NOTHING irritates drivers stuck in a roadworks queue more than to see a load of workmen stood around doing nothing.
To be fair to this group looking down into a trench in Weymouth there may have been no work going on but there was some discussion taking place as I walked by.
It seemed that something out of sight was broken.
The first man shook his head dubiously, the second just looked grimly into the hole while the third and fourth men were clearly well hacked off.
It was left to the fifth man, the gaffer presumably, to provide a technical summing up for the situation.
He said: “Right then, so we’re all agreed. It’s knackered.”
They were all still looking down into the trench when I went out of earshot but I could hear what motorists thought of the inactivity.
“Get on with it” was one of the more printable comments as I overtook the queue of vehicles on foot.
But they couldn’t get on with it, could they, because it, whatever “it” was, was “knackered”.
My top tips for barbecue beginners
IT’S that barbecue time of year when people vie with each other to take a perfectly good piece of meat and set fire to it.
I’m relatively new to this game having probably only hosted about 30 barbecues in my entire life, so here are a few tips for all you newcomers like me.
Begin by alerting both your nearest neighbours to the barbecue. You’re on good terms with them but this can change rapidly if their lines of clean washing are obscured in rolling clouds of charcoal smoke.
Likewise take great care where you site your barbecue as unleashing a furnace near the wife’s favourite clump of flowers is unlikely to go down too well and any excuse about stray gusts of wind will draw a withering response.
Caution must also be exercised over the quantity of lighter fuel used since beards and eyebrows can be gone in a flash and take weeks to grow back.
Having caused the minimum of garden damage to get the barbecue going always choose a decent quality of meat to cook.
Too much fat in the food will swiftly transform into liquid fat trickling on to the coals and shortly afterwards your food, the barbecue and distressingly large areas of your garden will be obscured by flames.
Always ask your guests hiding in the far corner of the garden how they like their meat done as this displays an air of professionalism and knowledge which helps to allay any suspicion that you have little real idea what you are doing.
Finally when eating the lightly carbonised meal you have prepared always make sure that your doctor’s number is left near a phone for convenient use later in the night.
Let the children have a good look
GIANTS rule this country and you only have to go to a Weymouth building site to see what I mean.
The new community fire station being built off Radipole Lane is largely hemmed in by 10ft hoardings plastered with logos, scheme advertising and comments praising the site’s future interaction with local people.
All well and good and the contractors have even built five windows into the hoardings at head height so that interested passers by can follow what’s going on inside the site.
But in this age of scrupulously equal opportunities for all there are also five much lower windows at child height to allow eager youngsters a view of all the big machines, men in hats and holes in the ground so beloved of children.
The sad thing is that two of the windows are almost totally obscured by regrown hedge and another two offer lines of sight through heavy clumps of weed or mounds of rubble.
The fifth window does manage to offer a tantalizing glimpse of the site but it is again through a rapidly spreading clump of weeds.
So Giants. Fee, fi, fo, fum, clear those windows before children come!
All fun and games but no respect
ANGRY pensioners were unimpressed at the antics of a boy kicking a beach ball about in St Thomas Street, Weymouth.
No one minds a bit of high spirits, but I have to say this boy was careless of property and people in the extreme.
He kicked the ball full blast against a variety of shop windows up and down the street, had no control over where the beach ball went afterwards and seemed oblivious of the glares he was getting from people hit or narrowly missed by the ball.
As I said, all this didn’t go down too well with watching pensioners who quite rightly asked the obvious question. Why didn’t one or both of this boy’s parents make him behave a bit better?
I can’t answer this because both parents either didn’t care or didn’t want to expose themselves to angry public comment.
Neither appeared the whole time I was queueing to use a cashpoint or when I was walking away down the street, and all the while this boy was kicking seven bells out of his beach ball as he darted among pedestrians who clearly felt uncomfortable with what he was doing.
Sure the boy has a right to play but not at the expense of annoying so many ordinary people in a public street.
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