| Sink or Swim (3) |
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I am blissfully relieved in the knowledge that the Municipality of Amsterdam's Subway Development Department has come up with a solution for the lack to date of emergency exits which is every bit as brilliant as it is straightforward: all elements of the sewerage infrastructure are simply to be hooked up to the subway network. In addition to being 100% fireproof, the natural state of the tubes and gantries is one of wetness. Better still, they're all over the shop. And in the unlikely event of a fire, this would give the smallest metropolis on the planet a unique opportunity to boost morale by having everyone flush their loos on the count of three, in a poignant demonstration of togetherness. The system could also be used to set up a pneumatic dispatch service. I'm not sure whether an inter-city sewerage link is maintained between Amsterdam and, say, The Hague, but surely it wouldn't be too much to ask henceforth to have specifically city-related mail such as property tax assessments and correspondence relating to participation proceedings delivered through a little porthole fitted alongside one's toilet bowl. I suddenly remembered that some Dutch administrators travelled to New York last year to sell and lease back domestic sewerage systems, in a transaction which to everyone's surprise proved hugely lucrative. Could it be that something was lost in translation so that the phrases "capital deepening" and "deep sewerage" got mixed up, or was it the Enron people who with foresight and by way of survival strategy had made arrangements using a post box (there we have it again) to go to ground for a while? Or could the single subway tube be used as a main sewage pipe if the worst came to the worst, with an overcapacity which would satisfy every conceivable need for the next five centuries, leaving aside for the moment the suggestion evoked by the play on words that surely it takes gargantuan mountains of the dross of the earth to dig a pit of such enormous depth, only to backfill it with excrement? |