Once Works Well was pure technology. Now it seeks merely to divert.
Pansy subjects - Verse! Opera! Domestic trivia! - are now commonplace.
The 300-word limit for posts is retained. The ego is enlarged

Saturday 18 October 2008

"I drink the air before me and return,
Or 'ere your heart twice beat."

My neighbour, two doors down, is a very, very enthusiastic gardener. Not content with his own plot, he mows the grass outside his house even though it’s “council land”. (Guess who’s the odd man out along our street when it comes to mowing the council’s grass.)

Some days ago Herefordshire Council told him to desist. He was “guilty of encroachment”. Turning the grass into a bowling green might discourage pedestrians from walking on it. The story leaked first to the local press, attracted regional attention on telly and then got huge national coverage in The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph.

But this is a techno story. Not a great fan of either of those two publications I was unaware of their lucubrations. But an ex-neighbour now living in Canada reads the DT online and emailed me the news. A four-thousand mile journey to tell me about something occurring 25 m away. The world is in your backyard.

DIY NOT GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH My garage door is an up-and-over and had been getting stiffer. A few squirts of WD40 on the bearings and it rose up under finger pressure. But what goes up… My mind, attuned to the previous stiffness, was not in gear as I stepped into the garage and the free-as-air door crashed down on my head. I survived to blog but am wondering whether I should have delivered an extra squirt up my ear’ole.