jencat | oh the irony..

It would almost be funny if it wasn't so sad. This poem has been a fixture on the wall of the wretched underpass you have to walk through to get to the Imax at Waterloo for nearly ten years now, and its presence is so incongruous and utterly wonderfully unexpected as you trudge through the usual delights of the grotty tunnel that I always end up dawdling to read of much of it as I can.

It's called Eurydice, it's by Sue Hubbard, and set in a fantastically ethereal gold font called Disturbance. It's pretty damn gorgeous. The line wolf-bone mummified in mud has been lodged somewhere deep inside my brain for years now.

One of the lines ends with the phrase 'I was drowning in blue', and when I read that online today, I felt sick.

Mainly because the bastards at Network Rail (who own the tunnel) came along a couple of weeks ago and painted over the entire fucking poem with blue paint. Because, apparently, "the tunnel was looking scruffy".

This was a piece of art, commissioned and paid for by the BFI (who own the Imax) which had sat in place in one of the most graffiti-prone sites in Londonfor nearly a decade without ever being defaced . Yes, your sodding underpass will start to look scruffy if you skimp on maintenance and cleaning (dare I mention this is a tunnel connecting a major railway station to a major tourist attraction next door) but how on earth do you go from 'it was scruffy' to painting over a poem embossed in huge gold lettering on the wall?

Obviously the outcome is that nobody has any funds available to restore it. Network Rail "should have told" the BFI, but apparently forgot.

Somehow that just about sums up the whole crappy thing.

Ack. Tomorrow there's a 'work sharing' meeting with our 'new team', which I confidently predict will be as earthshatteringly useless as the past two attempts at defining some kind of plan for merging our work have been. Half of my job has been 'redirected' elsewhere for a few weeks now, and the rest of it will have to be clawed back from whatever my counterpart joining us is already doing. Heh. I have an appraisal on Monday which is a little hard to plan for at the moment as my job bears little or no resemblance to my job description...

Lordy, thankfully I have Friday off, if only to go see Where the Wild Things Are, and try to forget that there may well not be much point in my going to work in a few weeks' time...