Tuesday, July 10, 2012

green Biffa terms











Now you can go.
 Verde que te quiero verde. "Green how much I love you green. Green wind, green boughs. The ship on the sea, the horse on the mountain. With the shadow at her waist she dreams on her balcony, green flesh, green hair, with eyes of cold silver. Green how much I want you green...." 
Fifty years ago I learnt Spanish so that I could read this and other poems by Federico Garcia Lorca, in the original language.

If you had to invent a name for a company in the business of emptying wheelie bins, hoisting and tipping them  with a hydraulic device at the rear of their lumbering vehicles, Biffa would do very well. But you don't have to invent it, I think to myself, as I watch a bin rising in the air and  being tipped through 100 deg as though it is tankard of beer being quaffed.   A google search reveals that Biffa was founded more than 80 years ago as a road haulage business. It has since diversified into "integrated waste management".  The hydraulics make a wild bellowing noise as they perform their task, almost a note of triumph.

The painter who preparing the front of the house before painting it,  is still scraping and scratching, banging and filling  and sanding. He gives me the terms for  the wooden structure between  the roof and the stucco wall. "That's a finial," he says. "That's the gable end, that the facia, and that's the soffit." I like to know what's what.

1 comment:

Lucas said...

This series on traffic lights reminds me of a chain of sequences from "Twin Peaks" - the long crazy TV soap opera by film diector David Lynch. David Lynch featured mysterious unexplained close ups of traffic lights.I must confess to having been a " Peakie."