Paradise Lost

Much has been sung, especially off-key in karaoke bars, about horrid people having paved paradise to put up a parking lot. Which is an appropriate sentiment, one imagines, until one needs to find a spot to park one's car, at which point, one probably starts declaiming platitudes about the great march forward of progress, etcetera etcetera.

However, no-one has yet endeavored (to the best of my knowledge) to write a song bemoaning the loss of the local asphalt-paved, 15-shekel a day parking lot to make way for a 40-storey residential and office block, theoretical (at least) work on which has commenced on the parking lot adjacent to my building, which has been the source of many a happy 'tootling' (Noorster, please provide the reference for that word) over the last three and a half years of my inhabitation of this particular abode.

But alas, the congested meeting place of future scrap metal is soon to be no more. For yesterday, they came and started to cut the branches off the three large and extremely messy tress that grace said parking lot, in preparation to dig them out of the ground and carry them off to a better place, while construction of the symbol of progress takes place. They are presumably to be returned and replanted once all the dust has settled.

And so I believe that I am about to become neighbor to a rather large hole in the ground. Actually, if the noise and dust don't bother me, I might stay around to watch the spectacle. But the problem is that construction workers have this antisocial habit of starting work as soon as it is light, whilst I have the far more civilized habit of waking up at the crack of noon, as my faithful readers will recall. This could quickly become a conflict of interests.

And so my own little frangipani-filled paradise looks likely to be lost, in the very near future.