Getting stuff done - one way or another. Making choices. Public displays of ignorance - some amusing, some tragic.

Out and about the other day I got into conversation with a neighbour who had just been redirecting yet another lost driver who either could not understand that Road Closed meant just that or felt the need to go beyond the sign in order to get help to find an alternative route to his destination. We both agreed that far too many people need redirecting and that there should be some more explicit diversion signs for the lost drivers and those led astray by sat nav. He then went on to comment that, of course, if the work were being done by a private contractor instead if the local council it would be more adequately signposted and would be completed much more quickly. Of course?!?

Oddly enough, if you walk past the roadworks you notice that the trucks and heavy machinery all have the names of private contractors plaster all over them. Local councils no longer have the kind of infrastructure that keeps heavy plant available for such work. So they tender it out to private contractors. Who do the work more efficiently??

And this morning I spotted, in a collection of stuff belonging to the roadworks contractors, a whole lot of big yellow “A62 DIVERSION” signs. All they need to do now is put them up in useful places! 

Ah, well, on to other things. Most of us have at some time or other thought about what we would choose to be our desert island discs. Writing in today’s paper Hadley Freeman decided that she was not likely to be selected as a candidate for the island and so she gave us her list. One of them was this:-

“Both Sides, Now, Joni Mitchell. I fell in love with this song when I heard it in Love, Actually, a film so bad I was left traumatised. But the song inspired me to try novel-writing, which ruined the next few years of my life. So the moral is: don’t see Love, Actually.”

My feelings exactly.

The presence or absence of our PM from debates and interviews continues to be a matter of discussion. For a while the BBC were holding out and saying that he would not be interviewed by Andrew Marr on prime time TV if he continued to shilly shally over the Andrew Neill interview. Now the BBC are getting some stick for backing down on that.

Among the letters in today’s Guardian was this:-

“Michael Gove, interviewed by a Channel 4 journalist, said that he should be allowed to replace Johnson at the leaders’ climate debate because he was “a” leader (Johnson’s absence from debate mars milestone for environmental politics, 29 November). Challenged that he as not “the” leader, he said: “Let’s not quibble over prepositions.”
It appears that the former secretary of state for education has failed master the year 3 curriculum and has made a definite article of himself.
Patricia Thorpe.
 Brigg, Lincolnshire.”

 Oops!

But not as seriously ignorant as the lawmakers in Ohio where the state legislature has introduced a bill to ban abortion which requires doctors to “reimplant an ectopic pregnancy” into a woman’s uterus or face charges of “abortion murder”. Medical people have tried to tell them that such an operation is currently medically impossible.

 Where do you begin to deal with lawmakers like these?