Location, Location, Splash

They're currently digging up the driveway to my apartment block, apparently to improve the drainage.  I don't know why, at present all the water drains neatly down to the carpark at the bottom.  I'm planning on buying a punt.  The workmen had got as far as digging a ditch when the heavens opened as if to prove why the work was needed in the first place.  The result is that we currently have what looks like a badly designed medieval moat running down part of the driveway.  It's safe to say that drainage is still pretty much a work in progress.

Let us now, dear reader, take a short break from this fascinating tale of urban renewal to meditate on the nature of time.  Most people tend to think of time rather like a one way street.  You get on at a certain point, travel in the same direction as everybody else until you get off it again at which point time ceases to be of any great interest to you.  This one way street theory of time is totally inaccurate.  Time can travel faster or slower, can bend back on itself and run in reverse.  It is probably safe to say that time can be bent, folded, stapled and mutilated.  Nevertheless the one way street theory of time has its appeal because it is simple enough to understand and lets face it very few people are going to encounter time under any other circumstances.  The only people for whom the one way street theory is inadequate are the guys at the large hadron collider and people trying to pick holes in the scripts of The Big Bang Theory.  To the first group I say, :"Put that boson down, you don't know when its been" and to the second I say, "Get a life you losers".  Still the fact that time is infinitely flexible is important if only because it provides an explanation of why the next sentence in this blog entry is dated a couple of weeks after the first and the driveway renovations are complete.

So the driveway renovations are complete thanks to the malleable nature of time (and not at all to do with the fact that I'm so lazy it took me three weeks to write a single blog entry).  There is now a bold macadam scar running partway down the driveway giving it a slightly piratical look.  Hard on the news that the repairs were complete came information from the building managers that they were turning our water off.  I guess that's one way to deal with a drainage problem.  Apparently plumbers were coming to (I presume) plumb.  This happens every few weeks and I'm starting to suspect that maintaining the plumbing in our block consists largely of emptying a series of buckets.  This is something that I can handle with a great deal of aplomb as I live on the top floor.  I'm not sure where the water goes but it certainly doesn't stay at my place.

It does seem that a great deal of human effort goes into procuring water in the first place and then getting rid of it again.  One can't help thinking that if the city's water supply network was built in a huge circle it wouldn't really matter whether it ever rained again or not.  Of course, if you take the holistic view this is exactly what happens.  After all water isn't created, it just travels a lot.  Along the way it picks up various additives which we then spend a lot of effort trying to remove (or alternatively using them as marketing points for why we're selling an essentially free resource for seven dollars a bottle).  Despite this there is a great deal of resistance to drinking recycled sewage.  Which is odd because at the moment we are essentially drinking unrecycled sewage.  Try to give people a bottle of water from a sewage plant and they will turn up their noses.  Give them the opportunity to buy the same water at an exorbitant price from a health centre down the road and they will leap at it.  Which just goes to prove that it isn't only real estate that depends on location.

An abattoir next to a petting zoo would raise eyebrows, one next to a hospital would probably lead to another damn movie by Michael Moore.  Location is even a factor in ones attitude to drainage.  Did I mention I live on the top floor?  The drainage in my place is fine.  The neighbours on the ground floor whom I once had to help bail out their apartment after a heavy storm may have a different opinion.