Monday, 15 December 2008

Observing urban drivers in their natural habitat

Short trip I was walking up the road this afternoon and heard a car start up nearby. The driver pulled out of the drive, rather closely in front of an oncoming car, then after a short distance drew in alongside a post box. I watched a woman get out and post a letter. She was clearly able-bodied. She got back in, turned the car round and headed back the way she came. I thought, well I suppose you might do that if you're off somewhere. So I turned round to see if she was. But she drove straight back into the driveway of the house.

I crossed the road to take this pic of the house, from beside the post box. It's about 75 metres away I reckon.

15 Dec 2008 20:30:52 | Vignettes

2 Comments

Did you go and ask the lady why she took the car rather than walked the 75 meter, given global warming and the like ??

Posted by: Jan Steyaert | Tuesday, 16 December 2008 at 20:37

I recognise where that is- hardly surprising huh dad? :p xxx

Posted by: Shauna Harris | Wednesday, 17 December 2008 at 23:55

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Blinged-up houses I think I may detect a reduction in the number of houses blinged-up with lights in my area this year, but there may be greater intensity of negative feeling about the habit generally. Here's Graham Norwood in the Independent with a researched article including the tale of Vic Moszczynski from Berkshire. Following a court injunction in 2006, Moszczynski's routine festooning of his house with yuletide kitsch was restricted to '300 lights, four seven-foot-high inflatable cartoon characters, eight 30-foot-long strips of rope lights and two illuminations in the front garden.' Very subdued and sensitively modest I'm sure. Meanwhile BBC Radio 4's PM Blog has recently been playfully tracking '"bad" Christmas decorations that we love'. And there's a book, Christmas houses, published last year. Mostly this is harmless enough, although as Norwood points out there have been numerous cases requiring mediation and much unpleasantness experienced. One can only sympathise with our authorities when they are expected to deal with discrepencies in taste. I also wonder how far the attitudes expressed for example at Houseblinger.com or Uglychristmaslights.com are from, say, the kind of comment you can read at Rotten neighbors (access to which should perhaps be restricted to authorised sociologists wearing protective theories). So anyway, there are two sets of questions. The first is a familiar one about how online technologies facilitate expression of views that otherwise might not find a channel, and the moral ifs and buts of the visibility of contested taste. The other, related questions are to do with privacy and the rights to individual self-expression around the boundary of the home, which I prodded at a few years back.
PREVIOUS POST
A new class equality duty? According to Regen.net, 10 Downing Street is considering a duty on public bodies to address inequalities created by class divides. The suggestion was put forward today by Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Obviously there will be raging debates in arriving at definitions and distinctions, but this could be radical policy-making in action. Class-related issues like parental occupation and postcode are stronger predictors of life chances than race and gender.

Kevin Harris

Search

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments