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Set Weasel on KILL!

margargetcalvertMargaret Calvert is still alive, but only because I haven’t found her yet. When I heard her interviewed on Radio 4, it’s the first I learned her name, but I had been looking for her for years. By her works I knew her.

Margaret and her boss, Jock Kinneir, undertook a much-needed redesign of British road signage in the middle 1950s and introduced thereunto previously unknown levels of suck and stink.

crossing

Weasel exaggerates? You decide. Let’s start with this here. The previous ‘school crossing’ sign was a charming little boy in a cap with a satchel leading a littler girl. As Margaret describes it, “It was quite archaic, almost like an illustration from Enid Blyton, and very grammar-schooly. I wanted to make it more inclusive, because comprehensives were starting up, and I didn’t want it to have a social class feel.”

So she smashed it to bits. Class warfare, feminism AND it looks like ass! Trifecta! Margaret later confessed that the little girl was based on a photograph of herself as a child. Yup. She had a model for this glommy piece of shit. Boggles the mind, don’t it?

She’s a Kiwi South African. Did I mention that? She emigrated all the way from far-flung colonies to screw over the mother country’s signage. Speaking on behalf of resident aliens everywhere: naughty, NAUGHTY immigrant!

abomination

But I don’t hate her for the School Crossing sign. I hate her for a sign I’m not even positive she designed. IT IS THIS ONE. Can you spot why this sign makes Weasel shiver and foam at the mouth? WELL, CAN YOU?! (Hint: say yes, or I’ll fucking come over there and hurt you).

Yes. Yes, that’s right. In order for a skidding car to make these tracks, the left front tire would have to detach itself, cross over and land on the right rear while the right front tire correspondingly travels diagonally over and does the other thing.

COULD. NOT. HAPPEN. This is suck writ huge. A graphical “ain’t got no” — times the tens of thousands of them jammed by the side of the roadall over Britain. How many people signed off on this abomination? How many bovine visual illiterates drive past it every day without a second glance?

I have one of my ‘funny spells’ whenever we pass one. It hurtssss ussssss. And oh…OH!!! There’s one at the end of the driveway!! MY DRIVEWAY!!!! I took one look and I thought, “Right! That’s how it’s going to be?”

So you can understand, when the vicar came at me waving a page of Miz Calvert’s best work and asking me to choose which three best typified my future life, I was like, “ZOMG! Darth Vader is really Luke Skywalker’s father!!!!!” and hid under the sofa.

Two more sessions to go!

December 18, 2008 — 6:10 pm
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