h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The local Crem's steep high roof is an attempt at something significant but the building's smallness makes it mean-spirited. Inside the ceilingless roof is lined with two foot (ish) square open box shapes - cream coloured but with black lines along the protruding edges. All along it are square light fittings with U shaped flurescent bulbs. The gable end is undecorated dark brick with a large blue velvet curtain hanging in the middle. The sides are mahogany-looking thin wood panels, but the very square, largish windows look framed with blocks of slate. At intervals along the wall are small decorative, living room style wall lights in brass with smoky glass shades. Where the walls join the ceiling, a long, large cream painted pipe runs the length of the room on either side with what must be a large space heater in the middle of it.

Each individual part is inoffensive if dull verging on naff. Put together they are an incongruous unharmonious ugliness. The brick gable is hard. The wood panel walls with brass wall lights homely but the high steep ceilingless roof is not. The slate window frames are not. The roof vault aims at uplifting but the homely walls and flurescent bulbs utterly cancel that out. The windows are big enough to be light and airy but the space between and the low eaves keep the light out.

At least hideous, contorted, blockish in-your-face architecture is interesting. It can be emotionally involving; thought provoking. That's worthwhile. A building that is a joining of incongruous varieties of naffness gives nothing.

Thankfully the service was the opposite, deeply personal, full of feeling and warmth - not even this building could defeat that. C did her teenage sweetheart and husband of four decades proud.

Fluorescent. Knew that was wrong - posted as midnight struck.

People made today work, but that building is inexcusable.

It's so important that a place like that should be absolutely neutral and simply designed. People in there are going to be looking around themselves a lot of the time and don't want to have their thoughts forced to wander on to the naffness of the decor.

Maybe something can be done about it - a letter to the Council - but not written quite in the same style as your post, which was a compelling read, by the way.

TC, you're right. I don't think it would do any good but it would be the right thing to do. I'll give it a go, in a more persuasive sort of style!

What this journal is bringing to mind are the neolithic burial tombs visited on Orkney last summer. There seem to be more there than they quite know what to do with. They're not all excavated, some you just wander up to, borrow the torch left for visitors use and go inside on your own. Which is a wonderful way to experience them. The tomb of the dogs had a 6' tunnel entrance to crawl through, inside it was large enough for a dozen people to stand in. Low chambers opened off it, where the neolithic bones were found. It's 5000 years old - built to last. And in use for centuries, not decades. Presumably a small community placed their dead there. Presumably with some ceremony given the separate storage of different bones, skulls being in a separate chamber for instance, and the 24 small bones found from 24 different dogs. This tomb was the only one with dog bones. Another tomb was the only one with eagle talons, and had comorant remains and another otters. The thin stones laid in layers for the walls, and curving in overhead to make a domed roof were skillfully placed. It felt very solid and enclosed, and sobering but not frightening. There were no naff brass wall lights. I suppose we can't assume there was no fashionable decor at all back then though. Or does it take sophisticated civilisation to produce decorative items with no craftsmanship. They have found scratched lines on stones at the temple complex being excavated bt the Ring of Brodgar (check the spelling there - it's NOT Drogba) which look like pretty idle doodling to me.

Caught midnight by the skin of my teeth. Been a long day, it was good to relive those tombs, it put work agros in perspective. It was job interviews today, one appointment decided, one is still pending the last interview tomorrow. Job interviews are pretty awful - so much influence on other people's lives. I don't like it and when all candidates are good it's particularly difficult. Much easier when they're unquestionably unsuitably weird.