Monday, October 22, 2007

A poster saying beware of the leopard

Our next door neighbour has two cars and no offroad parking, so wants to convert his front garden into a parking space. This seems a thoroughly reasonable venture to me, but given that he is our next door neighbour, we went this morning to the council offices to view the application. No problem, it won't impinge on us as far as we can tell, and he has our blessing.

I do however observe that he has had a failure of imagination. Rather ingeniously (I think) his plans involve a turntable. To save manoeuvring your car into position in a narrow space by means of the forward and reverse gears, you can buy a turntable. You drive straight in off the road, get out, manually turn the turntable so your car is facing its parking space, and - well - park. To get out into the road again, reverse the process.

But - manually? Come on! If I had a turntable for my car there's only one conceivable way it could work. It would require push button control from inside the car, preferably with the Thunderbirds launching music playing in the background. Has this man never seen a Gerry Anderson show? Or for that matter A Close Shave?

Honestly!

10 comments:

  1. Ben, one of my colleagues at work tells me that high quality blogs are now often valued at $7 - $10 per "UMU" (unique monthly user). As the owner of one such HQB (let's keep the ludicrous 3-letter acronyms flowing), the big question is (and I'm sure you keep a beady eye on your readership stats) - are you sitting on a potentially lucrative asset (PLA)?

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  2. WTF?

    Hmm. 921 views so far this month. Is that high value?

    BFN.

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  3. Are these applications open to public modification?

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  4. You get the right to submit any comments or objections but that is where your input stops. As I understand it, after that it's in the hands of the planning authorities to make the final decision.

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  5. Hands-up who got the title reference.

    You're not considering selling-out are you?

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  6. Rest assured, the only thing that would make me even consider selling out would be the right price.

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  7. *puts hand up*

    I'm with you on the thunderbirds music. It would have to be full-on Wallace and Gromit technology!

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  8. Anonymous1:17 pm

    Could always get rid of one of the cars. Down here in The Smoke there is a lot of fuss about people concreting over their front gardens, which reduces drainage as well as being bad for biodiversity. Mine was concrete but is now laid to gravel, which is permeable (and needs weeding, but so what?)

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  9. Hand goes up!

    Our front garden has been covered by tarmac, but it's so old that there's plenty of bio-diversity growing up through it.

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  10. You have obviously hit the ideal compromise, and managed to make mild suburban decay look like responsible ecological management. Score!

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