THERE’S a housing development near me going up at breakneck speed.
The builders arrive early each morning and put in a full day’s graft, and consequently it’s taken less than two years to erect several large houses, multiple blocks of flats, a children’s play area and a beautifully landscaped park.
ArchantThe Acle Straight — a 6.8-mile stretch of the A47 near Great Yarmouth in Norfolk — is known to be dangerous for motorists[/caption]
AlamyWork on The Acle Straight has been delayed for a decade over snails[/caption]
No prizes for guessing that it’s a private contractor, for whom reliability and efficiency is the key to turning a profit as soon as possible.
Compare and contrast this impressive project with pretty much anything that involves the dead hand of the state.
This week, a headline caught my eye that seemed so ludicrous I had to re-read the article a couple of times to check it was true.
“Accident blackspot revamp delayed ten years for snails.”
Yep. The Acle Straight — a 6.8-mile stretch of the A47 near Great Yarmouth in Norfolk — is known to be dangerous for motorists because of water-filled ditches next to the road.
Campaigners successfully argued it should be made into a dual carriageway, but just as work started in 2015 Brian from The Magic Roundabout was found to be living in the water.
So, a year later, scientists working for “government adviser” Natural England started a study aimed at relocating the endangered population of “little whirlpool ramshorn snails”, which was due to finish by 2019 but was then extended to 2025.
Graham Plant, chairman of the A47 Alliance, says: “It seems that Natural England can take as much time as they like and in the meantime we see people die on the Acle Straight.
“I just wonder what the priority is here.”
I think we can all agree, nine years to relocate a snail seems a little excessive.
When I visited Kenya last year, a young male rhino needed to be relocated so he could find a mate, and I was invited to watch.
An expert sniper fired a sedative dart into his thigh, two vets checked him over, then a team of volunteers from a wildlife charity helped manoeuvre him into a crate while he was still groggy.
Within two hours, he was on the back of a lorry and heading off to his new home 200 miles away.
So if a 3000kg rhino can be relocated that quickly, why does it take the best part of a decade to find a snail somewhere else to live?
Is it because, when your efficiency has little or no bearing on your pay cheque, there’s little need for urgency in such matters?
Similarly, how many times has your journey been hampered by roadworks which, when you finally edge past them after 48 hours of queuing, have absolutely no one working on them?
Even more infuriatingly, some have been blocked off by the cone department (or whatever they’re called) seven years before the gas/drains/cable team turns up to dig another hole where a different utility company recently finished its two-year project and had just filled it in.
Sometimes, it’s pavement repair and some bright spark has decided that one lane of the road should be blocked off for a century before work even starts.
Grrrr.
I have lost count of the times I mutter — all together now — “Just put the cones/barriers out on the day work starts and pay alternating teams to work 24/7 until it’s done.”
Let’s put it this way. If it was a private road and employees were being made late for work by necessary repairs, it would be finished in a day.
But when the state is involved, it’s snail’s pace all the way.
RUSSIAN-German pianist Igor Levit will attempt a “world first” performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations (me neither) by playing it 840 times in a row – as the composer mischievously instructed in his notes.
In other words, a posh version of Joe Pasquale’s, “I know a song that will get on your nerves.”
COURT’S SURELY BOOBED
PIRATE radio pioneer Roger Howe called his daughter Jenna a “lazy, useless, lying druggie” and disinherited her three years before he died.
But a court has now ruled that she will receive £125,000 to help with her “precarious” finances and pay for breast implants she says she wants as a result of her “body dysmorphia”.
Supplied by Champion NewsRoger Howe disinherited his daughter Jenna three years before he died[/caption]
Champion NewsJenna has now been awarded £125,000 to help pay for breast implants[/caption]
Perhaps Jenna deserves it. Perhaps she doesn’t.
But surely the point is that making a will is always sold to us as a “binding document” of our final wishes.
So if your instructions can be overturned by a court, what’s the point?
SLIM’S SHADY
THE National Pharmacy Association has warned regulators that online sellers are setting targets for clinicians to process more than 20 patients an hour for weight-loss jabs.
Whaaaat? So basically, an injectable medication is being subjected to the same sales goals as, say, a courier who has to deliver a certain number of parcels per hour (hence why they leave them on the doorstep rather than ringing the bell) or a traffic warden issuing tickets?
The shock isn’t just that the NPA has had to flag this.
It’s that it was ever allowed in the first place.
GEN Z’S GONE TO POL POT
WHEN I was a cub reporter in Birmingham (before electricity) I shared a house with university students.
They arrived for the freshers’ week each wearing a Marks & Sparks V-neck and smart trousers which, within three months, had been replaced with scruffy jeans and a T-shirt paying homage to far-Left band Dead Kennedys.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s comic creation Admiral General AladeenGetty – Contributor
Young people have always been more Left-leaning . . . until they start paying their own bills.
So it’s of great surprise that a “deeply worrying” study has revealed more than half of Gen Z are in favour of turning the UK into a dictatorship.
Equally troubling is that around 45 per cent of the male respondents felt that when it comes to giving women equal rights, “things have gone far enough” and we are now “discriminating against men”.
Yes, God forbid that women might enjoy parity after centuries of being discriminated against.
But I digress. Back to dictators.
Do some of today’s youth think we’d be better with a modern-day Hitler or Pol Pot at the helm?
Or did they skip history lessons and think Sacha Baron Cohen’s comic creation Admiral General Aladeen is as bad as it gets?
ALLEGED Sasquatch/ Bigfoot sightings in the US continue to draw crowds to festivals and expeditions aimed at catching sight of the beast.
Matt Moneymaker, host of Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot, says he saw one in Ohio in 1994 and, since, he’s had more than 80,000 “sightings” reported to him.
Yet in an age when cameras can capture fleas mating 74 miles away, we have yet to see a definitive photo of one.
Funny that.
CHEWLY DEEPLY
ROYAL grocer Fortnum & Mason is selling a, gulp, £39.99 pork pie for Valentine’s Day, with “I love you” on top in pastry.
And later in the day, when they’re getting on your nerves, you can change it to: “You’ve been pied off.”
TOYBOY OR NOT TO BE, LADIES
A NEW survey shows that both men and women are more attracted to younger partners.
No s**t, Sherlock.
Teen heartthrob David CassidyGetty – Contributor
InstagramMadonna and her toyboy lover Akeem Morris[/caption]
Study author Professor Paul Eastwick of the University of California, says: “This preference for youth among women will be shocking to many people because, in mixed- gender couples, men tend to be older.”
Not if you’re called Madonna.
Many middle-aged men fester in front of the TV in baggy sportswear (despite not having entered a gym since school) just as their partners are emerging from two decades of motherhood and wanting to live a little.
So who can blame older women for being attracted to someone who matches our energy?
Until we’re chatting over dinner about our childhood penchants for David Cassidy/Spangles/Clackers/Crackerjack/whatever and, brow furrowed, our date replies: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
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