Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Road markings continued
The road marking team have now moved to Howell Hill. That is to say, a number of cars, vans and lorries plus an appropriate number of road marking engineers were there yesterday, busily installing cones and noisily grinding out white lines so that they could paint them again. Today, maintaining the traditions of those long-lost council chaps whose jobs they have taken, they were firmly esconced in their vehicles, doing nothing. Given the state of the weather they had probably been so employed for some time. I forgot to check whether they were smoking in their workplaces.
They are clearly in for the long haul. So those happy souls being transferred from the wheelie bin inspectorate to the road marking inspectorate had better be given permanent transfer terms, rather than detached duty terms.
Perhaps one could make some kind of an Olympic sport out of it, or at least a competition. Which country has the most imaginative road markings? Marks for quantity, quality, humour, colour and all the rest of it. We could take real pride in that, in addition to having the finest golf courses, we also had the finest road markings. What a splendid, more or less harmless, way to waste time and resources and to find employment for all those graduates from interesting universities who might otherwise be flipping burgers, an activity entirely inappropriate to their graduate status. Would this be a better sport than synchronised diving? On which sport, I was puzzled to see that the English mens' team (or perhaps just one of the teams. Perhaps this sport has lots of events) consisted of a 15 year old and a 25 year old. I find it hard to imagine two people of such disparate age, working so hard at such close quarters. I would have thought that they would have got on each others nerves after a bit. Big time.
On return from Howell Hill, finally finished reading 'Jesting Pilate' by Aldous Huxley. A good read, which has worn well in the 80 odd years since it was written and which is well up to the various puffs printed on the back cover. This morning, by way of example, I discover many of the plants in 'Brave New World' come from seeds germinated in the California of the hectic twenties. To be found in the rhapsody in five movements on Los Angeles.
Which, demonstrating his expensive Eton education, includes the couplet: 'nunc uterum vitiat quae vult formosa videri/Raraque, in hoc aevo est quae velit esse parens'. My own rather less expensive education not being up to this, I ask Mr G. It turns out to be a well known quote from Ovid to do with abortion and which he (Mr G that is) translates from the Spanish as: 'Now corrupts your belly you want to be beautiful, and is rare in this era, which wants to become a mother'. So it is good of Mr G to offer this translation service, but, sadly, I am not any the wiser as to what the quote means. Perusal of my mini-Lewis confirms that Mr G has got the right words. Maybe the sense is: '... and now the belly which most want svelte is swelling. Rare indeed it is, in these days, to want to become a mother ...'. Contributions, as ever, welcome.
I imagine that the Aldous H breed is more or less extinct. Can we do better than Clive James or Christopher Hitchens? Do we have room or time for such exquisitely civilised people?
Although I sometimes wonder how civilised he was at close quarters. His books include all kinds of rum types, good parts of which look to be drawn from himself. Or is it rather, as someone put it, that he expresses all the nasty bits of himself into his books so that he did not have to express them in real life. Would one like someone better who did not dump all his garbage in the public domain? And odd (to me at any rate) that he and his wife were very close to D H Lawrence and his wife, in the last years of DHL's life. From a distance they seem very differant - and DHL, unlike AH who had manners, could be very difficult.
They are clearly in for the long haul. So those happy souls being transferred from the wheelie bin inspectorate to the road marking inspectorate had better be given permanent transfer terms, rather than detached duty terms.
Perhaps one could make some kind of an Olympic sport out of it, or at least a competition. Which country has the most imaginative road markings? Marks for quantity, quality, humour, colour and all the rest of it. We could take real pride in that, in addition to having the finest golf courses, we also had the finest road markings. What a splendid, more or less harmless, way to waste time and resources and to find employment for all those graduates from interesting universities who might otherwise be flipping burgers, an activity entirely inappropriate to their graduate status. Would this be a better sport than synchronised diving? On which sport, I was puzzled to see that the English mens' team (or perhaps just one of the teams. Perhaps this sport has lots of events) consisted of a 15 year old and a 25 year old. I find it hard to imagine two people of such disparate age, working so hard at such close quarters. I would have thought that they would have got on each others nerves after a bit. Big time.
On return from Howell Hill, finally finished reading 'Jesting Pilate' by Aldous Huxley. A good read, which has worn well in the 80 odd years since it was written and which is well up to the various puffs printed on the back cover. This morning, by way of example, I discover many of the plants in 'Brave New World' come from seeds germinated in the California of the hectic twenties. To be found in the rhapsody in five movements on Los Angeles.
Which, demonstrating his expensive Eton education, includes the couplet: 'nunc uterum vitiat quae vult formosa videri/Raraque, in hoc aevo est quae velit esse parens'. My own rather less expensive education not being up to this, I ask Mr G. It turns out to be a well known quote from Ovid to do with abortion and which he (Mr G that is) translates from the Spanish as: 'Now corrupts your belly you want to be beautiful, and is rare in this era, which wants to become a mother'. So it is good of Mr G to offer this translation service, but, sadly, I am not any the wiser as to what the quote means. Perusal of my mini-Lewis confirms that Mr G has got the right words. Maybe the sense is: '... and now the belly which most want svelte is swelling. Rare indeed it is, in these days, to want to become a mother ...'. Contributions, as ever, welcome.
I imagine that the Aldous H breed is more or less extinct. Can we do better than Clive James or Christopher Hitchens? Do we have room or time for such exquisitely civilised people?
Although I sometimes wonder how civilised he was at close quarters. His books include all kinds of rum types, good parts of which look to be drawn from himself. Or is it rather, as someone put it, that he expresses all the nasty bits of himself into his books so that he did not have to express them in real life. Would one like someone better who did not dump all his garbage in the public domain? And odd (to me at any rate) that he and his wife were very close to D H Lawrence and his wife, in the last years of DHL's life. From a distance they seem very differant - and DHL, unlike AH who had manners, could be very difficult.
# posted by Jim @ 8:24 AM 
