pumpkinstrokemarrow

There is another ivy lover at http://howtokeephouse.blogspot.com (search for 'ivy covered') but I don't know if she would be up there with this chap. My own ivy growing ambitions got the chop.

Another puzzle was a chap on Ewell by-pass the other morning, say around 1030. A mid-range jag was parked in a lay-by. Fully dressed, casually dressed chap appeared to be asleep in the driving seat, this last wound well down. Inside out pair of jockey shorts hung out from a back window, apparently to dry. What sort of an evening had the chap spent to be like this in the morning?

And then this morning we had the litter pickers. Too rather sullen looking young men, presumably on minimum wage, strolling down the road with their black bags and litter pickers. They were doing a job of sorts. But they were leaving a lot of the small litter, for example fag ends, some of the larger litter and they were certainly not going to clear up a smashed up beer bottle on the edge of the road. So the puzzle is, how does one manage litter picking? In the good old days the ganger man would have inspected each stretch of litter picked road and simply sacked the litter picker responsible for a bad one. I dare say a few innocents would have gone to the slaughter too and I dare say the ganger man would have had his favourites. Nephews, sons, dependant uncles and so on and so forth. But the litter would have been picked - although I also dare say that if the ganger man played too hard he might have found himself being jostled a bit when he left the pub one dark night.

Whereas now, the work is probably being done by contractors who don't inspect the work done too carefully. Work done by chaps who are very hot on their human rights. Not reasonable to pick up litter weighing less than 10 grams or more than 500 grams. Not reasonable to pick up glass, that's a job for a street cleaner not a litter picker. You can't fault me unless you can demonstrate that I have missed more than 1 kilogram of eligible litter in each of more than 2 100 metre stretches in some one kilometre stretch. I pick litter to parameters which have been agreed with my union - not to mention the International Court of Human Rights - and it is only fair that you stick to them. Otherwise I shall get Cherie Blair onto the case. She's feeling the need for a bit of limelight with dosh so I'm sure she'll take it.

I close with an anecdote for our time. It seems that collectively we have this tremendous guilt about the care we afford our old folk. Lots of guilt but not so much action. So to assuage the guilt, we encourage lots of bizzies to write lots of rules for the poor schmucks on the front line. To make sure that they don't get up to anything that we would not approve of (from a safe distance). With the interesting result that care workers are not allowed to help old people take their complicated medicines without written authorisation from a doctor or chemist. On the other hand they are allowed, indeed encouraged, to walk the plank if one of their old people snuffs it for lack of medicine. Let alone takes the wrong medicine. Funny sort of world where a care worker is trusted into someone's house to do all kinds of intrusive personal care - but not to read the instructions on the medicine bottle.