Living for Disco

Despite a certain over-fondness for commas, I’m not a fan of bad punctuation. Grocer’s who add apostrophe’s to their potato’s deserve to be hauled into the street and pelted with copies of Eats, Shoots and Leaves (hardback, naturally). In my opinion. However, I am a coward and will generally not pick people up on their punctuation, because I don’t want people to make faces at me behind my smug, gramatically correct back.

So when walking along a London street last weekend, and spotting a sign on a door that said “No! Junk mail please!”, I simply had to stop.

“What earthly sense does that sign make?” I said to Gordon in disgust, gesticulating wildly at the offending door. “I’m surprised they’re not inundated with pizza leaflets and free ads papers. They’re just asking for junk mail. Why can’t people get it right?”

At that very minute a man with a bag of shopping walks through the gate of the house. I had seen him, but what are the chances that the only other man on a long London street should live in the house at which I am staring as if it is a piece of dog poo on my shoe?

He turned out to be Chinese. And to speak English as most definitely his second language. I discovered this when he explained to me that “We put this sign, no junk, we don’t like - too much paper.”

I think I’ll go back to being a pedant in private.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 9:47 am and is filed under London Pride. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.