Saturday, March 11, 2006

The Wincey Willis hypothesis


Much about modern life has crept up on me. A couple of days ago I said to Ann, “Where have all the Morris 1100s gone – the roads should be crawling with them?” She did not spare my feelings and gave me the verbal equivalent of a nasty slap on the legs. I then paid proper attention to the cars and noticed that they all looked essentially the same. It is as if there is a kind of parallel evolution going on – all vehicles tending towards the same shape. Its not that all have a common physical difficulty to overcome – re entry into the earths atmosphere say which might require a specific shape.
I had already noticed that all roads looked the same. You try and follow a route today that was once an interesting and pretty journey and are continually channelled , bullied , diverted and forced off of the route and onto some nondescript uniform motorway.
I blame Wincey Willis. I may be wrong but I remember weather forecasts as straightforward expressions of data. “Temperatures of 63 degrees Fahrenheit or 17 degrees Celsius can be expected”. I am damn sure it was Wincey Willis who in place of numbers introduced “not too bad” as a metrological term. Now they all say it and that Andrea Maclean on TV am irritates me further by always ending with “Now here is your summary” – its not my summary its her bloody summary.
In the little evolutionary tree that I am drawing up Wincey Willis ,surprisingly perhaps, is entered at a node. Thereafter down that branch all aspects of life converged to a dumbed down sameness.

3 comments:

FBT said...

is she a qualified meteorologist or just a (not very) pretty face?

MacDuff said...

No meteorological qualifications I am sure.

Sir Compton Valence said...

i think the bbc weather gals are all met office-trained. i know helen willetts (brains and beauty) has a science degree. not sure about the national itv ones (QED) - harpies with too much slap on their mugs, most of them. the real thickos, though, are to be found on hick regional TV, especially anglia