The Curse of The Seagulls
Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2006 11:08 am
LIGHT FANTASTIC
Seagulls invented superglue. The evidence is deposited on my car at frequent intervals. It sticks like nothing else in the world, to paint-work, glass, stainless steel or chrome.
Some glues are said to contain fish elements, but this isn’t one of them; the gulls around here have never been to sea and probably never eaten fish; they just peck around the neighbourhood land-fill tip and eat anything they find. Sort of like computers: crap in – crap out!
That’s what caused the big traffic snarl-up on the ring-road.
Have you looked at a seagull perched on some lofty vantage point? I can visualise the one that initiated this mayhem: standing on the lamp high on its metal pole overlooking the dual-carriageway, seagull legs straight and stiff, head stuck up on its arrogant neck. If a gull could spit it would probably have done it on the passing cars, out of pure superiority. Not being much good at spitting it did the other thing and dumped a generous portion of poo, right over the light-sensor that switched the lamp on and off. The lamp, now convinced that it was permanent night-time, switched itself on and stayed that way. It was two weeks before the foreman at the Maintenance Yard got instructions to do something about it.
“Gerry, take your cherry-picker and go out to lamp 63 on the ring-road. It’s been on for days,” said bulky foreman Alfie Hinds to Gerry Walton, a grey-haired veteran of highway servicing.
“Need a safety man for that and Fred’s off sick,” Gerry cautioned.
Alfie looked around and considered his depleted staffing, “You’ll have to take young Sid here as safety man.”
Gerry was not attracted by the idea, “Young Sid’s neither safe nor man,” he objected.
“He can stand at the bottom, same as anybody else,” Alf directed, “the job’s got to be done. Probably the usual dollop of gull guano to wipe off.”
Young Sid gave old Gerry a quizzical look and mouthed ‘Gull guano?’
“Seagull shit to you son,” Gerry explained.
So the fifty-five-year-old Gerry and sixteen-year-old Sid, hitched the cherry-picker to a van and drove out to lamp 63 on the ring-road. Sure enough, the lamp still shone.
They halted with the cherry-picker below the lamp, to the consternation of traffic following them on the ‘no stopping’ clearway. Sid was sent to set up a warning sign and candy-striped cones; traffic on the dual carriageway being squeezed into a single lane rapidly built a tail-back. Gerry started the little petrol motor that powered the hydraulics on the cherry-picker; Sid enjoyed the feeling of power frustrating the traffic had given him.
Gerry climbed into the working platform, operated levers and raised himself to the level of the lamp. Sid watched and wished that he could ride in the machine. It was just good luck that he was watching Gerry and not doing his job keeping an eye on approaching vehicles, because as the veteran reached across to clean the sensor he croaked in sudden pain, grabbed at his chest and collapsed onto the floor of the platform.
Sid tried to shout above the unbroken rumble of passing traffic, “Gerry! Gerry, are you alright?” Which Gerry obviously wasn’t. Realising he needed to lower the platform, Sid inspected the duplicate controls at the base of the cherry-picker; there was a selection of levers, each with something written beside it. He needed to identify the lever to pull to bring the platform down. He read the lever names, but they were all written in German and Sid had studied French at school, and he hadn’t been very good at that.
The river of vehicles roared, groaned or rumbled by, the drivers knowing nothing of the collapsed man above, the inner lane concerned only with pushing into the outer and the outer concerned with not letting anyone get in front of them.
Being a typical teen-ager Sid was possessed of a mobile-phone and the life-motto, ‘when in doubt, phone’. So he did – for an ambulance.
By the time the sound of the Ambulance’s siren reached the scene of crisis, the traffic jam extended half-a-mile back to the preceding roundabout, where obstinate drivers trying to force their way around had successfully blocked every entry and exit.
Somehow, the flashing lights and the wee-wah horns performed their miracle and a path opened up. The ambulance arrived followed by a police car.
“He’s up there,” safety-man Sid informed the rescuers.
“Can’t you get him down?” was the obvious enquiry.
“Nope,” was the simple answer.
“We need a ladder,” a constable declared with Holmesian logic, and gambled life and limb amongst the traffic stream, for he had seen a ladder as they had cut through the conglomeration on their way to the scene. Meanwhile, the second policeman radioed for the Fire Service to come to the rescue.
The elementary constable soon reached an open-back truck of unappealing condition with an extending ladder set against the tailboard and extending skyward above the cab, secured by a few turns of grubby rope. To the driver he proclaimed,
“Emergency! We need your ladder.”
In a peculiarly accented manner the driver replied, “Ladder. Yes. O.K.”
Further to his enquiries the constable asked, “You a builder?”
In the same accented voice the driver replied, “Builder. O.K.”
In sudden hope the constable asked, “You a cherry-picker worker?”
The driver smiled this time and said, “Cherry picker. O.K.”
By the power of his uniform the constable guided the unappealing truck through the slow-moving stream to park behind the elevated platform. Arriving there the constable signalled urgently for the driver to come and operate the controls of the cherry-picker and the truck driver seemed strangely reluctant and slow to understand. It dawned on the policeman, remembering the accent, that maybe English was not the man’s first language.
He pointed, he gestured, he said things like, “You work levers! You work! Cherry-picker. You cherry-picker worker.”
The driver spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness and said, “I pick cherries, good worker.”
They went to plan B and set the ladder in place. A para-medic ascended to attend to the fallen veteran.
A Fire Service rescue vehicle arrived and the team leader surveyed the situation. he asked, “Can’t you lower the platform?”
Young Sid and two constables answered, “Nope.”
The driver of the unappealing truck pointed at the Fire Service vehicle and said,
“You have ladder. I go now.”
He called his mate from the truck, collapsed their ladder and whisked it away.
A bit shaken, the rescuers stirred and set the Fire departments ladder in place against the lofted platform. A constable commented,
“Thought you’d have a fire engine with a rising platform.”
Which received the reply that the nearest machine of that sort was at a bigger Station twenty miles away.
Young Sidney’s brain sparked, “There’s another cherry-picker at the yard.”
The constable reasoned, “We don’t need another cherry-picker, just someone to work this one. Phone the yard, lad, and get someone out here.”
Sid dialled the number, the foreman answered and the constable explained the situation.
“Charlie Glass is the other operator. He’s out t’other side of town at the moment. I’ll speak to him and call you back,” bulky Alf offered.
Charlie responded to the radio in his vehicle cab and told Alf,
“It’s no good my going out to that thing, I’ve never used it. It’s all vorsprungdurktechnik or some bloody clever German confabulation. I wouldn’t make head nor tail of it. You’ll have to get Gerry’s mate Fred, he’ll be able to work it.”
“Fred’s off with the flu,” Alf reminded him.
Practical if unsympathetic, Charlie pronounced, “You’ll just have to drag him out of bed then.”
Back at the crisis scene, constable number two was showing interest in the unappealing truck and its crew – an interest noticed by the scrutinised individuals.
The truck shot forward suddenly, trying to pass between the erected ladder and the constantly passing traffic. The various rescuers leapt for safety, the ladder was less fortunate and was knocked sideways, severely bending lower portions which made it unfit to stand up again.
The truck roared off up the open dual-carriageway, masking itself in a stinking cloud of exhaust smoke so that the frustrated constable was unable to note the registration number. He chewed his lip, thinking sadly of illegal immigrants, unroadworthy vehicles, lack of insurance and licence.
So it was that the street where Fred lived had the excitement of a police car arriving with lights flashing and two-tone horns blaring, to squeal to a rubber-burning stop outside of Fred’s house. Front doors opened and curtains twitched as the audience watched Fred being hurried from his house into the car and driven away with the blues and twos.
It took Fred about twenty seconds to lower the cherry-picker platform. He took a look at his old workmate, asked the para-medic for a prognosis then said to the police-car driver, “Can I go home now?” Which he did.
Gerry was stowed in the ambulance and hurried off to hospital.
Young Sid stayed with the van and cherry-picker until a relief driver came and took them all back to the yard.
The Fire Service and the police went away.
The traffic flowed normally again and the lamp still shone.
Seagulls invented superglue. The evidence is deposited on my car at frequent intervals. It sticks like nothing else in the world, to paint-work, glass, stainless steel or chrome.
Some glues are said to contain fish elements, but this isn’t one of them; the gulls around here have never been to sea and probably never eaten fish; they just peck around the neighbourhood land-fill tip and eat anything they find. Sort of like computers: crap in – crap out!
That’s what caused the big traffic snarl-up on the ring-road.
Have you looked at a seagull perched on some lofty vantage point? I can visualise the one that initiated this mayhem: standing on the lamp high on its metal pole overlooking the dual-carriageway, seagull legs straight and stiff, head stuck up on its arrogant neck. If a gull could spit it would probably have done it on the passing cars, out of pure superiority. Not being much good at spitting it did the other thing and dumped a generous portion of poo, right over the light-sensor that switched the lamp on and off. The lamp, now convinced that it was permanent night-time, switched itself on and stayed that way. It was two weeks before the foreman at the Maintenance Yard got instructions to do something about it.
“Gerry, take your cherry-picker and go out to lamp 63 on the ring-road. It’s been on for days,” said bulky foreman Alfie Hinds to Gerry Walton, a grey-haired veteran of highway servicing.
“Need a safety man for that and Fred’s off sick,” Gerry cautioned.
Alfie looked around and considered his depleted staffing, “You’ll have to take young Sid here as safety man.”
Gerry was not attracted by the idea, “Young Sid’s neither safe nor man,” he objected.
“He can stand at the bottom, same as anybody else,” Alf directed, “the job’s got to be done. Probably the usual dollop of gull guano to wipe off.”
Young Sid gave old Gerry a quizzical look and mouthed ‘Gull guano?’
“Seagull shit to you son,” Gerry explained.
So the fifty-five-year-old Gerry and sixteen-year-old Sid, hitched the cherry-picker to a van and drove out to lamp 63 on the ring-road. Sure enough, the lamp still shone.
They halted with the cherry-picker below the lamp, to the consternation of traffic following them on the ‘no stopping’ clearway. Sid was sent to set up a warning sign and candy-striped cones; traffic on the dual carriageway being squeezed into a single lane rapidly built a tail-back. Gerry started the little petrol motor that powered the hydraulics on the cherry-picker; Sid enjoyed the feeling of power frustrating the traffic had given him.
Gerry climbed into the working platform, operated levers and raised himself to the level of the lamp. Sid watched and wished that he could ride in the machine. It was just good luck that he was watching Gerry and not doing his job keeping an eye on approaching vehicles, because as the veteran reached across to clean the sensor he croaked in sudden pain, grabbed at his chest and collapsed onto the floor of the platform.
Sid tried to shout above the unbroken rumble of passing traffic, “Gerry! Gerry, are you alright?” Which Gerry obviously wasn’t. Realising he needed to lower the platform, Sid inspected the duplicate controls at the base of the cherry-picker; there was a selection of levers, each with something written beside it. He needed to identify the lever to pull to bring the platform down. He read the lever names, but they were all written in German and Sid had studied French at school, and he hadn’t been very good at that.
The river of vehicles roared, groaned or rumbled by, the drivers knowing nothing of the collapsed man above, the inner lane concerned only with pushing into the outer and the outer concerned with not letting anyone get in front of them.
Being a typical teen-ager Sid was possessed of a mobile-phone and the life-motto, ‘when in doubt, phone’. So he did – for an ambulance.
By the time the sound of the Ambulance’s siren reached the scene of crisis, the traffic jam extended half-a-mile back to the preceding roundabout, where obstinate drivers trying to force their way around had successfully blocked every entry and exit.
Somehow, the flashing lights and the wee-wah horns performed their miracle and a path opened up. The ambulance arrived followed by a police car.
“He’s up there,” safety-man Sid informed the rescuers.
“Can’t you get him down?” was the obvious enquiry.
“Nope,” was the simple answer.
“We need a ladder,” a constable declared with Holmesian logic, and gambled life and limb amongst the traffic stream, for he had seen a ladder as they had cut through the conglomeration on their way to the scene. Meanwhile, the second policeman radioed for the Fire Service to come to the rescue.
The elementary constable soon reached an open-back truck of unappealing condition with an extending ladder set against the tailboard and extending skyward above the cab, secured by a few turns of grubby rope. To the driver he proclaimed,
“Emergency! We need your ladder.”
In a peculiarly accented manner the driver replied, “Ladder. Yes. O.K.”
Further to his enquiries the constable asked, “You a builder?”
In the same accented voice the driver replied, “Builder. O.K.”
In sudden hope the constable asked, “You a cherry-picker worker?”
The driver smiled this time and said, “Cherry picker. O.K.”
By the power of his uniform the constable guided the unappealing truck through the slow-moving stream to park behind the elevated platform. Arriving there the constable signalled urgently for the driver to come and operate the controls of the cherry-picker and the truck driver seemed strangely reluctant and slow to understand. It dawned on the policeman, remembering the accent, that maybe English was not the man’s first language.
He pointed, he gestured, he said things like, “You work levers! You work! Cherry-picker. You cherry-picker worker.”
The driver spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness and said, “I pick cherries, good worker.”
They went to plan B and set the ladder in place. A para-medic ascended to attend to the fallen veteran.
A Fire Service rescue vehicle arrived and the team leader surveyed the situation. he asked, “Can’t you lower the platform?”
Young Sid and two constables answered, “Nope.”
The driver of the unappealing truck pointed at the Fire Service vehicle and said,
“You have ladder. I go now.”
He called his mate from the truck, collapsed their ladder and whisked it away.
A bit shaken, the rescuers stirred and set the Fire departments ladder in place against the lofted platform. A constable commented,
“Thought you’d have a fire engine with a rising platform.”
Which received the reply that the nearest machine of that sort was at a bigger Station twenty miles away.
Young Sidney’s brain sparked, “There’s another cherry-picker at the yard.”
The constable reasoned, “We don’t need another cherry-picker, just someone to work this one. Phone the yard, lad, and get someone out here.”
Sid dialled the number, the foreman answered and the constable explained the situation.
“Charlie Glass is the other operator. He’s out t’other side of town at the moment. I’ll speak to him and call you back,” bulky Alf offered.
Charlie responded to the radio in his vehicle cab and told Alf,
“It’s no good my going out to that thing, I’ve never used it. It’s all vorsprungdurktechnik or some bloody clever German confabulation. I wouldn’t make head nor tail of it. You’ll have to get Gerry’s mate Fred, he’ll be able to work it.”
“Fred’s off with the flu,” Alf reminded him.
Practical if unsympathetic, Charlie pronounced, “You’ll just have to drag him out of bed then.”
Back at the crisis scene, constable number two was showing interest in the unappealing truck and its crew – an interest noticed by the scrutinised individuals.
The truck shot forward suddenly, trying to pass between the erected ladder and the constantly passing traffic. The various rescuers leapt for safety, the ladder was less fortunate and was knocked sideways, severely bending lower portions which made it unfit to stand up again.
The truck roared off up the open dual-carriageway, masking itself in a stinking cloud of exhaust smoke so that the frustrated constable was unable to note the registration number. He chewed his lip, thinking sadly of illegal immigrants, unroadworthy vehicles, lack of insurance and licence.
So it was that the street where Fred lived had the excitement of a police car arriving with lights flashing and two-tone horns blaring, to squeal to a rubber-burning stop outside of Fred’s house. Front doors opened and curtains twitched as the audience watched Fred being hurried from his house into the car and driven away with the blues and twos.
It took Fred about twenty seconds to lower the cherry-picker platform. He took a look at his old workmate, asked the para-medic for a prognosis then said to the police-car driver, “Can I go home now?” Which he did.
Gerry was stowed in the ambulance and hurried off to hospital.
Young Sid stayed with the van and cherry-picker until a relief driver came and took them all back to the yard.
The Fire Service and the police went away.
The traffic flowed normally again and the lamp still shone.