What, one wonders, would Dick Turpin have thought of the new Highway Code? The only thing it doesn’t cover is Robbery. What genius in the Ministry of Blunders and Wonders decided that pedestrians should have priority at junctions? This means, if I understand it correctly, that a car turning off a major road onto a minor road must stop to give way to a pedestrian waiting to cross the minor road. So the traffic closing rapidly on the turning car must suddenly brake hard as the turning car has to stop on the main road to allow the walkers to wander across. No recipe for accidents there then! I thought Smart motorways were the idea of an alien, infiltrated into the aforementioned ministry with the strict brief to induce as much carnage as possible but the little green man seems to have excelled himself with this one. No doubt the generals at alien HQ on Planet Zug are rubbing their hands in glee.
Meanwhile, the very good news is that Eastbourne’s pillar boxes have all been given a fresh coat of bright red paint, which really does look very nice. Whether you can remain upright on the broken pavements and successfully weave your way down the road between the multifarious potholes to reach the newly renovated boxes is another matter.
I am writing this from a friend’s house a little way out of Eastbourne, to whence I have debunked as the rest of the family have all been struck down by covid. We know not whether it is Omicron, Delta, the Mumbai variant or some combination of the lot as there has been no official testing, which does slightly raise the question as to the validity of the daily figures that the media loves to pump out. With no PCR testing one would imagine that the bulk of sufferers go unrecorded in the official stats? No sympathy is required for me. Our very kind friends have given me free run of their palace while they explore the wilder off-piste runs of Tignes in the French Alps. I’ve just enjoyed wallowing in their hot tub under a grey ski, remembering what it’s like to wallow in a hot tub under a moonlit mountain sky after a day of flying through the virgin champagne powder. It hasn’t happened for awhile, but thankfully the memory isn’t completely shot. Their beautiful new kitchen boasts a Quooker. Lest you are unfamiliar with this devious device, it’s an integrated tap unit that has a ‘plunge, twist, plunge’ ring that produces instant boiling water from the single tap through which hot, cold and luke warm water also flows. It’s a great idea in theory, but can only be a matter of time before a wayward digit gets caught in a boiling deluge. There’s also a Thermomix which is a sort of computerised Mary Berry Dalek. You just throw all the ingredients into a bowl, wait a few minutes and out comes a three course meal. It’s a somewhat lonely existence out here, but I’m just about coping…..
ADayInTheStrifeOf 