If I was a more practical woman, I’d have married a man who can fix things. Instead, I spent Sunday repeatedly pumping a punctured paddling pool like a Danaïdean bride condemned to pour water into a sieve; and I haven’t even killed anyone (yet).
In the lull of a conjugal appeal to my administrative potential, and the importance of understanding the difference between gutters and drains when seeking a handy(er) man, I drifted into a different daydream. There, I forgot my fate, while water surged over folding plastic and fecundated the lawn.
Between invoices to type and a piano to play is an aching void. I think it’s called staff. Around me bureaucracy is busy, busy, busy: diverting traffic, fitting cameras, and finding new ways to fine people for their inattention. In a triumph of public private collaboration, the Council installed a narrow, six-foot phallic fountain shaped as a water droplet, in bright blue and white plastic, outside the train station. In the beginning, children would raise their hands to it as for a squirt of sanitiser, while dogs recognised it, at root, as a cheerful place to crap, and their owners marched on, unwilling to correct an improvement. No one ever quenched their thirst from its fluoridated springs. Today, it stands shrouded in grey tarpaulin secured with cable ties, like an erect corpse yearning to be buried.
The manifestations of an administrative mind amuse or outrage at first; a speed bump on a country lane, a health and safety sign by a village pond, metal grilles shielding a city churchyard’s roses. Creeping suburbia is indulged like a zone three wife swap. But the managerial disposition is caffeine anxious and can’t be calmed by contemplation of the whole; the words babbling brook provoke it to petition for regulatory fencing, the Apollo Belvedere suggests a pink Post-it note marking marble loins.
As everything is broken into parts and labelled appropriately, new filing opportunities present themselves to an invisible machine, and the demoralised soul accepts a number it’s told it needs in a grid it no longer responds to.
Really, what is a drain, or a gutter, but a modest attempt to contain and divert abundant flow? Surely, in the forgotten detail (for the Devil lurks in that) lies a victory for the soaring soul?
A white and blue phallic fountain, sounds rather sinister to me 🤔, tempt folks over with the trusty colours of the NHS 🙄 in order to fecundate them with mRNA'd fluoridated discharge 😱. Dogs are smart 😉
OK, I'll admit I didn't know what a Danaïdean bride was! Tania's substack is funny and education.