Just Slightly Ahead of My Time

All Change I should like to leave the World a better place than I found it. I know some of you are saying, “Just go now, and that would do it”, but I want more than that. So here are a few suggestions of things to change. Pick your favourite three and start work on them now. • Get rid of the amber on traffic lights. Maybe it was needed when brakes were poor, but nowadays just a slightly longer phase when all lights are red would suffice. Seeing the lights switch from green to amber is just an encouragement to speed up, whereas the switch from red to amber achieves nothing. Those at roadworks are often just red/green, and we don’t sit there like deer in headlights, not knowing what to do. Traffic lights would be cheaper and lighter, and the electronics switching between the various colours would be simpler. • Get rid of Daylight Saving Time. The whole process is unnecessary, disruptive and expensive. The original reason given for it was to help farmers. Winter mornings can be pretty dark, but the cows don’t know that the farmer has put his clock back an hour so they still want to be milked at the old time. Then it was the danger for kids going to school in the dark. Now they have to come home in the dark instead. If everyone wants lighter winter mornings then just move the UK to a different time zone. It’s not as if we need the Sun to be exactly overhead at noon, and Greenwich Mean Time has long since been usurped by Co-ordinated Universal Time (UTC – a compromise with the French). • Get rid of the net call in tennis. The ball can hit the top of the net in tennis at any point in the game, yet it is only on the serve that we consider this to be totally unfair to the receiver, and may demand that a let be played. When this happens on the serve, there are three possible outcomes. At one extreme, the ball is deflected so much that it lands outside the service box, so no let is called. At the other extreme, the ball merely grazes the net and is barely deflected at all, so the receiver is not disadvantaged and a let call achieves nothing. In-between these two extremes, the ball gets significantly deflected but still lands in. So what? It happens to everyone, and if it occurs later on in the point no-one cares, so why do anything different just because it is on the serve? And for goodness sake, Wimbledon, allow a fifth set tie-break. Tradition is one thing, but arrogant bloody-mindedness… • Standardise emergency lighting and signage. In buildings, the Exit signs are green - a nice, friendly, safe colour. On planes, “white lights lead to red lights which lead to the exits” – eek! red means danger – Run Away! • Make fridges round. A fridge is an inefficient appliance to run because every time we want something from it we let in a lot of warm air. The longer the door is open, the more cold air escapes, and the more electricity is used to cool down the warm air which replaced it. And currently, the space at the back of each shelf is wasted or difficult to get to. So let’s turn the inside of the fridge into a large Lazy Susan, with shelves that revolve, giving quicker access to the whole fridge. The back would be flat to go against the wall (use those two corners for the workings) but the front would be a beautifully-curved, stainless steel door. • Ban TV cooks from using salt. I cannot recall a single cooking programme where the supposedly-talented chef hasn’t added salt to what they are preparing. If their creation is really that tasteless then there are dozens of herbs and spices that they could use instead. Many of these contain trace elements and are beneficial to one’s health, whereas we get more than enough salt in our diet without adding any. • Slash the number of MPs and Lords. The House of Commons comprises 650 elected Members of Parliament. Many do very little at the national level. So, while we all want to be “represented in Parliament”, we should elect the representatives for our area (where they will live and work full time, so are accessible to us) with just one Member of Parliament in the House of Commons for every ten representatives. The House of Lords has around 800 members, a number which is rising steadily. This should be reduced, through attrition, to 65, like the House of Commons. • Ban petrol stations from using tenths. When decimal currency was introduced, there was much consternation that Government issued a halfpence coin. It was quickly deemed pointless and withdrawn. Yet petrol stations are still allowed to sell fuel for 135.9p a litre. If a market-stallholder tried such a trick he’d be up before the judge, but Big Oil has so much sway that they get away with conning the public. They even moaned when the price went over a pound, and they had to adapt to showing four digits. Duh! I have a solution! Introduce these changes, and I promise I’ll die happy.