be totally reassuring, but at least they’re somewhere, despite what many passengers say.
Pondhenge Pantomime
![[Artwork] Pantomime](/articles/images/011231Panto.jpg)
Problems arose at the Pondhenge Pantomime when Henry (Fred) “Shrimp” Houseago, who was passing, said he had discovered a frog that could turn into a prince at will, and they could have it for a firkin of ale.
Len “Kissme” Hardy, who was playing the fairy in the unexplained absence of Dorothea Goodchild - and who is renowned for believing almost anything - put on his wellingtons to extract the frog from a Pondhenge tributary, which was flooded because of global warming the previous Thursday.
However, after depositing the frog on stage, he forgot to take his boots off, and a last-minute attempt to iron his fairy dress also proved counter-productive when he was hauled on stage for the rehearsal.
He was being lowered on to the stage, in full view of the local primary school, when he realised he had a wand in one hand and an iron in the other. Someone yelled “Behind you!”, and the primary school shouted back “Oh yes he does”, because that was what they had learned. At which point Len began to have doubts about the whole thing...