(~2 minutes to read)
Life in the south-west of England must be so exciting in the winter. Three incidents in that region caught my eye this week.
Sheds
News item: Driver caught with shed balanced on car in Newton Abbot
The gene pool needs more chlorine, it seems.
No. I take that back. Who was it said, “Don’t judge other people, or you might get judged yourself”? Oh—that’s right; Brian Cohen. (“Brian that is called Brian” from Monty Python’s Life of Brian.) So I shouldn’t judge the driver of the car involved.
The car, by the way, was a red Honda Civic, and only marginally bigger than the shed it was carrying. The car had no roof rack and the only thing making the difference between the shed balancing on the roof and tipping off the roof was a single rope.
One thing that disappoints me though is that the article didn’t have a headline that played on the (British?) phrase “A vehicle shed its load”. (Translation: a vehicle lost its load).
How it’s done in Canada
Swans
Meanwhile, eighty miles away in Newquay, two swans were jaywalking on a roundabout in the rush hour and holding the traffic up.
News item: Swans hold up rush hour traffic (Note: you’ll have to scroll down to 5:53am on 23 Jan to see the original item.)
Or at least, that’s what the headline said.
Newquayonians (Newquavians? Newquanians? A little help please, residents of Newquay) have a very laid-back notion of “rush hour”. For starters, the dashcam footage that accompanied the report was timestamped 9:48 a.m. My question is, was this near the start or the end of the rush hour? Secondly, there wasn’t a lot of traffic around, and none of it seemed to be in any particular rush.
Irrespective, a public-spirited van driver took the initiative, stopped his vehicle part-way round the roundabout, got out, and shooed/herded the pair of swans to the verge. The report describes his actions as “restoring order in Newquay.”
That’s what this world needs—more public-spirited citizens who are prepared to “have a go” and help our valiant law enforcement people maintain order in an increasingly selfish, chaotic and violent world. Or maybe the reporter had his/her tongue firmly in his/her cheek when he/she wrote the item. I hope so—that’s the kind of humour I enjoy!
Presumably the swans were refugees from the boating lake just north of the roundabout. Perhaps local boaters were tearing it up (and down) on the lake in their rowing boats and the swans were looking for some relative peace and quiet in the rush hour traffic. Who knows? But it’s good to see that refugees are being treated sympathetically in that corner of the world. And thank goodness Newquay doesn’t have a mayor whose solution to problems like this would be to build a big, beautiful wall. The poor swans would be forced to waddle round it or fly over it.
Seasoned Sausage Rolls
And since good things come in threes, here’s an item from Plymouth Police. (Plymouth is in the same general region as Newquay and Newton Abbot.) Link here. (You’ll have to scroll down to Jan 23)
Apparently a cop stopped a drunk driver. The driver (who was already disqualified) showed his displeasure by throwing a sausage roll at the officer.
The officer responded with pepper spray.
Should have offered some ketchup too.
Maybe this is the origin of the expression a shedload. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/shedload
It could be! And given its possible euphemistic origin, it might be apropos, especially if the shed had come unmoored.
I agree, Ketchup would have been a far more palatable way to assuage the sausage affair than the use of pepper.