Monday, December 15, 2008
Signage
I have been moved to moan about the quantity of signage on our roads before. Today, following a round trip to Tunbridge Wells, I am moved to moan about the quality. I have decided that it is not just me. Rather, that whoever it is who decides where to put signs saying things like 'turn left for Epsom' is not always very good at it. I grant that getting it right at a complicated junction is not easy - but getting it right they are not. The most common failing seems to be to put up such a sign where it does not mean the first on the left. More by way of an early warning. Another tricky area is where you have two exits on the left, one after the other. I often find it hard to know when one is supposed to be pulling over for the second one. The eastbound exit from the M3 onto the M25 is a case in point, with the M25 anti-clockwise exit immediately following the M25 clockwise exit.
I suppose one of the troubles is that a proper diagram of a junction on a road sign is going to be too much to take in as one zooms past. So they have to settle for some simplification. Perhaps there are some simple conventions which, if stuck to and known by the motoring public, would do the trick. Perhaps they should get some contracting cognitive scientists onto the case rather than contracting tar macadam layers. Would it take more effort than is being poured into persuading us to stop smoking?
Nearer home, was strolling around the Ewell branch of Epsom and Ewell library the other day, on the occasion of a coffee stop with free parking. Quite a good selection of fiction. Come across 'The Great Gatsby' by Scott Fitzgerald, which I had heard of, but for some reason, never read. Nice edition from Everyman, a bit smarter than most of the large number of rather elderly red Everymans that I have at home. Slightly enlarged format, smart white cover, Random House replacing Dent as the publisher, middle brow (aka accessible) introduction by an academic who also happens to be a novelist in his own right, and rather a natty calendar, setting out the life of the author and the publication of this book in the goings on in the literary world and in the world at large. In four column format.
It turns out that Scott Fitzgerald is an almost exact contemporary of Aldous Huxley - who did not figure in the calendar, while DH Lawrence and JAA Joyce did. The first novel of the former (SF) sold some 25,000 copies, while the latter (AH) was pleased with 2,500. And oddly, although they both appear to write in a satirical vein about overlapping milieux, they do not appear to have ever met. AH seemed to manage quite a comfortable life style on his 2,500, so presumably SF was more in the pop star firmament, presumably along with the likes of Simenon.
Whizzed through Gatsby in a few hours, perhaps a little too quickly. But the book left rather an odd taste: one didn't much like either the author or the people he was writing about. If a fair picture of what the prohibition era in the States was like for the fairly rich, they must have been rather rum lot. Must read it again.
I suppose one of the troubles is that a proper diagram of a junction on a road sign is going to be too much to take in as one zooms past. So they have to settle for some simplification. Perhaps there are some simple conventions which, if stuck to and known by the motoring public, would do the trick. Perhaps they should get some contracting cognitive scientists onto the case rather than contracting tar macadam layers. Would it take more effort than is being poured into persuading us to stop smoking?
Nearer home, was strolling around the Ewell branch of Epsom and Ewell library the other day, on the occasion of a coffee stop with free parking. Quite a good selection of fiction. Come across 'The Great Gatsby' by Scott Fitzgerald, which I had heard of, but for some reason, never read. Nice edition from Everyman, a bit smarter than most of the large number of rather elderly red Everymans that I have at home. Slightly enlarged format, smart white cover, Random House replacing Dent as the publisher, middle brow (aka accessible) introduction by an academic who also happens to be a novelist in his own right, and rather a natty calendar, setting out the life of the author and the publication of this book in the goings on in the literary world and in the world at large. In four column format.
It turns out that Scott Fitzgerald is an almost exact contemporary of Aldous Huxley - who did not figure in the calendar, while DH Lawrence and JAA Joyce did. The first novel of the former (SF) sold some 25,000 copies, while the latter (AH) was pleased with 2,500. And oddly, although they both appear to write in a satirical vein about overlapping milieux, they do not appear to have ever met. AH seemed to manage quite a comfortable life style on his 2,500, so presumably SF was more in the pop star firmament, presumably along with the likes of Simenon.
Whizzed through Gatsby in a few hours, perhaps a little too quickly. But the book left rather an odd taste: one didn't much like either the author or the people he was writing about. If a fair picture of what the prohibition era in the States was like for the fairly rich, they must have been rather rum lot. Must read it again.
# posted by Jim @ 8:24 AM 
