No Brain Count

Shoeville's town council has a very long history of being utter pants, dating right back to the time of the Industrial Revolution when the fat controllers were...ahem..."persuaded" by rich landowners surrounding the town that having a mainline train station in the town and thus train tracks across their land was a bad idea, thus isolating the place for years until sense was seen and a branch line installed. To this day, Shoesville, a county town with a population of almost 200000 and the third largest town in the country remains marginalised when it comes to rail travel.

We no longer have a daily local paper and local news in print is courtesy of the free papers we get through our letter boxes, if you're in an area where these are delivered. We only get them intermittently at home, but at work, which is much closer to town centre, we get them every week. Glancing at the front page of today's Herald & Post I espy the headline "Council's five day wait to reveal fountain bug."

Not Tivoli

Those of you who know Shoesville will be aware of the magnificent plumes of water that rise to all of five feet out of the pavement at the bottom end of the Market Square. Magnificent, doncha think? The council paid almost £100000 for it too, dolts that they are, in an age where painful cuts are being made to essential services,

Anyway, the story under that headline relates to the council waiting five days before it told anyone that the reason they turned the fountain off on Tuesday 14th August was not, as they originally claimed, due to "strong winds", but actually because the results of tests on the water the previous day had revealed higher than normal traces of legionella and e-coli in the water! I can quite believe that there was no evil intent in this cock-up, as blundering idiocy is ingrained into our local leaders (no matter what their political persuasion, I hasten to add) like comedy is ingrained into Liverpool FC.

I was in town on the rather warm Monday when the tests were carried out and walked past the "fountain", where kids were messing about in the water as kids do, and I do recall walking directly through the fountain mist. So far I've not gone down with flu-like symptoms thank Thor, but God knows what the parents of those kids are going through!
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