Wednesday review

Another free Wednseday, my oasis for the week, and as it rained all day I had a dry oasis rather than go outside and get the usual sort with the water. My main task was to try and find some old posts for Funtrivia, but as the search function had been limited it wasn't possible without finding my notes which are not stored in any formal way. I found one large folder and managed to chuck out most of it (not an easy task as you have to read it first and copy anything needed elsewhere). I did discover a number of posts had already been reinstated so my task had already been started and possibly even finished, so the little elves may have worked all night as I slept! Then I watched Arsenal draw (on TV) 0-0 to go through to the next round of the European cup. Not a bad 0-0 as both sides hit the woodwork and was plenty of attacking despite the absence of a score. Not that I care about Arsenal, and like Chelsea in the past, had not a British player among them. I remember when most teams were not only all British but local players as well, and that is only 30 years ago. Meaningless now really.

The interesting part was when I went for a walk. There's a small dead end near me where you can look up it but no reason to walk up. I have a couple of times and the last discovered a path to another road. So tonight I went that way and though it was light last time and dark this time, it turned out one side of the entrance to the path has, instead of a house on the plot, a council depot. How I walked up this path the last time during the day and didn't see it is a mystery, but I'll try and work it out. The building was always there, it looks as old as the houses but only like a garage. The clues were the site was used for storing road mending equipment, and packed with signs, pipes and fences, which Sherlock Holmes would have said couldn't have been there the first time I walked past to attract my attention unless I had my eyes closed. But however I missed them, I'm surprised the council have used a plot in a tiny remote residential street for a road depot, as you will get hordes of lorries arriving all hours especially the crack of dawn, crashing equipment on the backs of the trucks while swearing loudly, which would be enough to try the patience of all the residents. Very strange. I'll take some photos but it would look so boring that it probably won't be worth posting. But it doesn't stop there. Further up the road they have just finished building a new road of houses and flats that look like they've been built in 1969! Wooden panelled terraces and flats which are the exact opposite of the Victorian copies of Dartmoor Prison (only much nastier) prove there is actually no ban on building anything that looks newer than 1900. It only goes a tiny fraction of a percentage to swing the balance, but proves it's not just me who feels the current insistence of building slums makes them feel suicidal every time they see a picture of one in the paper.

If only this could be said for the car industry who do the exact opposite, and exclusively outside Japan. They refuse to cater to popular taste (the joke Nissan Figaro made for a motor show generated so much interest that by the time they bowed to popular demand, the 10,000 they built had 10 buyers for each one produced). There's a message in that story which not one manufacturer large or small has ever picked up. The only exception were the 100 Daihatsu Mira Classics imported to Britain in 1998, seeing one reviving my interest in cars and led to my hundreds of models being bought.



A warning ps, don't preview blog entries, once you press back (the only apparent way to leave the screen) you will almost certainly lose your post. There's clearly a software issue and one I will not be utilising again, if I make a mess I'll go back and edit it in future as this is version2 of this post.