Friday 4 March 2016

Heaping Pelion upon Ossa


“Ter sunt conati imponere Pelio Ossam”.
                                                          Virgil

The Greek myths tell of  giants waging a war on the gods and in an effort to destroy the home of the gods they pile one mountain on another. These days, of course, there are no giants and no gods either. Just the midgets and minnows of the Council who are seemingly waging an undeclared war, not on heaven but on Hull itself. The opening front of this stadtkrieg involves ripping all the pedestrianised areas up in order to lay new paving stones with fountains (they will no doubt squirt you for the sake of civic virtue). The supposed enemy, reeling from this blitz, are then faced with a flanking manoeuvre; the closure for refurbishment of Carr Lane. Ah yes the timing of this assault is exquisite, that is to say, exquisitely awful..
So there'll be four months (better make that five you know how things go round these parts) of upheaval, 32 buses per hour rerouted, pedestrians rerouted, shops made inaccessible in the usual Hull way of cacking things up. I'm looking forward to the inevitable epic gridlocks that will happen; it's bad enough at the best of times. My bus doesn't go down there but, things being the way they are, one little niggle in a road and the whole godforsaken place grinds to a halt. Oh it's going to be so much fun ... but when it's all done there'll be silver paving stones, the road will glisten with gold and people will dance gaily in the brave new world while minstrels will sing songs of praise to the glorious Council.
But as Virgil says three times they tried to pile Pelion on Ossa  ... ah yes the works already carried out in Jameson Street are having to be ripped up and reinstalled because there were "defective".

And while I'm here, and on a roll, I may as well mention the Ferens art gallery, on the left,  is also being done up to make it able to meet the demands of modern day art exhibitions (the Turner Prize for example), the bill for this just recently went up by a cool half mil to £2.8 million. Kerching!

"Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat" as no-body ever said.

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