distant drums

Highways Dept workmen have been messing around on the road outside for a couple of weeks now. Spreading half a dozen rectangles of orange tarmac, leaving it for a couple of days (the excitement, orange tarmac, what could it be for? Will it be an admittedly risky chessboard? A communal arts blank tarmac canvas project to lure the teenagers back to the straight and narrow with a brush and an invitation to Create! Flowers! Birds! Hills!? Have Bury MBC developed a yen for a bit of warm Mediterranean?) before returning to daub SLOW in white across the centre of each.

Gosh, thanks. Give it to them, they wrote each SLOW the right way round for the respective carriageway; there will be no bumps, prangs or scrapes as drivers strain to work out what WOIS is warning them about. WOIS? Wois a WOIS? Is it like a Woozle?

Drivers, go careful, drive WOOZLE.

As it’s getting near the end of the financial year there’s previously sat on chunks of budget to be used up sharpish on rivers of orange tarmac, oceans of white paint. Still, as a traffic calming measure it stinks: they haven’t given us bumps to make certain drivers going above 15mph will Bo and Luke it against the roof of their Corsa; they haven’t lowered the speed limit from the standard 30mph for built-up areas. They’ve given us a white word on an orange rectangle.

I knew when they were working, by the low, distant drumming of their generator. I heard it when I woke at 6:30 this morning, and thought they’d got an early start. Taking the kids to school I realised the road was clear, the SLOWs gleaming up through the frozen fog. I could still hear the generator, though, and shook away a Richard Carpenter image of ghostly, grudge-holding workmen slowly banging on each front door. Waiting, just waiting, until the awful moment when some fool will open, to be given an orange tarmac-stained mug of tea, as orange as ... tarmac, and a copy of yesterday’s Sun.

Sadly this was not to be. It would have been wonderful for house prices, and easy to get a foreigner done on driveway resurfacing, so long as you don’t mind orange. With a big WOOZLE across it in white.

The distant drumming is in my head. A brand new tinnitus tone, to join Barbershop Hum, Spincycle Whine, and 1970’s BBC1 After 11:30pm. It’s me that’s got the workmen in.

It might be that I’ve seen both Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Vanilla Sky this year, but I’m wondering how long it will be before they get busy. That woodland track we walked through Bradfield Woods in 1994: did we really step across that rectangle? That large, orange rectangle? Charles Bridge in 2002: beneath the Czech vendors’ stalls of enamelled pendants and wood carvings, could I really see that large S, a T, a bit of a P?

Nah, I’m being daft, these are workmen. They haven’t even had their second brew yet, not even glanced at the sports pages. My memories are safe.



Things To Do

Cake: Soak fruit in booze; chuck all the stuff together and cook; voodoo with more booze; marzipan; ice; eat.
Pressies: buy; wrap; distribute (wearing stiff gauntlet to save fingers). addendum: forget to give Suffolk ones to mum when she visits.
Pressies from kids: buy; make; wrap; post / give out.
Cards: buy / make; give out / post.
Decorations: consider putting up; put up; take down.
Christmas dinner: yeah, right.
Booze: buy; drink; buy; drink; be bought; drink; buy; drink; buy; drink; scrounge; drink; drink; drink; drink; buy; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink; drink (list in progress).