The police are perfectly right. After all, cars have been built to run, and run fast, so they should not stop.
This healthy philosophy of the police has been seriously challenged by a certain group of motorists who maintain that cars have been built to park and not to move. These people drive out to Hampstead Heath or Richmond on beautiful, sunny days, pull up all their windows and go to sleep. They do not get a spot of air; they are miserably uncomfortable; they have nightmares, and the who procedure is called “spending a lovely afternoon in the open.”
How to Plan a Town
Britain, far from being a “decadent democracy,” is a Spartan country. This is mainly due to the British way of building towns, which dispenses with the reasonable comfort enjoyed by all the other weak and effeminate peoples of the world.
Mediaeval warriors wore steel breast-plates and leggings not only for defence but also to keep up their fighting spirit; priests of the Middle Ages tortured their bodies with hair-shirts; Indian yogis take their daily nap lying on a carpet of nails to remain fit. The English plan their towns in such a way that these replace the discomfort of steel breast-plates, hair-shirts and nail-carpets.
On the Continent doctors, lawyers, booksellers — just to mention a few examples — are sprinkled all over the city, so you can call on a good or at least expensive doctor in any district. In England the idea is that it is the address that makes the man. Doctors in London are crowded into Harley Street, solicitors into Loncoln's Inn Fields, second-hand book-shops in Charing Cross Road, newspaper offices in Fleet Street, tailors in Saville Row, car-merchants in Great Portland Street, theatres around Piccadilly Circus, cinemas in Leicester Square, etc. If you have a chance of replanning London you can greatly improve on this idea. All green-grocers should be placed in Hornsey Lane (N.6), all butchers in Mile End (E.1), and all gentlemen's conveniences in Bloomsbury (W.C.).
Now I should like to give you a little practical advice on how to build an English town.
You must understand that an English town is a vast conspiracy to mislead foreigners. You have to use century-old little practices and tricks.
1. First of all, never build a street straight. The English love privacy and do not want to see one end of the street from the other end. Make sudden curves in the street and build them S-shaped too; the letters L, T, V, Y, W and O are also becoming increasingly popular. It would be a fine tribute to the Greeks to build a few φ and ϑ-shaped streets; it would be an ingenious compliment to the Russians to favour the shape of Я, and I am sure the Chinese would be more than flattered to see some [chinese-character]-shaped thoroughfares.
2. Never build the houses of the same street in a straight line. The British have always been a freedom-loving race and the “freedom to build a muddle” is one of their most ancient civic rights.
3. Now there are further camouflage possibilities in the numbering of houses. Primitive continental races put even numbers on one side, odd numbers on the other, and you always know that small numbers start from the north or west. In England you have this system, too; but you may start numbering your houses at one end, go up to a certain number on the same side, then continue on the other side, going back in the opposite direction.
You may leave out some numbers if you are superstitious; and you may continue the numbering in a side-street; you may also give the same number to two or three houses.
But this is far from the end. Many people refuse to have numbers altogether, and they choose house names. It is very pleasant, for instance, to find a street with three hundred and fifty totally similar bungalows and look for “The Bungalow.” Or to arrive in a street where all the houses have a charming view of a hill and try to find “Hill View.” Or search for “Seven Oaks” and find a house with three apple-trees.
4. Give a different name to the street whenever it bends; but if the curve is so sharp that it really makes two different streets, you may keep the same name. On the other hand, if owing to neglect, a street has been built in a straight line it must be called by many different names (High Holborn, Notting Hill Gate, Oxford Street, Bayswater Road, Notting Hill Gate, Holland Park, and so on).
5. As some cute foreigners would be able to learn their way about even under such circumstances, some further precautions are necessary. Call streets by various names: street, road, place, mews, crescent, avenue, rise, lane, way, grove, park, gardens, alley, arch, path, walk, broadway, promenade, gate, terrace, vale, view, hill, etc. 3
Now two further possibilities arise:
(a) Gather all sorts of streets and squares of the same name in one neighbourhood: Belsize Park, Belsize Street, Belsize Road, Belsize Gardens, Belsize Green, Belsize Circus, Belsize Yard, Belsize Viaduct, Belsize Arcade, Belsize Heath, etc.
(b) Place a number of streets of exactly the same name in different districts. If you have about twenty Princes Squares and Warwick Avenues in the town, the muddle — you may claim without immodesty — will be complete.
6. Street names should be painted clearly and distinctly on large boards. Then hide these boards carefully. Place them too high or too low, in shadow and darkness, upside down and inside out, or, even better, lock them up in a safe place in your bank, otherwise they may give people some indication about the names of the streets.
7. In order to break down the foreigners' last vestige of resistance and shatter their morale, one further trick is advisable: introduce the system of squares — real squares, I mean — which run into fours streets like this:
With this simple device it is possible to build a street of which the two sides have different names.
P.S. — I have been told that my above-described theory is all wrong and is only due to my Central European conceit, because the English do not care for the opinions of foreigners. In every other country, it has been explained, people just build streets and towns following their own common sense. England is the only country where there is a Ministry of Town and Country Planning. That is the real reason for the muddle.
Civil Servant
There is a world of difference between the English Civil Servant and the continental.
On the Continent (speaking now of the Scandinavian countries), Civil Servants assume a certain military air. They consider themselves little generals; they use delaying tactics; they cannot withdraw armies, so they withdraw permissions; they thunder like cannons and their speech is like machine-gun fire; they cannot lose battles, they lose documents instead. They consider that the sole aim of human society is to give jobs to Civil Servants. A few wicked individuals, however (contemptible little groups of people who are not Civil Servants), conspire against them, come to them with various requests, complaints, problems, etc., with the sole purpose of making a nuisance of themselves. These people get the reception they deserve. They are kept waiting in cold and dirty ante-chambers (some of them clean these rooms occasionally, but there are hired commissionaires whose duty it is to re-dirty these rooms every morning); they have to stand, often at attention, whilst they are spoken to; they are always shouted at in a rude manner and their requests are turned down with malicious pleasure. Sometimes — this is a popular cat and mouse game — they are sent to another office on the fifth floor, from there they are directed to a third office in the basement, where they are told that they should not have come there at all and sent back to the original office. In that office they are thoroughly told off in acrimonious language and dispatched to the fifth floor once again, from there to the basement, and the procedure goes on endlessly until the poor fellow either gets tired of the whole business and gives up in despair or becomes a raving lunatic and goes to an asylum asking for admittance. If the latter case occurs, he is told in reception that he has come to the wrong place, he should go to the another office on the fifth floor, from which he is sent down to the basement, etc., etc., until he gives up being a lunatic.
3. While this book was at the printers a correspondence in