Office blocks to lift the spirit

I note with a real sense of jubilation and relief that the new development outside East Croydon station (pearl amongst commuting stations) will include ‘Grade ‘A’ office space for 500 people’.

Thank God for that! At last. After all, if there’s one thing Croydon needs, it’s more office space. Some skyscrapers would be nice, for instance - some tower blocks and some office blocks to lift the spirit and gladden the heart.

Perhaps we can finally make ‘Croydon – the quaint, rural village’ the thing of the past. Perhaps we can finally banish our town’s reputation as a bucolic backwater and instead lurch, sorry, leap into the ‘white heat’ of the twenty-first century.

Gone will be Hobbledehoys, the Croydon village blacksmith. Away with Gristlegums, the village butcher, and Silas Snout, the wheezing village tobacconist. Away with PC Humble, the village copper; perhaps now our notoriously crime-free idyll can embrace the kind of fashionable crime levels you would expect from a twenty-first century metropolis!

As for the ducks in Croydon village pond, they can sod off as well. Let’s build some sort of dual carriageway through the village green, that’ll settle their hash (as they used to say in ‘Warlord’).

Vive la concrete revolution! More offices means more ‘thinking outside the box’, doesn’t it? And that can only be good, can’t it?

Can’t it?

Low Quality of Clouds Around Here

When water droplets condense, notoriously, something interesting happens. It’s possible that birds see clouds as nothing more than traffic jams. Birds are wrong.

However, if the sky is nature’s monitor screen – and I think we can all agree it is – then winter is a hell of a dull screen saver.

After all, one of the great pointless pleasures in life is to piddle about staring at archipelagos of clouds and imagining in them the faces of traffic wardens we have loved, or favourite doorkeys, or different parts of your own intestine. We've all done it.

You’d think that because winter, with its featureless grey skies, precludes such distractions, we’d all focus instead – ironically - on higher things; or at least on more obvious things. But as everyone’s too knackered, cold and broke to concentrate on anything other than sleep, and perhaps the odd slice of cake, higher things, whatever they may be, don't stand a chance.

So conjure up elusive spirits: cumulus, stratus, nimbus, cirrus...