Where?

The delicious bit this week is the Birmingham Council.

Shining beacon of Tory admin skills. And the Lib Dems implicated too.

So sending out 720,000 leaflets about recycling has to be up there with the Chinese decision just to help the Games spectacle along with a couple of bits of judicious graphics.

We apparently didn’t have anybody to put their metaphorical foot on the ball and say:

“But these are going to have to be recycled”

This is because the corporate world and those who ape its conventions, are far too busy getting things done to figure out why they should be done, or when they might be done, or indeed if there is any point in them at all.

So ……..the apparatchiks are given task by well meaning Elected Councillors. There is probably a political point in here somewhere. David C, it is well known, is a Green in disguise. Very heavy disguise which isn’t very green. Star- struck petty foggers have light bulb go off in head. Recycling seen to be a very good thing.

Teams will have been set up. There will have been Powerpoint presentations lovingly created after hours then to be emailed to a large number of more important people, themselves convinced of the urgent need to gee up recycling in advance of even the Government catching on and demanding action. Phrases such as ‘Yes’ and ‘Please advise progress’ and ‘You will keep me in touch with this’ will have littered the Council Email system.

This will have given rise to a universal feeling of satisfaction. Well-being will have seeped under the massive doors of said Council House, past the security guards and down the steps past the Floozy.

Birmingham will at last be in front. Olympic analogies will have seen the blessed city ‘breasting the tape’ or ‘blasting down the home straight’, or even ‘pedaling to glory’. This is a heady brew indeed to inspire the hoi polloi.

And David C.

Not to mention the real people.

And then. Ah! And then.

There was a bit of a snafu.


Goodness knows how it happened. There are dark rumours that the final paper went off to Asia Minor on an outsource.


And they got the wrong photograph.


All that work, all that money, all those leaflets turned up with striking photo of Birmingham on the front.

Birmingham, Alabama.

So the next time the Birdie Mitchell does his tired riff about ‘incompetent government’, and ‘time for change’, and ‘couldn’t run a whelk stall’.

Remember Alabama and smile


Nightwatchman