Tuesday 6 December 2016

Padlocked



People are nothing if not slaves to fashion, the more idiotic the better. I'm not sure when the thing about fastening a padlock onto certain bridges and tossing the key into the river as a token of terminal sentimentality began, but I first noticed it a few years ago, and wondered why so many bikes were getting stolen from such a visible place.

It quickly got out of hand, however. Last year, locks weighing 45 tonnes were removed from the Pont des Arts in Paris. Forty-five tonnes... On just one bridge! The damned things were accumulating like brass and steel barnacles and actually causing structural damage.

We were up by the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol on Sunday, and the padlock plague is clearly spreading. For some reason the railings near the Observatory are favoured. I hope this means none are being attached in any numbers to the bridge itself; I doubt very much that Brunel had factored this in when working out the stresses and strains on the cables.

I noted that, typically (and, frankly, pathetically), it seems starry-eyed couples are now able to buy specially engraved padlocks for the purpose, which further cheapens and commodifies the whole soppy business. In my day, young fools would climb all the way up to the highest accessible point of the Vatican and scratch their names onto the bums of rooftop statues, or descend after midnight into the cellars of ancient colleges equipped with a suitable selection of spray-paints. Or, ah, so I am told.


6 comments:

Paul Mc Cann said...

Opening shot is a nice image of the suspension bridge. Not the usual hackneyed one.

Mike C. said...

Thanks, Paul, I'm glad you say that. This post is typical of (probably) most of mine, in that I'd got a couple of shots I was pleased with, and wrote a few words to go with them. That is, the words are the illustration, and the photographs are the substance!

I was also thinking of some play on "flare" vs. "flair" ...

Mike

Mongo, At The Moment said...

It's a global lock-out; nature's way of saying we've got this; just b--- off for the next couple of centuries and leave us be, thank you.

Mike C. said...

Mongo,

I keep wondering about the combination padlocks, though -- those guys are hedging their bets. I suppose if they kept half the number each?

Mike

Mike C. said...

Posted on behalf of Kent Wiley, who has a bad case of the ERROR 400s:

My entry in the documentation of this head scratching behavior:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1070896819672813&l=1f23efcc9e

You've got some crazy flare going on there, Mike. Cool view of the bridge.

Mike C. said...

Kent,

Yes, the psychedelic flare is odd -- it's a Fuji 27mm with a Leica-style lens-hood on, and is normally utterly well-behaved. The sun is only just out of shot, but even so...

Mike