From Times Online
Cable Street, scene in 1936 of one of Britain’s most infamous civic confrontations when Sir Oswald Mosley attempted to lead his Blackshirts through the East End of London, is today a quiet, rather safe, modern road.
But you wouldn’t think so by the signage that’s erupted along its path. Along with all the parking permit signs and bus stops, a huge lurid green cycle lane stretches out for half a mile or so in both directions from Shadwell Underground Station. Blue lollipop signs alert you to the fact that the cycle lane is for cyclists and the pavement for pedestrians. The message is reinforced with pictures of bicycles on the green asphalt just in case you thought it might be, say, a six feet by 3,000 feet tennis court. Bus stands and black railings, speed limits and “CCTV in operation” signs complete a hideous array of paraphernalia that dominates just this one street in London.
We are assaulted by signs telling us to slow down; signs telling us to speed up; signs telling us not loiter; not to take photographs; not to park; not to sit on the wall; not to smoke; not to play golf (really); that we are being spied upon by cctv cameras.
“Kids cook quick” is the illiterate notice on a poster board at my children’s school, just in case parents had never considered sunburn before. They might have added: “The sun is a big yellow thing in the sky; don’t look at it or you’ll go blind.”
Across London we are introduced to similarly illiterate signs such as “Help us keep your Tube safe” (as if a Tube train is suddenly going to leave its depot and get beaten up by a mainline thug that has strayed from its Euston terminus for a spot of aggro), designed to “reassure passengers” and “boost” security on public transport. Then there’s “Less road traffic emissions: The Charge is making it happen”. A glance at the stationary traffic belching out fumes as they wait at traffic lights – almost permanently on red – will tell you this is a lie. Or here’s another from Transport for London urging us to leave our desks at lunchtime and “get out more” – give use half a chance and we poor wage slaves would be “out” for half the day.
Isn’t there something Stalinist about this crude propaganda? Although we’ll never again witness posters of smiling workers wielding their sickles, it would come as no surprise to see billboards of outreach workers at play, riding their bicycles alongside bendy buses, setting forth to non-smoking riverside cafés captured on a grainy video installation by Tracey Emin. Our functionaries have gone beyond offering useful information such as the fact that there’s a very busy main road at the end of the lane and if you cycle into it you’ll get your block knocked off. They are telling you to behave yourself. What possible use is there for “cctv in operation signs” other than to say, “We’re watching you, so don’t you dare be naughty”?
At Clapham Junction railway station there is a sign telling us to: “Be safe. Take care on the stairs” – as if stations users have never before had to grapple with that most dangerous of urban phenomena; the staircase.
If we need to be told how to use a staircase, then surely these signs have lost all meaning. At another station – Harrow on the Hill – a sign has broken so it now simply reads: “Avoid Risks.” Well, here’s an idea. Given that most signs – even those telling us to stop at a main road – are about avoiding risks, why not change them all to have the same message. Imagine: “Avoid risks” repeated 1,000 times over across the country; at every junction; at every staircase; at every cycle lane. Perhaps then it will sink in that, unless you’re going to spend your days slumped in front of the shopping channel, life is a risk. And we should be thankful for it.
Monday, 23 February 2009
Forever waiting
From Times Online
The heat, even in October, was as clammy as the showers after a school swimming session, our bodies were pressed so close we couldn’t just feel each other’s wallets, we could count the loose change, too, and the sheer frustration of being stationary seemed to fizz its own energy like a van der graaf generator – we were all wondering, this time, was someone going to blow a fuse?
The scene, you’ve probably guessed is that magnificent feat of 20th century engineering, the Northern Line, and – train derailed at Morden wouldn’t you know? – we were somewhere between Clapham North and Stockwell, just waiting.
You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that after 150 years of underground train building, someone might just have got it right by now. But they haven’t. The managers of the Tube are about as adept as running their Underground system as Chihuahuas are at climbing trees.
It’s not just the underground, though is it? Heathrow and Manchester and Stansted – shiny architectural triumphs of the modern age – are principally shopping malls to divest air travellers of their hard-earned holiday cash. Why? Because we spend so much of our time in them waiting for delayed planes they might as well try and convince us to fork out on a pair of fair isle socks. In the age of the bullet train in Japan, we sit in stationary carriages (always in the dullest of railway cuttings) watching a Greggs paper bag being blown around like a clump of stinging nettles. And make an appointment at even the swankiest dentist – let alone the Stalinist slabs of concrete that house a multitude of waiting rooms in our hospitals – and you should take an outline of that novel you’d planned and get cracking.
Thousands of years of evolution, in other words and we’re standing about in the vain hope that a streamlined train with go-faster stripes might come into the station, or forcing down yet another Costa Coffee in the terminally boring Terminal 3 with the prospect of journeying across the Atlantic being pushed ever further into the future.
And when we’re not institutionally waiting, as it were, we’re waiting for our girlfriends, our boyfriends, our children, our boss, our plumber.
Which begs the question, are they late because of the institutional late-ism that pervades our country? Or does institutional late-ism exist because our institutions are populated by listless ne’er-do-wells whose principal activity seems to doing the minimal amount of work that remunerates them sufficiently to pay the mortgage and get leathered at All Bar One at the end of the day.
Well, is surely has to be the latter. In which case, the government must take action now. Legislation must be introduced forcing the managers of train companies, airlines, airport authorities and hospitals to take responsibility for wasting so many hours of our precious time. At time of delay, they will be forced to entertain us by dressing up in clothes of the opposite gender, walking on stilts and singing Ich bin ein Berliner to the tune of the 1812 Overture.
And is that doesn’t work then a stocks should be put on every platform, station concourse and hospital waiting room in the land. Rest assured, we’ll have the squashed tomatoes all ready to throw in our hand luggage.
The heat, even in October, was as clammy as the showers after a school swimming session, our bodies were pressed so close we couldn’t just feel each other’s wallets, we could count the loose change, too, and the sheer frustration of being stationary seemed to fizz its own energy like a van der graaf generator – we were all wondering, this time, was someone going to blow a fuse?
The scene, you’ve probably guessed is that magnificent feat of 20th century engineering, the Northern Line, and – train derailed at Morden wouldn’t you know? – we were somewhere between Clapham North and Stockwell, just waiting.
You would have thought, wouldn’t you, that after 150 years of underground train building, someone might just have got it right by now. But they haven’t. The managers of the Tube are about as adept as running their Underground system as Chihuahuas are at climbing trees.
It’s not just the underground, though is it? Heathrow and Manchester and Stansted – shiny architectural triumphs of the modern age – are principally shopping malls to divest air travellers of their hard-earned holiday cash. Why? Because we spend so much of our time in them waiting for delayed planes they might as well try and convince us to fork out on a pair of fair isle socks. In the age of the bullet train in Japan, we sit in stationary carriages (always in the dullest of railway cuttings) watching a Greggs paper bag being blown around like a clump of stinging nettles. And make an appointment at even the swankiest dentist – let alone the Stalinist slabs of concrete that house a multitude of waiting rooms in our hospitals – and you should take an outline of that novel you’d planned and get cracking.
Thousands of years of evolution, in other words and we’re standing about in the vain hope that a streamlined train with go-faster stripes might come into the station, or forcing down yet another Costa Coffee in the terminally boring Terminal 3 with the prospect of journeying across the Atlantic being pushed ever further into the future.
And when we’re not institutionally waiting, as it were, we’re waiting for our girlfriends, our boyfriends, our children, our boss, our plumber.
Which begs the question, are they late because of the institutional late-ism that pervades our country? Or does institutional late-ism exist because our institutions are populated by listless ne’er-do-wells whose principal activity seems to doing the minimal amount of work that remunerates them sufficiently to pay the mortgage and get leathered at All Bar One at the end of the day.
Well, is surely has to be the latter. In which case, the government must take action now. Legislation must be introduced forcing the managers of train companies, airlines, airport authorities and hospitals to take responsibility for wasting so many hours of our precious time. At time of delay, they will be forced to entertain us by dressing up in clothes of the opposite gender, walking on stilts and singing Ich bin ein Berliner to the tune of the 1812 Overture.
And is that doesn’t work then a stocks should be put on every platform, station concourse and hospital waiting room in the land. Rest assured, we’ll have the squashed tomatoes all ready to throw in our hand luggage.
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