I cannot believe that I never saw this till recently:

Now, I never thought that Parson’s Green and Sand’s End had particularly flourishing gay scenes. You are more likely to see pink pashminas than pink pride, blt sandwiches rather than l/g/b/t sandwiches. Perhaps the somewhat reserved status of these areas is brightening up a bit.

Perhaps they have some preposterously effective way of turning Tories there? I wonder how many local Telegraph readers amble in and wonder ‘Oh what might have been? Had that sunny day at Cambridge turned out differently… bollocks, they haven’t got the egg out of that properly’?

Magritte famously made a picture which showed a pipe and simultaneously claimed not to be a pipe.

And in a witty and updated version of the semiotic pun, Welcome Break service stations have made a sign which is not actually a coffee, and at the same time makes you think: ‘oh fuck off’.

I like my local council. Hounslow always seems more down to earth and less petty than Hammersmith and Fulham. Less Londony, less extortive. They still are irksome, nevertheless, in the ways councils always are.

Like when you spend ages queuing to pay for a permit or something and they only have one of four windows open. I don’t really mind too much, at least not as much as the little old lady in front of me who was tutting like a typewriter.

However, if they cannot afford to pay the wages of enough people to man more than one kiosk, it is nice to see they had the resources to install funky new dot matrix signs above each window. Obviously someone envisaged a situation where the numbers ‘1,2,3,4′ simply would not be adequate. Perhaps a council worker might be superstitious about the number 3? No sweat, the council can just change it to an 8.
THAT is foresight.

It is also good to see that, while they were at it, they stuck in another, bigger sign. It says ‘hello’ and conveys the human touch.

The gutterpress launch another war, this time on violence. Will they never learn/give up/ realize the ironic madness of their ways?

I lean against the newsagent’s wall in dismay.

I can’t believe I haven’t uploaded this picture yet…

Uggh. Truculance and ignorance make a loathsome combination.

The riter was clearly pised off, but to what end? Does he suspect a conspiracy to short change the public? Does he expect a shamed and apologetic reponse?

I dread to countenance the prospect, but perhaps our dolt was in fact so cranially recessive that he was asking an honest question, somehow expecting a technical explanation which he would have no doubt found unfathomable.

Actually, let’s be positive about his writing. At least he was having a go.

I was very much tempted to write underneath it the single word ‘can’t’. But without the apostrophe and with a very different vowel.

Hounslow council has recently started recycling food waste. I requested one of the bins so I could join the party.

Now when the designer sat down to find an easily communicable image of ‘food waste’, he would have probably found himself scratching his head at the decision. What sot of food, how do we show it is eaten, how not to convey a different idea etc.

And it is a good idea having an image. In the Royal Festival Hall there are pairs of bins everywhere accepting very specific categories of waste. Unfortunately there are no pictures of what can go in each bin – only descriptions in words. It takes ages to throw something away, as you have to read about ten different lines on the bins to know which one to use. Pictures are far better.

However, I wonder what the designer thought he was representing when he/she put this image on the Hounslow food recycling bins:

I mean, what sort of diet does he think the average Briton has? Chicken drumsticks and white bread? Is that actually a bone at the or is it a dog biscuit there at the bottom?

I know it is meant to be just a reference, but maybe there is a sad truth behind the image. I imagine they did plenty of market research into the best possible images of un-eaten food (which probably consisted of reading some comics by the looks of it). Maybe white bread and chicken drumsticks are the most obvious food images in this country, may be that IS what everyone eats after all. 

So that’s it: we are a bunch of wasteful, big-toothed, malnourished bunch of food twats. According to the council.

I winder what I would icons I would put on the bin. Probably a fried egg with a bite taken out of it, a wobbly jelly with a bite taken out of it, and a squid with a bite taken out of it. And probably a gnawed human femur, just to annoy the Daily Mail crowd.

Here is something not for the children, despite its ‘yoot-kolcha’ graphic [click on the image to read the notice if it is too small]:

Clearly Hounslow council don’t want to get sued for letting kids get damaged by falling coke bottles. Or perhaps they are worried about a caffeine-fuelled teenager running amok in town hall, destroying civic amenities like a Hindu god on crack.

The Israeli authorities are much more child friendly. If anyone knows about respecting kids, it is them.

This must be worthy of some caption competition or other.