Thursday, 13 November 2003

Personal

On HGVs and narrow lanes

[Collapsing Wall]

I will now introduce the technical term, Oik. It's a placeholder noun for persons unknown that have generated feelings of mild frustration. It's used like this:

Some oik has gone and rammed their lorry into the wall at the bottom of my garden.

Tonight this is not a theoretical example. Some oik has indeed had a good go at widening the road behind my house. They failed. Presumably they damaged their HGV, but made off before talking with anyone. What's left are a few bits of wall now reducing the width of the road, and serious damage to the wall between my garden and next-door's.

So - yay! - I now get to learn about non-stop RTAs, about highway engineers, about structural repairs to walls, about how the police will stay here until the wall's been safely cordoned off and lit, and how tomorrow I'll be talking more with my insurance company on the finer points of landscape gardening (or something like that).

The sign that was knocked down during the incident is a "no waiting" sign. When all's fixed I'll be adding a "no three-point turns for HGVs" sign, and another that instructs "no running off without leaving your details".

Still as I said to the Policeman, I'm just glad it was the back of the garden, not the front of the house. And besides, I'm going out to the theatre tonight and this isn't about to stop me.

Posted by pab at 17:52