A Street Named Desire

CAUTION: Some words and juxtaposition of words in this Fryday may cause unintended offence.

A few years back the council invited the residents of our small side road to name the road. We promptly had a neighbourhood meeting and almost as promptly decided on a name which the council agreed to.

We intended the name we chose to be our homage to a young boy who died in the area in tragic circumstances back in the early pioneering days. It remains that. Except the name is also that of New Zealand’s most litigious and high-profile former criminal/prisoner, which was decidedly not our intent.

However, it got me thinking—what other streets and roads have been misnamed or can be misinterpreted? So I did a little research, confining myself to English names, and this is what I came up with.

I started in Nova Scotia Canada where the residents of the small community of Porter’s Lake used all their imagination to name their three streets: This Street, That Street and The Other Street.

A more descriptive name was given a road in Montana: Bad Route Road. And the residents of Gansevoort New York must have had too much on their plate when they named a road Anyhow Lane. Same goes for Idaho, which named one of its roads Chicken Dinner Road.

Nor are weird names confined to North America. Truro in the United Kingdom boasts Squeeze Guts Alley, and just down the road in Ivah Lancashire is a very silly name indeed: Silly Lane.
Elsewhere in the UK if you are not thin-skinned you can live in Crotch Crescent or Slag Lane. Castleford has Tickle Cock Bridge and if none of those appeal you can always gird your loins and choose to live in Dumb Woman’s Lane. I am too dumb to find out where that is though I know it can’t be far from Titty Ho.

We in New Zealand have no reason to feel superior. We have also come up with some fairly strange ones. With Halloween coming up you might want to contemplate moving to Vampire Street in Dunedin. And  Christchurch had Godley Avenue, which was anything but when I lived there, and Wellington gives us Handyside street, which comes in handy.

But New Zealanders pale into insignificance against Australians, whom we go to next.
However, I couldn’t leave New Zealand without making a mandatory trip to Hamilton to visit Johnnybro Place and Allgood Place; I believe Hamilton’s Hooker Street is a popular destination.

Australian street names deserve a Fryday of their own (and will probably get one) but here is a sample: we start with the quintessential Australian Beer Bottle Road in Darkan and Upperthong Street in Bullswick; we have Baldknob Road in Peachester, Pisspot Creek in Ross, while Tasmania offers (true) Boobs Flat, Crack Pot, Misery Knob and  Guys Dirty Hole.
And lastly, the place where your average Aussie reckons all we New Zealanders should live when in Aussie, but where more fittingly they should feel right at home—Wanka Road in Darby.

An Aussie by any other name…

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The European Association of Competent Authorities

The weirdly named European Association of Competent Authorities (EACA) seems to be doing all it can to show it is anything but competent.

This is deeply worrying given that its role is to promote the safe and sustainable transport of radioactive material.

To be fair, my assessment of the EACA is based solely on their website, and given that as far I know there are no recorded cases of a radioactive spill in Europe or elsewhere, they are probably competent in their core role.

But if you going to claim to be competent, it is a reasonable expectation that you would be so in all areas of your operation, including your showpiece website.

This is not the case.

For a start, the EACA home page has a panel with an ever-changing array of supposedly important information. I say supposedly because it changes so quickly there is no chance of anybody reading a panel before it changes—unless they are prepared to wait for it to cycle around again.

Then there is this, again on the home page:

“The transport of nuclear material has been successfully and safety undertaken for over 50 years without serious incident yet the transport of nuclear material continues to attract public attention, though it can be said often the public attention is not for reasons of public concern about the safety of transport.”

Really? I guess that apart from the use of “safety” it makes some kind of sense, though it is not immediately obvious and could have been structured better.

However, it is the word competent that draws my attention. It seems a strange word to use in such a context. To me, describing someone or something as competent just gets over the line as faint praise, though to describe my local council here in the Far North as competent would require a massive improvement on their part and a change of management.

 It is perhaps an irony that whilst competent is faint almost opaque praise, its antonym “’incompetent” is a devastating indictment of anybody so described.
The latter is clearly more important and aggressive than the former.

However, to return to the European Association of Competent (though not great) Authorities, maybe they should be congratulated for their restraint in not over-selling themselves. And congratulated, too, for their honesty.
It would be a little more comforting however to have someone a little more than competent handling that radioactive stuff.

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What's love got to do with it? A lot.

The secret of what makes a loving and lasting relationship remains that—a secret. There are many theories, but they also remain what they are—theories. There is no apparent certitude, nor perhaps should there be; love, the supposed cornerstone of a loving relationship, defies definition and is, in any case, fluid and evolving. As it should be; it is more sustainable that way.

What love may be by definition is constantly promulgated in literature and song but rarely as adroitly as in the sonnets of Shakespeare or the multi-authored letters from the front of the First World War. Everyone else  tends to cloud the issue. Lord Byron for example seems to equate love with lust and fails (probably deliberately) to differentiate the two.

However, love exists, regardless of how it may be defined and in what form it is found. And if we are open to it we can collectively share vicariously in its glory.

I felt that way today when I read an article about the Obamas. This week Michelle and Barack are sharing and celebrating 27 years of marriage. No doubt some of those celebrations are private and intimate, but the couple have also used social media to express their love for each other. There is no doubt in my mind what they are saying is sincere, and mercifully they are sufficiently restrained not to make it cringe-worthy.

On Wednesday I was in a tavern restaurant in east Auckland. Seated at a table near me and my companions was a couple whose barely concealed actions almost immediately evoked the oft-used phrase, “get a room”. They were constantly caressing each other; their hands seemingly everywhere. Kisses of which there were many were pecks, more forceful for their frequency than lack of longevity.

Was it love or was it lust? Without knowing this couple’s circumstances, I don’t know. Perhaps like Byron I can’t tell and don’t care, though the prurient among us would say I should.

I am going to err on the side of love. I think they were in love. People who are simply in for the lust rarely express it with such fervour in public. I believe this couple were simply expressing their love for each other and it had such intrinsic hold over them that they were oblivious to their surroundings.

They were, I think, giving literal meaning to the phrase Love is Blind.

They didn’t need a room.

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