Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Toilets are a monument to hygiene
Germophobes rejoice! If you have an aversion to touching anything in a public, then The Monument pub in St Dunstan’s Street has at least one of the answers. Totally refurbished about a year ago, the pub boasts special metal handles attached to loo seats in the male khasi. This avoids the need for using one’s feet or a fragment of loo roll to move it. Chuffed.
From chuffed to gutted: Kent fell agonisingly short of a semi-final spot in cricket’s domestic 50-over competition, The Royal London Cup.
The game a week ago was beamed live by Sky Sports, with many hoping that the middle order pair of Alex Blake and Darren Stevens would bring Kent home.
As I watched, I was suddenly aware of a very prominent piece of advertising – that of shirt sponsor Cardy.
The construction firm holds the title of Canterbury’s biggest bogeyman after it folded this summer with subcontractors claiming they were owed thousands.
How galling for them to see cash poured into sponsorship of a sports club rather into their banks for work done.
Quote of the week comes from writer Tim Black: “What the Olympic spectacle presents us with is an ethos almost entirely at odds with that writ large in today’s mainstream cultural script, rich as it is in relativism and low aspiration.
“You can see this in the contradiction between the International Olympics Committee’s jargonised and buzzworded articulation of the spirit of the Olympics, with its emphasis on encouraging ‘pluralism’ and ‘cultural diversity’, and the Olympics itself.
“After all, there is nothing plural or diverse about a sprint competition. It is exclusive. There is equality of opportunity, of striving and struggling to run faster, leap higher, throw further – it’s universally human in that sense. But there can only be one winner, not many or plural winners. The Olympics establishes a strict hierarchy, not a loose plurality, cultural or otherwise.”