Ice, ice, baby...

Seriously, you'd think that the people down our street had never seen anyone scrape ice off car windows before. Quite a crowd gathered around me at 8.45am, although not enough to melt the ice. Nobody said anything, they just slowed down, stared, seemed to think it really odd that I had prefixed the application of a scraper with a series of hefty squirts of deicer. It is probably what some government quango costing taxpayers millions describes as "a culture of lifelessness" and is worthy of an EU-funded study into how such attitudes are a barrier to redevelopment and regeneration. Some words are beginning to annoy me as I try and inject some Plain English into proceedings: forming, cascading, worklessness, place-shaping. It's even infiltrating (!) my surfing habits, with my feed reader unavailable while Bloglines get on with the business of 'implementing network upgrades' to their 'data center'. What's happening with the world? Everyone's talking as if they've over-indulged on Stephen Fry's Dork Talk columns.