Tuesday 17 July 2007

Jeux sans frontiers

Space, the final frontier.....you might have been led to believe, the reality is that the final frontier is the City of Delta. I spent almost three-quarters of an hour there yesterday trying to find a friend's house that I'd been to several times before.

Firstly, and you might think logically, the roads are all numbered. You might think that, and you'd be wrong. The streets are numbered and the avenues that cross them are numbered. So....you have a two way numbering system going on. THEN....you have streets off of other streets that are numbered with an A or a B. Confused? Oh no, that's by no means the last word.

Let us consider the hypothetical street 714a. 714a is a street off 714, but not directly. To get to it, you have to go down 697 Avenue. Ok, so you're pootling down 714, turn off on 697 to get to 714a, but then you discover that you've come to the end of 714a and you haven't seen your friend's house number. What's going on? Well, there are six or seven more sections of 714a and none of them are joined in any way to the section you went down.
And not only that, but if say, your friend's HOUSE number is 6923, then you expect their neighbours to live in 6922 and 6924, or at worst, 6921 and 6925. You might think that, but like I said, you'd be dead wrong.

And rumour has it, well more than rumour, that the police won't attend domestics at these addresses for the self-same bloody reasons.

Pshaw.

This morning the temperature was unusually tolerable and shortly after waking, rain was pattering on the skylight and the windows and as I walked to work, although it still felt warm out, it was also, obviously wet.
The roads looked as though someone had washed them with soap suds, white foam making its way down from the camber.
The parched trails in the park were now softened.

By close of play, the sun was shining again.

I generally keep quiet about Harry Potter, due to the fact that I always thought I was the only non-fan in this quadrant of the galaxy. However it seems not. Nicholas Lezard makes some pretty damning comments about the standard of writing contained within the pages of the books and this, together with the derivative nature of the subject matter, is pretty much the point in my opinion.

"A nine-year-old might feel quite pleased with the writing in the Harry Potter books. It's pretty embarrassing coming from an adult," says Lezard. God bless ye Nick, it needed saying.

Sleepy says she's fed up with Victoria Beckham, frankly I'm fed up with Mr. Posh.
No, he hasn't been stalking me or anything, but I'm not in charge of him. Just because he speaks roughly the same version of English as me - very roughly - we are not joined at the hip.
More than that, his presence on the same land mass as myself has no impact on my life bar the fact that people keep asking me what I think. I think nothing, he is no-one, the only opinion I have is that he isn't attractive and the game he plays IS called football. (That's not an opinion, that's a fact.)

Oh and here's something else I don't have (much) of an opinion on. Conrad Black. I understand that he's an evil, swaggering toad, who has turned his back on Canada and now is trying to turn his back on Britain. The justice system of one country or another will deal with him so that I don't need to worry about him. The only slight bugette I have with the whole thing, is that my understanding is that his crimes are all money related whereas I keep reading stories about men murdering or violating women getting away with far shorter sentences than CB.

Justice, the final frontier.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Justice and fair play, or lack of it, are a recurring theme in your writings. It's a moral thing isn't it? But it seems to me that the law in any country is not based on morals as such. Conrad Black rips off money and let's face it that seems to be regarded as a very very bad crime in these societies that are run entirely on economic grounds.

Good recent Wedgie Benn quote: "The people were once represented by their politicians, now they are managed".

By the way - I see Rudyard Kipling wrote "words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind" but I think "words define our world" is better! (Easier to graffiti too).

Schneewittchen said...

Yes, you're right Nigel, I do think I have strong sense of fair play. I just assumed it was being British.

Interesting that Kipling managed to pen such words of wisdom in between making exceedingly good cakes ;)