Archive for July, 2006

Tossing Scaffolding

Something happened to make me quite miserable this morning, and then later, a wonderful reversal made me quiet happy.

Firstly, somebody rang on the door to ask me to move my van. It turned out they were taking down the scaffolding from the side of our house, which has now been there over six months (for a job which took half a day, some time over the winter - we’ve been asking to have the scaffolding removed ever since).

These same scaffolders came last week. They didn’t announce themselves, Gill just heard some noises outside the house, went out to look and there they were, taking the scaffolding down. She asked if they were going to fill the holes in our walls which they’d drilled to attach the scaffolding and was told “not our problem. That’s the builders job”. When Gill asked how the builders were supposed to get up there without any scaffolding she was told to fuck off, then the guy dropped a piece of scaffolding on the floor, making a hole in the pavement, and they left.

So today, we again asked how the holes were going to be filled, and were given the same answer and similar levels of rudeness. When I pointed out the hole in the pavement, the guy’s answer was “not my problem, it’s the council’s problem”. We came back inside, seething but not really knowing what we could do about it.

So it was really nice when, half an hour later, all of the scaffolders except for the foul-mouthed one called at our door again. This time it was to apologise for his behaviour, and to say that they had spoken to the builders who would be back with a ladder to fix the holes. They said “sorry about him, he’s a tosser, nobody likes him, but he’s the gaffer’s son so there’s not much we can do”.

Gill said “oh well, I’m sure if he carrys on that way, sooner or later he’ll have an accident”. The scaffolders smiled conspiritorially.

Flickr Me Do

I’ve had a flickr account for quite a while now, but only recently have I started making proper use of it. The life section of my website is still reserved for photo-sets, and I’m trying to find time to build myself a professional photography portfolio website, but Flickr is damned handy for all those one-off photos which I would normally spend an age making blog entries here for. In the future, I’ll try to blog them as I post them to Flickr, but in the meantime below are a few which I’ve uploaded to Flickr but not here (you might also want to check the FAD blog, as I quite often post stuff there and not here). Click any picture for the larger version:

Guess Where?

21st Century Bar Scene

Leeds Art Gallery - Paranoia exhibition

Paranoia

The Lovers

View from Psalter Lane

Sheffield Mayfest

View from Crookesmoor across Sheffield

Rock the Casbah

Cash for England

21st Birthday

Seminordlap

Elsecar Diptych

Sheffield Skyline

Magnetic Floating Bed

I already have a bed which looks like it’s floating, but I’d almost be willing to pay €1.2 million for one of these!

David Beckham vs. The World

The Guardian Diary has recently run a series on poor punctuation and phrasing in public signs and elsewhere (e.g. “Drive carefully squirrels” - a sign obviously aimed at the large number of irresponsible squirrel drivers). So I was ticked to read this article on the Guardian website, which contains the following sentence (referring to David Beckham’s captaincy of the England soccer team):

The 31-year-old thanked former caretaker coach Peter Taylor for giving him the armband in November 2000 in a friendly against Italy, Sven-Goran Eriksson, his team-mates, the fans and the media.

Some friendly! I know sometimes it seems as if the whole world is against Beckham, but at least Sven and his team-mates have offered him occasional support since November 2000.