23 September 2002
Fine time for coypu, newts and clowns
![[Cartoon] Elephant carrying clown](/articles/images/020923Elephant.jpg)
The discoveries of Norfolk explorer Richard “Volcano” Meek are getting more and more bizarre. During his excavations near Mount Beeston in North Norfolk, he has uncovered the remains of a clown, complete with red nose and baggy trousers.
Since this was adjacent to the Runton Elephant, his first thought was that it was part of an early Roman circus, but he revised this opinion after a dating check.
He then wondered whether it had escaped from a nearby local authority, but a quick inquiry revealed that none of theirs were missing.
At this point I was able to help by pointing out that although many people thought local authorities were run by clowns, my own extensive research over several years had found that they were staffed largely by coypu and great crested newts.
Since the Battle of Wymondham in the mid-1990s, the newts have been running an underground campaign designed to eliminate anything recognisably human from our way of life. By infiltrating councils, they have been able to introduce distortion and disruption of normal behaviour, usually by means of huge loads of unnecessary paperwork.
Their allies, the coypu, aid and abet them by creating confusion everywhere. This is not difficult for them, since they are both extinct and not extinct, and it has helped especially in the development of traffic policies, which are inevitably contradictory.
In the Norwich area, for example, you might think they want to discourage cars. If so, obstacles like the projected closure of Tombland and the end of easy on-street parking might make some sort of sense.
But at the same time we have the encouragement of congestion and pollution in the positioning of the Castle Mall car parks and the Big W; the increase last week in park-and-ride fees; the ongoing Grapes Hill roundabout disaster; and the strange case of Silver Road.
Silver Road used to be a fairly quiet road, issuing on to the inner link road at a spot where you could only reasonably turn left. Instead of rationalising this by inserting a no-right-turn sign for the benefit of the occasional idiot, the coypu thought it would be a wonderful idea to introduce what my mother-in-law – a wise woman – calls “one of those silly little roundabouts”.
This encouraged far more drivers to use Silver Road, because they could now turn right and enter the city. Result: extensive hold-ups on the inner link road and complaint after complaint from Silver Road residents about traffic. No doubt this will eventually be solved by introducing speed humps.
So we have expense, irritation, congestion and pollution, when all that was needed was one signpost.
Another triumph for the coypu. Bring back the clowns.
Not another boring piece about climate change
The real danger of global warming is not in its possible effects, but in its power to distract us from what we could be doing to help needy people.
Sceptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg calculates that if the Kyoto Protocol were brought fully into effect, it would delay the effects of warming by only six years over a century.
But for the same amount of money that would be spent in just one year on implementing the Protocol, we could provide the entire world with clean drinking water and sanitation – something that would avoid two million deaths and prevent half a billion people becoming seriously ill every year.
But you can judge how interested politicians and many environmental activists are in doing effective good when you realise that the 60,000 delegates at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg enjoyed four- or five-star accommodation, plus tons of lobster, oysters, filet mignon, salmon, caviar, pate de fois gras, champagne, fine wines and mineral water.
And hundreds of trees were cleared out to accommodate delegates’ limousines.
Meanwhile, an estimated 60 African children a day die from contaminated water, and poverty in Africa has increased 35pc since the last such summit, 10 years ago.
As Noam Chomsky so eloquently put it on another occasion, “you need something to frighten people with, to prevent them from paying attention to what’s really happening to them”.
Shock plans to smarten East Anglia revealed
Following suggestions that Cromer’s crab boats are too scruffy for such an up-market resort, it has been revealed that plans are afoot to smarten up other parts of East Anglia for the benefit of discriminating holidaymakers.
Consultants Houseago Inc have been called in to look closely at beaches, broads and peripheral paraphernalia. Preliminary findings are that much of Blakeney is pointless, and Holkham beach is “nothing more than empty space, suitable only as a film set”.
Wroxham, like Cromer, would be better off without boats, says the report, which however praises it for its shopping facilities. Yarmouth is lauded for having “everything you could possibly want”, but Houseago Inc suggests moving the sea out a bit to create more space. Southwold is “beyond hope”.
Meanwhile the Government is intending to set targets for resorts, followed by examinations. A spokesman said: “These will be equivalent to A-levels. At first. Later we expect to downgrade them.”
Do not read wrong way round: start other end
Translating directions is always a problem, but when you’re dealing with a product that combines a compass with improving the smell in a car – as shown me by a friend recently – the difficulties tend to multiply.
Users are told that “the reek in the car can be changed to the natural fresh fragrance”, which is encouraging, and “you can stick it on everywhere you want in the car after sticking on two-faced tape”.
So far, so good, maybe. But there is a word of caution: “Don’t use other way than right uses” and “Keep out from the children”. Presumably just in case you had been intending to insert one wrongly in a child.
But I feel the prize must be awarded to one sentence that is in perfectly good English: “Please assemble product the other way round.”
Probably best not to think about that at all.
Owners follow dogs' lead
Most recreational areas in our fair neck of the woods are sadly soiled to some degree by what dogs leave behind. But Mattishall appears to have an additional problem.
According to the parish council minutes – to which my attention was directed by a correspondent – “queries were raised re the length of footpath adjacent to the infants school, and its being fouled by one or more dog owners”.
I’ve heard of owners growing to look like their pets, but apparently the pooches’ behaviour is catching too.