27 August 2007
Street-cleaning is rubbish
When I spent a few days in a small coastal town in Normandy last month, I was quite surprised – but delighted – to see that the beach was cleaned every morning. And I was astonished to discover that domestic rubbish was collected every day.
In this country the authorities seem to think that once a week is a bit excessive. It’s all part of the general tendency not to do anything that people actually want.
Living in the city of Norwich, I was delighted to hear of the council’s emphasis not long ago on cleaning up litter. But nothing much seemed to happen, so when a Green Party campaigner called on us, we mentioned the litter problem in our road. Now I have received a letter saying they took the matter up and found that there is a “litter pick” in our road regularly – or to be slightly more precise, every eight weeks. So once every two months our road is clean. If you come to see us, please choose your day carefully.
In addition to this exciting development, I can reveal that it’s “mechanically swept” every 16 weeks. Yes, that’s about three times a year.
I would like to know the name of the person who thinks this is remotely satisfactory. If the council can’t even keep our streets clean, what are we paying it for?
No doubt there will be those who think that I should go out and pick up the litter myself. Well, on occasion my wife and I do exactly that. Perhaps we should also service the street lighting, resurface the road (it certainly needs it), take all our rubbish down to the tip (where some of it will be rejected), charge our neighbours for parking and campaign to become a unitary authority.
Blindfold chess
Holding the British Chess Championships at Great Yarmouth was an iconoclastic masterstroke. I turned up for the last two days at Yarmouth College and was impressed almost as much by the facilities as I was by the variety of participants – from fashion-conscious teenage girls to the occasional smartly dressed but sockless grandmaster.
The excitement and beauty of chess is clearly getting through to a wide cross- section of society, even though certain parts of the media still greet it with that supercilious face they use when confronted by something much deeper than they are.
The only strange thing about the whole event was that there were no road signs to guide occasional visitors through the warren of streets to the college. I would have thought that if the horse-racing merits copious AA directions signs, an event of this magnitude certainly does. At the very least they could have effected a small change to those “For the Broads follow Yarmouth” signs so that they read “For the Boards follow Yarmouth”.
This is what is known in chess as a useful transposition.
Too much information, too little knowledge
That marvellous poet T S Eliot asked many good questions, and one of the best was: “Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
We have now reached a stage where we are presented with so much useless information that what we know disappears into a kind of background swamp, where it sinks. Here are three quite different examples.
The first – “This unit has been disconnected electrically for your safety” – appeared on a towel rail in a motel near Hull. Presumably it simply means that it deliberately doesn’t work, which makes you wonder why it’s there. The kettle didn’t work either.
The second is from an aircraft and must have been used untold thousands of times: “Your life vest is either under your seat or in the panel above your head.” Don’t they know which? Surely the last thing you want to be doing in an emergency is be looking for something that might be in one place or possibly another.
The third is quite simply not true: in fact it is almost the opposite of the truth, but I guess that the betting company that uses it must assume that if you say something often enough, you will create an assumption that it must be right.
“It matters more when there’s money on it,” they say. If we believe that, we might as well give up now.
Cakes and death in the country
Rural readers will be familiar with the strange and bizarre rites that are still practised in the wilder parts of Norfolk.
I was wandering around one such part (which I cannot name in case of reprisals or wicker man incidents) when I thought I had stumbled on one such ancient ceremony. There, attached to a post, was a weathered notice bearing the words “Mother’s Day Cake Tomb”.
What could it mean? Perhaps cake makers in this part of the world were hampered by poor local ingredients, and the tomb was where their cakes were consigned to die – rather like an elephants’ graveyard.
Unlikely, I decided. Much more probable that innocent, unsuspecting strangers were lured to a graveyard vault by a tempting cake and then subjected by local mothers to unspeakable experiences. I kept an eye open. It could happen, and I didn’t want to miss out.
In the end, however, after close examination of the notice, I was forced to the reluctant conclusion that it might have read originally “Mother’s Day Cake Tombola”. How weird is that?
It's still called propaganda, Al
Ernest Benn said that “politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy”.
I understand he was not talking about climate change, but it’s a pretty apt description of most politicians’ response to a phenomenon that has always been with us.
Al Gore, patron saint of global warming, says this month that “what used to be called propaganda now has a major role to play in shaping public opinion”.
Actually I still call it propaganda, and the more it pours forth, the more likely impressionable people are to vandalise 4x4s in Germany, disrupt innocent holidaymakers at airports and brainwash children. There’s a word for that too.