Tag: diesel

November 7th – Long, long before the wonderful John Cooper Clarke was a sort of cult national treasure doing voice overs for oven chip adverts, he observed the everyday diesel spill on wet tarmac and made it chilling.

‘Revenge is not enough
There’s a dead canary on a swivel seat
There’s a rainbow in the road
Meanwhile on Beasley Street
Silence is the code’

I find easy, cheesy, greasy, queasy, beastly Beasley Street still chilling and an absolute classic, and after hearing it 30 odd years ago, I never looked at the urban terrace street in the same way again – including oil slicks flowing down the Darlaston Road and catching the light.

John Cooper Clark is one of the best performance poets Britain has ever had.

April 26th – It’s nice to see Scarborough Road in the Walsall suburb of Pleck currently being resurfaced – the road is an occasional bypass for the Pleck Road for me, and may now be mores with rideable tarmac. My thanks to the workers involved – we’ve not got an upper layer of blacktop yet, but it’s already a whole world better.

Whilst stopped to record the art of asphalt, I noticed the handwritten warning on the stubbornly derelict School Street Cottage. I’ve noticed a few times left here empty steel cooking oil drums, presumably someone is running their vehicle on either virgin or waste cooking oil and dumping the evidence. 

Nice bit of direct action there.