So on the Horton Clockwise last week, I noticed that the art work noticed at reference 2, provided for the people of Stamford Green has been removed. The stand is still there, but the art work has been removed, taking the stand back to its basic black.
A few hundred yards further on we had a clutch of steel cupboards and a tall pole, a sort of fat lamp post with a cylindrical white casing at the top, perhaps a foot in diameter and six feet high. Taken together, no doubt an important node in the BT broadband network. My point being that BT have put what is probably thousands of pounds worth of equipment into each of these cupboards and I think it is a fair bet that I could get into any one of them in about ten minutes using my No.3 wrecking bar, the sort of thing that one used to be able to buy from Messrs. Buck & Ryan of Tottenham Court Road. From where I associate to the foreman for the demolition company in Newcastle under Lyme for which I worked briefly, many years ago now. When we needed a No.6 wrecking bar, he simply went down to the local blacksmith and got one made up. Could our own Sparrowhawks do such a thing? They were able to make the boundary bars to our new daffodil bed - see reference 3 - but a wrecking bar is a much more complicated thing - and made of tempered rather than mild steel.
But back with BT, entrusting a lot of important & expensive equipment to some lightweight steel cupboards by the side of the road. Prey to any passing vandal or to any van or worse that loses control on the adjacent roundabout. I recall that the good people of Tattenham Corner were without streaming services for 'EastEnders' and without access to Amazon for a week or so when a car crashed into what I remember as being a similar sort of box up there. Much hullabaloo on Streetlife or some such place. Is it sensible for BT to rely on the local council and the local police to look after their stuff, rather than putting it inside something rather more secure - and expensive? What do their insurers have to say about it?
Further along still, I came to the sign illustrated in the snap above. I was amused to learn that what had been a residential facility for people not deemed suitable for life in the outside world with the rest of us, has been born again as a different sort of gated community. Presumably the estate agents think that the word 'gated' adds a few percent to the price they can get for these units. Perhaps they did not allow for the careful placing of the dustbins, rather detracting from the desired image.
It is possible that this particular facility was used to house unmarried mothers in the bad old days, mothers who subsequently declined to be moved when the authorities wanted to sell Manor Hospital, of which the facility was part, off to developers. Their quite reasonable line being that, having been locked up all their adult life (these people were by then quite old), they did not propose to learn, in their twilight years, how to manage outside. I associate now to the lady up north somewhere, in her forties, who is about to have her 17th child taken into care. Perhaps more evidence of having thrown the baby away with the bathwater when we pulled the plug on the mental hospitals.
The last item of interest was an ants' nest in one of Horton Lane's western grass verges. Not as big as our daffodil bed effort, but an intricately sculptured affair, which reminded me of the drip castles we used to make when the sprogs were of sandcastle age. Just the most spectacular of the many signs of ant activity this day. Must be their time of year.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/trust.html.
Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/outreach.html.
Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=sparrowhawks.
Group search key: hla.
No comments:
Post a Comment