A long time ago I was involved in a scheme, (actually a job rather than a scheme, a scheme sounds like a bid to take over the world) to create a new inner ring road in my home town of Mansfield. Its a long story but it involved a lot of surveying, using a porta cabin on site as my office, dealing with frozen toilets and climbing in the back of Tarmac lorries with a digital thermometer. During one memorable frozen toilet day where even the water from a boiled kettle couldn't unblock it I found myself flicking through a brochure.
It's not that I was looking for anything for the home or deciding on a mail order outfit as the brochure wasun inspiringly called 'The Best Of Street Furniture' and resembled a very posh catalogue. Can you imagine a sexy brochure selling litter bins and park benches? No neither could I but after flicking through the pages I became convinced I needed a powder coated polycarbonate bus shelter in my living room after seeing one seductively displayed outside a chip shop with several models enjoying the moulded seating included in the price.
Really, this was a whole new world, items that you pass everyday being touted as fashion accessories. Young couples tossing litter in a cast iron fake victorian litter bin, business men leaning on the latest urine proof lamp posts taking important calls on their stylish 80's brick telephones. Bollards with names like the Brunel and Churchill when really they looked like they should have been called Dominator and Destroyer due to their shapely curves. Even signs were given suggestive names like the Fingerpost and Header Boards. "I say Derek, did you order those pointing signs for the town centre?", "Certainly did Sir, I ordered a Fingerpost each and we both get a free Header with them, if we order three they will also give us a Shaft, a new retracting bollard they have designed."
Street benches were even better with names like the Recliner and The vandal proof Endurance, some even had names of towns and cities so if you went for a Westminster for example you got an ornate cast iron seat complete with lions and crests held together with oak timbers. If you chose the Mansfield you got two breeze blocks and a floorboard. Actually I was kidding with that one, you actually just got the breeze blocks to sit on.
Litter bins come with big beefy names to suggest they can digest litter at phenomenal rates, why buy a cast iron space saver when you could have instead a fireproof Elephant 150, seriously, a quick look on the web and we still have bins called Buffalo for sale and more awkwardly a dog waste bin called a Neptune, missed a trick there I think, it should have been called the Bad Fido or the Poocrate, not that many seem to be used now days judging by the amount of Poorniments we see hanging around.
Anyway, it seems it all runs out of steam when we get to bins created for cigarettes, they are simply called Ashtrays. How boring.
So in the interest of having nothing better to do I have decided to sex up my house and rename the furniture. So tonight I will sit down on my Cheeky Loungemaster Buttcaresser and watch a little bit of television whilst casting admiring glances over to my new acquisition the Essex EaZY Lay, a table of distinction. They all seem to fit in perfectly with my new Glasgow Tent hallway bus shelter and Jayne seems pleased with her new retractable Rampant bollard I've had installed in the kitchen. All in all I'm pleased with my purchases and I shall be ordering more in the new year.
And if you think today's blog is a load of bollards just wait until tomorrow, I'm almost at the bottom of the barrel.
www.petersmithcollective.co.uk Home Of Foreverbunny and the Impossimals
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