AHC             Nottingham follows London

The capital city of most countries leads the provinces in ideas and progress. London, of course, led the other cities around the country in matters good and bad. In some cases the “progress” neither led nor followed; this is probably true for Nottingham. The pre and post war fogs, the trams and then the trolley buses, followed by the modern styles of trams with the chaos of new layouts to road junctions causing apoplexy to visiting coach drivers. In other area too, Nottingham seemed to duplicate London: Victoria Station, Parliament Street, and The Theatre Royal. Nottingham even mimicked London by getting a few bombs during WW2. But now the City Council seems to have decided to mimic a rather different facet of London.

“The Old Dun Cow Caught Fire” was probably a ditty about a pub in The Old Kent Road. “Dun” of course, is just another name for “brown” (the word "dung" and "dun" are probably related). And “Cow” has quite a few meanings. There is the four-legged beast that moos at you in a field. It is also the name of any large female mammal such as a whale. And, of course, it is an acronym popularised by Alf Garnet for “cussed old woman” when the gentleman has a slight difference of opinion with his truly beloved.

But I believe the Council concentrates an another meaning. That is the one given to any mechanical device that fails to operate as it was thought to be designed. A supermarket trolley is a good example when it decides that it will only go in the direction other that the one in which it is being pushed.   With its tiny wheels, a wheelie bin falls into the last category.

Now, the Noble Burghers of Nottingham have decided to play a game with the punters who pay their expenses and keep the whole show on the road. Rational souls, like me, would expect that you put the green stuff in the green bin and the rest of the trash in the brown bin. But to keep us on our toes they have reversed the colours.

With the type of cow that moos at you, you put green stuff in at the front and get brown stuff out of the other end with your daily pinta coming out somewhere in the middle . There seems to be a similarity between the moo-cow and the brown wheelie bins. If you fill a brown bin with grass cuttings and leave it for a week in the recent hot weather, it seems to do what the mooing type of cow does, except it doesn’t expel the gung out of the other end; it just stores it

You know that haystacks have a habit of catching fire spontaneously when they are badly designed. This is due to the same sort fermentation process that takes place in brown wheelie bins. Composting grass gets similarly hot. Try putting your hand into a wheelie bin full of grass cuttings after a three-day storage. You will remove it a lot faster than you put it in!

But back to the story, the City Council seem to want a Nottingham ‘Old Dun Cow’ to catch fire. This would really put them on the map and make a good story for The Nottingham Evening Post, to boot.

Now what about road humps? Again Nottingham seems to be copying London. In Hampton on Thames where I hail from, the London Borough of Richmond seems to bear the same grudge against motorists as does Nottingham.  However, the subject has been given some thought by local philosophers, and they have concluded that there is a sort of perverted logic in Nottingham’s method of torturing motorists and ambulance passengers. Reasoning along the lines that no Englishman can be as evil as the evidence suggests, brings up the thought that there must be a deeper reason for the destructive effect of the road humps. The conclusion was therefore made that the Burghers of the City have decided to make all road heights the same by installing a bump to match every pothole; and here in Wollaton Park, potholes are what they made the road from.

Naïve people like me would have thought that it was easier to fill in the potholes, but we must accept that the reasoning of our betters is of a higher order than we hoi polloi can manage.

Having established the principle of humps on roadways, the City Hospital has taken the idea one stage further and installed them on pavements to curb the speed of wheelchair pushers. A little way from the North entrance to the ward block, there is a hump on the pavement. I waited in my car for over half an hour recently and observed just how effective that particular pavement-hump is. Four of five wheelchair pushers slowed considerably as they approached the hump, in exactly the same way that car drivers slow right down on the approach side of a hump, only to accelerate after crossing the mini-Alp. But there the similarity ends; the wheelchairs did not emit a trail of black smoke as the left the Alpine scene.

Written Summer 2004 by C D Campbell