'Flakes'

There's a Frank Zappa song called Flakes (Sheik Yerbouti), it's about the end of the world. It's the one after the opening track, the scything critique 'I Have Been in You'. Frank was not is a genial mood for this record, he was at his best and mad as fuck; and it's now thirty five years later, he's dead, and everything is worse. California may have got the most of them (flakes) but we are catching up, we got our own little Soviet Union over here in the name of freedom and prosperity; where nothing fucking works and nobody's fussed about fixing it. James May can rant all he likes about how awful Soviet cars were, but at least they ran forever. That, in the built environment, is beginning to look like a blessing.
Of course, I am in recovery from yet another Council meeting. After many many many years of so called consultation (because that's what people want) precisely nothing has happened to refurbish our apartment block. It seems the notion of doing something correctly no longer exists (except in my imagination) It seems impossible for the authorities, if that's what they are, to engage with the notion of quality for the people; impossible. It's a disgrace, it is a world of shit. The home of liberty and we can't even fix a sink that won't spring within a day or two, or rig up a shower that wasn't even designed to work properly in the first place.
'It's a disgrace!' says the barmaid in The White Horse. She won't even let her contractors in to the house. She's  right.