This sign at the Tesco construction site makes sense now.
Yesterday I was in London, meeting with other members of the vast left-wing conspiracy. I also went to St Paul's Cathedral, which will be significant in a moment.
(No, I didn't have a conversion.)
When I arrived at Marylebone to catch a train home, the marquee was blank. I thought I'd missed the last train but then they announced an even bigger disaster: the train tunnel at my town collapsed. No one was hurt, but there were plenty of out-of-sorts commuters. (We bonded, however, on the replacement bus, though it was a little eerie. I felt like I was heading for some kind of upscale gulag with my fellow passengers, on a coach with photos of Queen Elizabeth's Golden Jubilee taped to the inside. Sometimes you don't ask questions.)
As for that wayward tunnel, I have my theories. Before I moved here Tesco received permission to build a store in this small town, after much local opposition. It's being built right over the train tracks. They finally finished constructing the tunnel, and the other day I noticed they'd filled the dirt in over it.
"That's a lot of dirt," I thought. "I wonder if that tunnel will collapse one day."
(No, I still haven't had a conversion. Just a prescient moment.)
We've had a lot of rain lately, and when dirt gets wet it becomes heavier. I guess the engineers who designed this didn't factor that in, being as Tesco was in a hurry to open the store and start raping and pillaging making a profit.
Which brings to mind another theory. The local grocer, A.A. Fisher, will likely go out of business when the new Tesco opens. Nah....
And the St. Paul's connection? While I was inside the cathedral, I marveled at the mastery of architecture and engineering Christopher Wren must have had to build such a monument 300 years ago, probably without Mathematica on his laptop, even. He was in his early thirties at the time, yet had been a practicing architect since he was a teenager.
I know some commuters who wish he were around today.
