Saturday 7 July 2012

A cacophony

Yesterday morning, I was having a nice quiet breakfast which was suddenly interrupted by a cacophony of loud voices in the street directly outside my home. The online dictionary describes cacophony as "a harsh, discordant mixture of sounds," and that was exactly what I was hearing.
Loud bantering and arguments that sounded as if it were going to erupt into a brawl. If you have never heard a group of "real" Bajans speaking their local Bajan dialect, you are missing out on an out-of-this-world experience.
On looking outside, I saw what all the commotion was about.
A "crew" of roadside government service employees were out weeding the street verge.
What???    Oh my, I knew we were in for some kind of signs and wonders.
Let me give you the background.
A couple of months ago (March), I was gardening outside my front boundary, cleaning the road verge outside my home, when I espied the Parliamentary Representative for this area visiting at a neighbour's house.  As he passed, I waved him down, and commented that it just was not right for me to be cleaning up government roadways and verges. Told him I had not seen a crew in my area for a LONNNG time.  He admired  my Golden Palms in the front garden, and told me he would look into it.
You know how that goes, so I did not hang on to those words, but continued to thoroughly clean my road verge.
Then guess what...two weeks ago, a cleanup "crew" arrived and cleaned the entire neighbourhood road verge.  I thought, "Not bad, he kept his promise."
Now our government cleanup "crews" work in a certain pattern....listen carefully...out of a crew of about 8-10 persons, only one, (yes, I said one) person actually does the work. All the others stand around laughing, eating  and talking LOUD LOUD LOUD.
Then yesterday morning, they were back again (two weeks later) to clean again...something was up.  Yep, you've guessed it, it's election year, and votes from the constituents are needed, you catch my drift?
Yesterday the cacophony included a few choice words of indecent language (to put it mildly), all the latest juiciest gossip, arguments about politics and cricket and football, the girlfriends, lottery numbers, horse races,  and all the rest of it......
Mind you they only work for a few hours in the morning, so promptly at 10.59am, all work ceased, and off they went....who knows to do what for the remainder of the day.

Clean as a whistle


                                                  At least all the road verges are spotless for now.

2 comments:

  1. Ah the joys of politics and politicians and attitudes towards them. Doubtless the same the world over.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's hard to believe sometimes that they supposedly start out with good intentions for the country. Who can ever figure out what they're really up to?

    ReplyDelete

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