27 August 2007

on 27 August 2007 at 05:00

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.

13 August 2007

on 13 August 2007 at 05:00

Heavy lorries biggest hazard on the roads

What is the single biggest hazard that motorists face? The never-ending roadworks? The constant diversion signs? Boredom caused by the streams of fatalistic, slow- moving traffic crawling along perfectly serviceable major roads, apparently under the illusion that this is all they can do?

I am a bit suspicious about the roadworks, largely because they always take so long, so few people seem to be working on them, and the coned-off sections tend to be three times as lengthy as they need be.

Is there a conspiracy to make use of our roads so unpleasant that we will avoid using them as much as possible?

Ridiculous, you say. Still, one of the inspectors to the Secretary of State for Transport recently recommended refusal of the planned Thames Gateway Bridge because “it might encourage people to travel”. Perhaps this is an example of a more general principle at the heart of Whitehall.

The diversion signs are more of a mystery. They are everywhere, and proliferate even on the rare occasions when you are not being diverted. I can only assume that someone made far too many of them, and they were sold to highways authorities on the cheap.

The other week my esteemed colleague Charles Roberts, now resident in France, pinpointed the dangers caused by heavy lorries tailgating him aggressively when he was going as fast as he was legally allowed to.

This is a problem here too, largely because the speed limits are hopelessly out of sync with what is safe. Here the tailgater is less likely to be a heavy lorry than one of those oversized vans that know exactly where the speed cameras are.

There is a different problem with heavy lorries in this country, and after driving over 500 miles in a couple of days last week it is my nomination for Single Biggest Hazard.

It manifests itself most often on dual carriageways. A heavy lorry comes up behind another HGV, which is going very slightly more slowly. It signals and pulls into the right-hand lane. This is done regardless of what may be coming up behind in the faster lane, how dangerous the manoeuvre is and – critically – how long it is going to take to overtake the other HGV.

When I was taught to drive, and for many years afterwards, we did not overtake if someone coming up behind was moving faster than us. It was not only dangerous but inconsiderate.

The result of the dramatic change of attitude is that the right-hand lane of dual carriageways becomes packed with vehicles that would like to go faster but are blocked by an HGV struggling to overtake another HGV.

The lorry being overtaken could slow slightly to ease progress, but I have never seen it happen. Mile after mile they drive along, blocking both lanes until one manages to edge just enough in front to go back into the slower lane – if you’re lucky.

To make matters worse, because a queue develops in the outside lane, waiting to overtake, other drivers undertake and then try to slip into the outside lane, causing further delays.

As well as being extremely irritating and thus provoking accidents through frustration, this whole procedure is highly dangerous of itself. But why should HGV drivers worry? If they collide with a car, they’re not very likely to get hurt.

I apologise to considerate lorry drivers if this upsets them. But there seem to be fewer and fewer of them about. The defining mark today is selfishness – and rank bad driving. If we were serious about road safety, this sort of behaviour would be top of the list for elimination. But we’re not, are we?

Ambitious blackboard scheme to revitalise resort

Following the fiasco over Great Yarmouth’s giant hi-tech street screens, described as a “catalogue of errors” by councillor Trevor Wainwright and in more graphic terms by many other people, it is believed that the town is going for something even more ambitious.

A secret working party is working secretly on a plan to install large blackboards in place of the screens. This will enable important messages to citizens and visitors to be chalked up on a regular basis by dedicated blackboard operatives, as they would be known.

Len “Kissme” Hardy, a consultant, said this would avoid all the problems inherent in anything hi-tech. There would be no batteries needed, and they were going to be using state-of-the-art chalk that was eco-friendly and virtually carbon-neutral.

Asked if there might be difficulties for the blackboard operatives in reaching the screens, Mr Hardy said they also had the latest ladders, although there were obviously health and safety issues. “Of course we won’t be able to use them in the rain,” he added. “But I don’t see that as a problem. We will have insurance.”

Mr Hardy said the real attraction of the scheme, apart from its simplicity, was the fact that it could be set up in such a way that no-one would be able to find out who was responsible if it went wrong. “Of course, that’s been done before,” he said. “But it’s tried and tested. You have my personal guarantee.”

Corporation denies involvement in warehouse shock horror

A spokesman for Houseago Inc, the world-famous Norfolk diversification corporation, said last night that the discovery near Erpingham of warehouses full of suitcases packed with holiday wear and sun cream were “nothing to do with us”.

He admitted that while it was true that millions of items of luggage went missing from airlines every year, there was no connection between that and the lucrative secondhand clothes operation recently included in the Houseago portfolio.

“We have our own suppliers,” he claimed. “Some of the items are very high quality – almost new. We’re also moving into making and distributing our own sun protection lines, though our supply line on that is a bit shaky at the moment. But our sealable clear plastic bags go down very well.”

Investigation into ownership of the Erpingham warehouses is planned, but has not taken off yet.