In the last few years, whenever there are renovations to some part of the building where I work, there have been some common design elements. They’re always more colourful for a start, which is nice because the building’s original colour scheme was mainly shades of grey. They also involve little holes or indents in otherwise blank panels that spell things in morse code.
In reception, for example, there are large dark coloured panels with a repeating pattern in morse code that’s lit from behind, which spells out the name of the building over and over again. It’s like a little interior design Easter egg.
Lately, a shared kitchen area near our room was refitted and gained new green cupboard doors. One of them just covers the equipment for the instant hot water tap. It has a pattern of holes that form a vent so the cupboard has some air circulation, and the holes are in morse code.
Eventually my curiosity got the better of me and I looked up a morse code translator to see what the vent spells.
Almost two years ago, in July 2022, you might remember that I blessed the toilets at work with a second piece of artwork. Thanks to my efforts to improve the lives of my colleagues, Piet Mondrian’s Composition London 1940-42 has been gracing the gents for the last 23 months.
I now need to report to you an important development. Since 2021 I have been placing beautiful artworks in the toilets, but now it appears I am not alone. Last week, Mondrian made way for a new image, placed there by an unknown hand.
It’s undeniable that the new artwork is a little less highbrow than my choices, but art is for the people, and I am not going to stand in the way of a more populist approach if it increases the appeal of the men’s toilets.
We’ll see how long Werther’s Original Man lasts. When he disappears I’ll collect your suggestions for a replacement with mass appeal, if the mystery curator doesn’t get there first.
I was preparing a hot drink the other day over the mostly rainy Bank Holiday and, after pulling the mug out of the cupboard, noticed something strange.
I have seen that there was a weird mark on my crab mug and never bothered to look a little closer. Now that I have, well, look for yourself:
To me, it looks like a puppy with stick arms is facing off against a very angry Sonic the Hedgehog who may or may not have his own arms up in despair.
A few years ago I moved to a new location and reported to you on the mysterious lumps in a park not far from where I lived. Well, I now live fairly close to France, where the mysterious objects in local parks are of a different nature.
Until about 2015, if you happened to join the army and they decided you looked like the right sort of person to drive a tank, they would take you to a place called Hogmoor which was some woods with lots of muddy tracks and water traps to drive tanks around. Presumably you then did a tank driving test or something to prove you’d learned all their was to know about piloting big metal boxes around Hampshire woodland.
Anyway, after that the army decided they didn’t want to be involved in this part of Hampshire any more, so they went away, leaving behind large areas of a town that are being redeveloped into housing estates. They also left behind Hogmoor, which has been turned into the town’s equivalent of a park – except it doesn’t have big grassy lawns and flowerbeds, it’s just a big woodland with park-type things in it like an adventure playground and a cafe and stuff. I’m very happy with that because walking around in the woods is far nicer than walking around a manicured park.
The other thing Hogmoor has are all the bits of rusty debris the army didn’t take away when they left. I now walk the dog around here more or less every day, so I thought I’d share with you some of the mysterious military debris I keep finding lying around the place.
A concrete hidey hole for soldier people to hide in while pretending to shoot at other peopleMysterious corrugated iron protecting a tree or something, for military purposesAn entire engine half-buried in the groundA radio antenna, which is not abandoned and still belongs to the military, who have posted many warning signs around it and who will probably now arrest me for sedition because I put a picture of it onlineSome sort of very knackered collection of vehicle parts, one of which used to have a ladder to an upstairs bit so it must have been big
Typical. You need to use the payphone and some idiot decides to jam a collection of old storage boxes folded into the tight space along with packing material thus taking up all the area I need in order to make my phone call. I mean I can hardly use the phone on the street, everyone will hear my conversation.
I can’t tell you how many times this has happened to me.
