DEATH TO CAR ALARMS
Car alarms - should they be banned? Should the inventors of car alarms be named and shamed? Should people who fit car alarms to their vehicles be locked in steel boxes full of screaming baboons and slapped around with live sharks?
Excuse me, I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. I was kept awake by certain questions: What is the point of setting an alarm on your car if you are sleeping where you can't hear it? Of what advantage is it to your personal security to have your vehicle braying to itself all night long? Are you a steaming moron? These questions troubled me. Also: In what interesting and prolonged way are you about to die? That was my favourite question.
Now, this is Middle Street I live in. This is the city centre, you are not meant to park unless you are a resident. Whoever owned that vehicle clearly wasn't resident, even staying here; the whole street could hear that demented scream. This is adding insult to injury. Was he thinking perhaps that the friendly residents would, on being awakened by his alarm, rush to the aid of his property and defend it from robbers? He was lucky that we didn't rush out to torch the bloody thing .
It almost happened a couple of years back. A nice shiny black BMW, squalling away the small hours in the voice of an infant giant. In anger I actually called the Guards - who of course said they could do nothing. This I quite naturally read as official permission to take the law into my own hands. I stopped it.
No, not with a crowbar. Sadly. I actually found the cause. It was making all this fuss because its bonnet hadn't been properly shut. A little pressure, that's all it took, and blessed silence fell. Good. Good? I have been kept awake - and not just awake, but irritated half to madness - through most of the night because some asshole didn't shut his bonnet properly?
I'm a cartoonist, I carry art materials. I took out my white-out pen and wrote "NEVER LET THIS HAPPEN AGAIN" across his windscreen. Backwards, so it could be read easily from inside. I'm thoughtful that way.
A neighbour who does lithographic printing had a similar idea. She wrote a polite note explaining how this tocsin had been sounding all night, and attached it to the windscreen - with her industrial strength glue. Cruel? He got away lightly. She uses acids too, she could have etched her note. Let this be a warning. Don't leave your car to cry the night away in Middle Street. Not if you wish to recognise it when you return. Our neighbourhood is full of artists.
Speaking of the street, a question to the City Council and all the cable companies. Are you finished? Have you dug up and re-laid our road enough times now, or do you want to give it another go? How much longer can we look forward to being woken at eight by the merry call of the pneumatic drill and the angle grinder? It seems like it's been in some stage of reconstruction, or re-reconstruction, for over a month now. And after all this, how come DSL is still not coming on stream for another year? I just ask out of curiosity. Also I'd like to know, what was it you missed the first time that you had to rip it up again? Is it a bit like bungled surgery, did you leave a clamp inside? A JCB? A construction worker?
Maybe my neighbours buried a Merc in there.