How people forget

When I first arrived in Sydney many years ago, the controversy of the day was over the construction of the monorail around Darling Harbour and the city. A dozen years later, it is still standing (despite continued futile calls to pull it down) and people wander around obliviously underneath it. It's funny how quickly people adapt to changes in their environment.

I just wish the blathering hordes would shut the hell up whenever someone wants to pull down a building and put up something new. Yes, the old thing might have been there since they were a kid, but that is no reason to leave it standing if it isn't performing any useful function, apart from attracting graffiti and shedding broken glass into the surrounding overgrown grass.

Personally, I think bulldozers are an underutilised part of city planning. If we razed things to the ground first, we could plan with a clean sheet of paper, rather than trying to build around some old piece of crap that only three teacosy wearing nutbags in a VW care about.

The only thing that I don't like about the monorail is the way it sheds water when it rains. Gallons of water collect on top of the big, wide rail, and when the train goes past, it slushes all the water off onto anyone silly enough to be sheltering underneath. It only happens to you once. In fact, I reckon that is a pretty good feature, since it generally only gets stupid tourists, and tourists always need memories of the places that they have been - good and bad. "Hey honey, remember when we got utterly saturated by that stupid people moving contraption in Melbourne?'