(no subject)
I'd like to think that, as internet blogs go, mine is a rather chipper effort. This isn't really much of an achievement, if I do say so myself, as a cursory glance at the outpourings of most online scribes would suggest that they're a bunch of joyless individuals who could suck all the fun from an episode of 'Monkey' filmed on a bouncy castle. They seem to spend plenty of valuable time and energy dissecting every minor problem in their existences till you're left wondering how they can even summon up the willpower to follow one breath with another. Well I should warn those of you who head over here for a little joie-de-vivre that I'm going to join the numbers of the dark side for the opening stages of this particular entry as I get a few of life's current irritants off my chest. However, stick with this and I promise that later on I'll tell you how snooker made me figure out how to solve every social problem on the planet.
When I said I'd be discussing a few of "life's current irritants" just now, I'd probably have just fared better by being upfront and saying "electronic signs on motorways" instead as that's pretty much all that's bugging me these days beyond the usual (95% of all television, Cheshire, The Guardian etc). These signs basically have two functions; firstly they tell you that you're in queue and you shouldn't go faster than 40mph even though you're in a queue. Seriously. I spend at least half an hour a day on the M62 squashed between Eddie Stobart lorries and reps in Audis crawling along with all the speed of continental drift. And whilst I'm doing this, I'm inevitably faced with a blinking sign warning me 'QUEUE: CAUTION' and telling me to stay below 40, a situation which is pretty much inevitable unless I find the button on the dashboard that turns my Saxo into a Harrier jumpjet. The other function of these signs is even more daft as it's actually dangerous. When there's no queues to point out to people who happen to be stuck in them, the signs usually display a patronising road safety message which, more often than not, is 'THINK. DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE'. Now, in the shutting-the-stable-door-after-the-horse-has-bolted stakes, it doesn't come sillier than waiting till someone is charging up the M6 at Mach 3 with half a distillery in their bloodstream before getting a sign they probably can't read to deliver a friendly bit of advice. The roads of Britain are an upsetting enough place to be at the best of times without institutional idiocy being thrust in your face from every angle and, as I discovered recently, one of the most horrific parts of these islands is also fittingly home to highway muppetry on an Olympian scale.
The northern stretch of North Wales is unspeakably crap. For some reason Amy woke up at lunchtime on Bank Holiday Monday the other week and stated that we should go to Rhyl. Remember that this woman is a pharmacist and therefore one miscalculation from killing someone's granny and yet she makes decisions like this. Remember also that I'm a man and I therefore dutifully agreed. An hour or so later, we were trundling through mile after mile of Welsh A-road surrounded by towns and villages, garages and businesses, shops and pubs all of which appeared to have not been open for a good decade. It genuinely looked like everyone had suddenly decided, some years ago, to give up and stay in for the rest of time. To be fair, this may be because the process of actually travelling anywhere in North Wales is as disheartening and ultimately futile as trying to find the laughs in an Albert Camus novel or a Shakespeare comedy.
North Wales is well documented as the home of speed cameras and rightly so but that's not what I'm really getting at; if you want to read about that sort of thing, check out Jeremy Clarkson reviewing cars you can't afford in the Sunday Times' 'InGear' pullout. No, the depressing thing about North Walian motoring is the road-signs that firstly seem to assume that there's so much going on all around you that you need reminding every 10 yards about any junction, school, pothole, tree and stray pebble rearing up on the horizon and then they also appear to believe that despite the plethora of deadly activity going on all around they've got the time to tell you about it in two seperate languages! Now if there's as much danger on the roads as the signs suggest, the only suitable form of communication to drivers is SCREAMING AND SHOUTING IN CAPITAL LETTERS!, not equal opportunities signage that comforts locals with the fact that the adverse camber that's about to kill them has been documented in their native tongue.
I'm sure that all the speed cameras in the area are there for the noble cause of saving lives and making roads safer but all they need to do really is simplify the signs so there's less English drivers not concentrating on the road as they learn what the Welsh for 'Reduce Speed Now' is. Simple eh? I've solved a big problem for the region's roads there. And, coincidentally enough, it was on a stretch of North Wales highway that my snooker-based epiphany on saving the planet came to me during an argument with the missus (told you I'd get round to it).
I found myself charging between the Gatsos at something around lightspeed after this particular bank holiday monday in Rhyl in order to get home for the final of the World Snooker Championships which was entering it's last day. Amy was bemused by my passion for this most pedestrian of sports (snooker being capable of polarising opinion in a way that only Marmite and fox-hunting can) and asked me what it was all about. Without really thinking, I told her where my love of the game came from and suddenly realised I was touching upon a way to solve every social problem in the world.
You see, I love snooker because my mum liked a bit of the old green baize herself (she was one of the army of housewives in thrall to Bolton's cue-wielding lothario Tony Knowles during the 1980s) and the only thing I could stay up late for every year was the conclusion of the World final. In fact, much as many people of a certain age remember staying up to watch the moon landing, I recall being 3 and not going to bed in order to watch the heart-stopping black-ball conclusion to the 1985 final- making Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor my own persoanl Armstrong and Aldrin. The game itself was a classic that even Hollywood would baulk at conceiving with plucky underdog and Blackburn resident Taylor coming from 8-0 down to beat undisputed titan of the table Steve Davis 18-17. The climax is famous for the crucial black ball evading the pocket for what seemed like an age before Taylor sunk it and raised his cue above his head with all passion of a Roman gladiator stood over the twitching corpse of his vanquished foe.
But, for me, the end of the game is mostly memorable for not actually happening till half-past midnight- a time of the night that a boy still a few weeks short of his fourth birthday isn't even sure exists. I was hooked and that's the crux of what I'm rather obtusely getting round too. If you let a kid stay up late for anything, they'll instantly adore it just for the chance to not go to bed for a few extra hours. Now all we need to do is dedicate some of the space that the TV schedules give over late at night to phone-in quizzes and edgy (i.e. crap) short films to programmes about being nice, tolerating others and not becoming chavs or suicide bombers and just plonk goggle-eyed children in front of them into the wee small hours. Hey presto! A generation grows up dedicated to peace, love and harmony in exchange for a few missed bedtimes.
And, to save time and irritation later in life, one of the programmes we could broadcast could just be a screen flashing one simple sentence: "THINK. DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE"
When I said I'd be discussing a few of "life's current irritants" just now, I'd probably have just fared better by being upfront and saying "electronic signs on motorways" instead as that's pretty much all that's bugging me these days beyond the usual (95% of all television, Cheshire, The Guardian etc). These signs basically have two functions; firstly they tell you that you're in queue and you shouldn't go faster than 40mph even though you're in a queue. Seriously. I spend at least half an hour a day on the M62 squashed between Eddie Stobart lorries and reps in Audis crawling along with all the speed of continental drift. And whilst I'm doing this, I'm inevitably faced with a blinking sign warning me 'QUEUE: CAUTION' and telling me to stay below 40, a situation which is pretty much inevitable unless I find the button on the dashboard that turns my Saxo into a Harrier jumpjet. The other function of these signs is even more daft as it's actually dangerous. When there's no queues to point out to people who happen to be stuck in them, the signs usually display a patronising road safety message which, more often than not, is 'THINK. DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE'. Now, in the shutting-the-stable-door-after-the-horse-has-bolted stakes, it doesn't come sillier than waiting till someone is charging up the M6 at Mach 3 with half a distillery in their bloodstream before getting a sign they probably can't read to deliver a friendly bit of advice. The roads of Britain are an upsetting enough place to be at the best of times without institutional idiocy being thrust in your face from every angle and, as I discovered recently, one of the most horrific parts of these islands is also fittingly home to highway muppetry on an Olympian scale.
The northern stretch of North Wales is unspeakably crap. For some reason Amy woke up at lunchtime on Bank Holiday Monday the other week and stated that we should go to Rhyl. Remember that this woman is a pharmacist and therefore one miscalculation from killing someone's granny and yet she makes decisions like this. Remember also that I'm a man and I therefore dutifully agreed. An hour or so later, we were trundling through mile after mile of Welsh A-road surrounded by towns and villages, garages and businesses, shops and pubs all of which appeared to have not been open for a good decade. It genuinely looked like everyone had suddenly decided, some years ago, to give up and stay in for the rest of time. To be fair, this may be because the process of actually travelling anywhere in North Wales is as disheartening and ultimately futile as trying to find the laughs in an Albert Camus novel or a Shakespeare comedy.
North Wales is well documented as the home of speed cameras and rightly so but that's not what I'm really getting at; if you want to read about that sort of thing, check out Jeremy Clarkson reviewing cars you can't afford in the Sunday Times' 'InGear' pullout. No, the depressing thing about North Walian motoring is the road-signs that firstly seem to assume that there's so much going on all around you that you need reminding every 10 yards about any junction, school, pothole, tree and stray pebble rearing up on the horizon and then they also appear to believe that despite the plethora of deadly activity going on all around they've got the time to tell you about it in two seperate languages! Now if there's as much danger on the roads as the signs suggest, the only suitable form of communication to drivers is SCREAMING AND SHOUTING IN CAPITAL LETTERS!, not equal opportunities signage that comforts locals with the fact that the adverse camber that's about to kill them has been documented in their native tongue.
I'm sure that all the speed cameras in the area are there for the noble cause of saving lives and making roads safer but all they need to do really is simplify the signs so there's less English drivers not concentrating on the road as they learn what the Welsh for 'Reduce Speed Now' is. Simple eh? I've solved a big problem for the region's roads there. And, coincidentally enough, it was on a stretch of North Wales highway that my snooker-based epiphany on saving the planet came to me during an argument with the missus (told you I'd get round to it).
I found myself charging between the Gatsos at something around lightspeed after this particular bank holiday monday in Rhyl in order to get home for the final of the World Snooker Championships which was entering it's last day. Amy was bemused by my passion for this most pedestrian of sports (snooker being capable of polarising opinion in a way that only Marmite and fox-hunting can) and asked me what it was all about. Without really thinking, I told her where my love of the game came from and suddenly realised I was touching upon a way to solve every social problem in the world.
You see, I love snooker because my mum liked a bit of the old green baize herself (she was one of the army of housewives in thrall to Bolton's cue-wielding lothario Tony Knowles during the 1980s) and the only thing I could stay up late for every year was the conclusion of the World final. In fact, much as many people of a certain age remember staying up to watch the moon landing, I recall being 3 and not going to bed in order to watch the heart-stopping black-ball conclusion to the 1985 final- making Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor my own persoanl Armstrong and Aldrin. The game itself was a classic that even Hollywood would baulk at conceiving with plucky underdog and Blackburn resident Taylor coming from 8-0 down to beat undisputed titan of the table Steve Davis 18-17. The climax is famous for the crucial black ball evading the pocket for what seemed like an age before Taylor sunk it and raised his cue above his head with all passion of a Roman gladiator stood over the twitching corpse of his vanquished foe.
But, for me, the end of the game is mostly memorable for not actually happening till half-past midnight- a time of the night that a boy still a few weeks short of his fourth birthday isn't even sure exists. I was hooked and that's the crux of what I'm rather obtusely getting round too. If you let a kid stay up late for anything, they'll instantly adore it just for the chance to not go to bed for a few extra hours. Now all we need to do is dedicate some of the space that the TV schedules give over late at night to phone-in quizzes and edgy (i.e. crap) short films to programmes about being nice, tolerating others and not becoming chavs or suicide bombers and just plonk goggle-eyed children in front of them into the wee small hours. Hey presto! A generation grows up dedicated to peace, love and harmony in exchange for a few missed bedtimes.
And, to save time and irritation later in life, one of the programmes we could broadcast could just be a screen flashing one simple sentence: "THINK. DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE"