Why Do Policemen Lick Their Balls?

Sorry, ladies, this is a terrible boys' joke. Your boys all know the punchline. In fact, it cropped up on 'I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue' the other week, when they were talking about chat-up lines that might be used by dogs … Oh damn, I've got it wrong: I didn't mean to say 'policemen', I meant to say 'dogs': "why do dogs lick their balls?" The punchline, as all boys know, is "Because they can!".

What I meant to say about policemen is "Why do policemen park on the pavement?" What confused me is that the answer is, of course, the same: "Because they can!" Now they're very busy, and it's a very hard job, and I/you wouldn't like to have to do some of the things they have to do. And they can't plan a lot of it at all. So why do things like this upset us so much?

Well, it's because we suspect that this isn't one of those urgent, unplanned situations, where they were trying to rush some psychopath into a cell, or pick up some urgent piece of equipment en route to rescue some terrified woman. We suspect that they're doing it because they can; because nobody can stop them, like they stop us. And we're jealous. If only we could break the law when we have an urgent need to, without some pecksniff jobsworth taping a ticket to our windscreen.

It's the tension between our feeling cowed by minor laws, and our suspicion that they don't apply to people in authority. I'm sure we've all been in a group when a police car passes with its blue lights flashing: someone in the group is pretty nearly bound to say "I expect they're late for their teabreak", aren't they? It's because we have a statistical understanding of the world: although we rarely overrun our parking time, we often get a ticket; although the police rarely struggle with psychopaths (and I repeat, I don't envy them their task when they do), they often park on the pavement.

I used to walk up and down Eltham High Street a lot, late in the evening. Police cars would sometimes pass me, going, in my judgement, much too fast. They were only going a few miles at most, so however fast they drove, it was only going to save a few seconds. And it was so dangerous. Not because they were bad drivers, I'm sure they weren't (and aren't). I'm sure they were driving well within their competence. It's the rest of us who couldn't cope with it. It only needed one of us to be stupid and there was likely to be a disaster. So I always wrote a letter of complaint. And the Met did its PR thing and tried to smooth the ruffled feathers. But it went on. And I continued to write my letters.

They don't do it now. Well, so rarely that I'm inclined to think those occasions might indeed be exceptional. But I don't think it had much to do with my letters. I think it was because the accident rate was becoming apparent to the public.

We need brave policemen who are willing to risk making mistakes, who are willing to shoot the wrong man, or bang the wrong head. Which is why we need them to be highly disciplined and well-officered.

I'm sure the parking shown in these pictures was well-justified. These pictures were both taken outside Eltham Police Station. The night picture was taken at 11.09pm on the 8^th of July, and the daytime one at 7.24pm on the 10^th.

Truck Drivers Find Eltham Diverting

When I see something unusual and entertaining, I take a quick photo with my phone. If it sticks in my mind, I come back the next morning with my camera and take a proper photo. Well, this time you're stuck with the phone photo, because the Council must have spotted me taking it and moved like lightning to avoid further embarrassment. Councils moving like lightning may seem an unlikely concept, but it does happen when there's embarrassment at stake. Anyway, I took the photo you see at about nine in the evening, and the signs were gone at seven the following morning: amazing!

The main sign, which you may just be able to read, says "No access for LGV follow diversion". (LGV, by the way, is European for HGV.) This sign, you will see, is parked on the War Memorial outside the Parish Church on Eltham Hill. (As a digression, we might pause to note that at a time when we are giving new consideration on how to honour servicemen killed in foreign wars, our Council dumps traffic signs on our War Memorial.) The other sign, which you can't read in this photo, says "Diversion ends". It is in front of the traffic lights at the main junction: less than the length of two LGVs away! Could this short stretch of hill have similar properties to Harry Potter's Platform 9 ¾ at King's Cross. Have LGVs been diverted into some other dimension? Is Eltham the Bermuda Triangle of the LGV world? Or did the council put up a nonsense set of signs? What do you think?

You're probably unpleasantly aware of the amazing abilities traffic engineers have with road signs. Like me, you will have made countless journeys desperately following diversion signs, only to find, at the most stressful junction, that you missed one. How do they do that so consistently? They must learn it in school, mustn't they? On the Traffic Engineers' course there must be a module on the subject: something like 'Application of the Poincaré Duality to Ensure Discontinuity in any Directed Transversal of an N-point Topology'. Or to put that in old money, they can get all of us lost all of the time; which we already knew. Put not your faith in traffic engineers: study a map beforehand.

They also think they know where you ought to be going. 'For Stoke, follow Newcastle' they say. So you do. And where do you end up? Well, Newcastle, of course. Then what? You start to follow 'Other Routes', in the forlorn hope that Stoke must be one of them. But it isn't: in what seems like no time at all, you come across a sign saying 'For Stoke, follow Newcastle'.

Then there are the signs so confounding, I hesitate to blame them on traffic engineers. There is a sign on the A102(M), just beyond Kidbrooke, which says "For the Dome, follow Blackwall Tunnel"! Now that must have been put there by Poplar pirates, hoping to lure out-of-town pop fans north of the Thames. Or perhaps the traffic engineers are still hoping to extend the Dome's failure by preventing people getting there by car.

Further down the A102(M), there is a sign so amazing, it must have won prizes at Traffic Engineering Conventions: "For the Dome", it reads," follow the Dome". This actually manages to produce a diversion inside my head! What can it possibly mean? Is it just deeply insulting, or have I missed something?

Of course, there are probably more prosaic explanations: where I started from, the signs on Eltham Hill, is really a question of councils having left and right hands, and the one not knowing what the other is doing. You see, a water main burst in Well Hall Road, and the council put up two diversion routes: one going north, and one going south. The left hand must have done the one going north, and the right hand the one going south. One sign is the beginning of one, and the other is the end of the other, if you see what I mean.

Question is: was it the council's left or right hand that profaned the War Memorial?

Alien Slavery in Eltham

Mike Slavin May 2008

I go to the station every morning to pick up the free paper. It’s not just that I’m Scottish, it forces me down and up the stairs with a mile walk in between. At my age, I call that exercise. One of my young friends told me he’d seen me one morning: “You were in your track suit. You must have been going to your exercise, or coming back.” “No”, I said, “I wasn’t going or coming – that was the exercise.” And there’s another plus: I like to go to a fringe theatre event every week, and the Metro has, by far, the best London fringe listing I’ve found anywhere.
Anyway, there I was, the other morning, on my way to the station, when I spotted an abandoned parking cone on the edge of the pavement.

Hardly very interesting; roadwork gangs abandon equipment right, left and centre along there. The Gas Board (which I think has now moved to its holiday gite and calls itself ‘Le Board de Gaz’ these days) has been sniffing for a leak there for years. Safety barriers are constantly being blown into the road. And the Water Board (or is it the ‘Wasserborden’ now?) has cleared away its recent workings, leaving only a very large pump behind on the pavement. So what’s to worry about one little parking cone?

Well, as I got quite close, it appeared to have been run over, but someone had drawn scars and stitch-mark over it. I stopped to have a better look, and, do you know, on the side pointed towards the road, there was what you see in the picture below.

(If you eyes are as aged as mine, the writing at the top says ‘ALIEN SLAVE’ and the speaking bubble says ‘hello, handsome’, an obvious reference to me.) Fancy someone taking all that trouble just to bring a smile to my lips first thing in the morning.

I’m not myself much impressed with what is nowadays called ‘Installation Art’. I reckon an artist has to show a bit of technical skill. Someone getting up in the morning, realising they haven’t done anything for the exhibition, and displaying their unmade bed just leaves me cold. Or rather, thinking “There’s one born every minute”.

But this little cone impressed me: this wasn’t to get another million out of Saatchi, this was just to cheer me up. Which it did. Quite made my day, it did.

I sometimes walk up the High Street, contemplating with some equanimity a law which would allow police marksmen to practice on the little tykes who deface the shops. They just make things a tiny bit worse, but they do it day after day after day. And it simultaneously depresses and angers me.

But this little Alien Slave added to the gaiety of life. I could put up with something like that every morning. Do it again, son, I can’t wait!