abandon hop

One of the recurring themes of my local paper as a child (in between the stories reporting the theft of £2.37 worth of tobacco and confection from local garages and Rotary Club knitting competition results) was the treacherousness of the cobbles in the market square of the nearest town, particularly with regard to grannies and hips and slippage resulting in the breakage of one or both the former two. The grannies appeared to be recommending that the cobbles be from their mother road untimely ripped and replaced with lovely granny-friendly rubberise wipe-clean tarmac. Evidently their plan was to then complain about the wanton vandalism of the removal of the historic cobbbles and so on until they could find something better to complain about such as not enough ducks to feed by the bridge between Conging Street and the Co-op car park or too many left-wing asylum seekers in front of them in the Post Office queue on pension day.

I often wonder what they'd make of a city like Edinburgh; not only is it full of cobbles but some of the cobbles are on slopes, the slopy cobbleroads are frequently slippily wet and the wet and slippy sloping cobbleroads are the route for erratic gusty winds. They probably wouldn't even be able to recognise steps as being steps, so flat is central Lincolnshire. Perhaps they would interpret them as walls. You don't often see native grannies navigating slippery wornsteps but I assume they have the capability as some of them live in old tenement buildings without lifts. Railing-impalings are a known local urban injury but I can't recall ever hearing of people slipping and b0rking themselves on steps, not even on particularly well-worn and busy steps such as Fleshmarket Close down which people wearing stupid gripless business-shoes can often be spotted running on their way to an Important Meeting at the other end of a train journey.

Maybe the government hushes it all up.

Maybe anyone who does slip is swiftly scavenged and eaten by tramps or sold by smackheads or painted black and fashioned into clothing by the flocks of emo on Cockburn Street and the close between the high street and Market Street.