Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Hi Viz

I have the fashion sense of a pithed cat but even I know that fluorescent yellow, orange or green is not good. Anywhere. I once (like 1967) had a sweater that could pass as fluorescent green and I regretted buying it the moment I walked out of the shop. How prescient that my realisation of a style faux pas should come about forty years before it was required.


This what we are talking about; bloody safety jackets - and as we shall see it doesn't stop at jackets The first image (I'm afraid there will be more) shows no less than thirteen people kitted out in the foul kit in one place. I can almost, almost mark you, see the point of it here as they are working on a construction site and were the bloke up in the tower crane not concentrating avoiding lowering an RSJ onto a fluoro orange object might be easier than avoiding a bloke atired for duck shooting. But even here do all these people have to be dressed like traffic cones? I would imagine that in excess of 99% of the world's current building stock came into being constructed by blokes wearing ordinary clothes. And I would also wager that a vast majority of them lived to tell the tale. When I was buying stupid sweaters builders wore woolly jumpers in the winter (bobble hat if really cold) and tee shirts in the summer. And they were fine.

If we can sort of see why this obsession for this foul clothing started in the construction and perhaps roading industry then why the hell has it spread like a cancer across all sections of society. This horrible stuff is bloody everywhere; it has infiltrated places where even damned Health'n'Safety can no longer be an excuse. More of that in a minute. First though we shall see some examples where safety is used as the stick with which to beat the great unwashed. Safety is used as the argument that can have no rebuttal for all sorts ofthings. It is everywhere. I am penning this in the Koru Lounge at Auckland Airport. The PA has just announced the you are only allowed one piece of carry on luggage weigh no more than 7kg 'in the interests of your safety'. Bollocks this is just a bare faced lie; it is in the interests of the airline saving fuel costs.

So this lady in Cardiff has to wear not only a Hi Viz jacket but a whole Hi Viz ensemble.


She is standing at an intersection controlled by traffic lights with pedestrian crossing red and green men lights and has a perfectly adequate old fashioned lollipop. And she needs this stupid fluorogear as well? I don't think so. How many lollipop ladies were mowed down during the course of their duties prior to the Hi Viz regulations (you can be sure she is not wearing that hideous raincoat out of choice) coming into play.? I'll give you a postage stamp and a builder's pencil with which to do your calculations.

More safety nonsense. Most of the pictures in this post were taken a recent trip to the UK - in my estimation Hi Viz capital of the world. I went and watched the All Blacks give England a good seeing to at Twickenhm. 82,000 spectators and Plod quite sensibly had the crowd control horses out in force.


I apologise for the poor picture (iPhone, 82,000 people remember) but you get the idea. A horse wearing a safety jacket for God's sake? Horses are bloody big things and if it is only three feet from you even Mr McGoo could see one. In fact this is a very unsafe horse as most of them were also wearing Hi Viz ankle socks. And of course Plod sitting atop horse, backside about seven foot off the ground, also has to wear a Hi Viz coat this time embellished with reflective stripes. Just so you can see him.

Also in the UK all the London Transport people manning the ticket halls in the Underground wear the ghastly kit. Why? Why do you need to wear high visibility clothing if all you have to do is look after a ticket machine 100 foot underground in a well lit public concourse. New Zealand. I travel on domestic airlines a lot. If you fly into smaller places, Gisborne for example, you don't go in an Airbus A380. No its a Beech 1900D where there are but two members of staff on the plane the driver and his mate. They have to do everything including on the tarmac stuff like making sure the propellers haven't fallen off prior to take off and that sort of thing. When they leave the cockpit they cover their very smart pilot gear with a bloody Hi Viz vest just to stroll around the tarmac. Why? There is no one in Gisborne so they are not going to get run over and they can't get bowled by the plane because the driver is wandering around the tarmac......in a HI Viz Vest.

But it all gets worse. The Health'n'Safety wallahs have so infiltrated the world that high viz is now considered desirable where it is obviously just plain daft. Oxford Street, October 2010.


Note the reflective strips so you can get a tan after the sun has gone down.

Regent Street October 2010


The relevance of Hi Viz clothing to golf? I can't think of a single golf club that would grant him admission dressed like that. Maybe he's there to help out with the roadworks going on behind his left shoulder.

Well, no he's not. We fast forward to June 2011


He's still there and the road works are finished. See he now has eschewed the use of the winterised hood of his hideous suit and has taken to an equally ghastly summer Hi Viz truckers cap - plastic. I promise you it's the same bloke standing in exactly the same spot. I asked him if he had been home for a cup of tea and a lie down since I'd last seen him in October and he looked at me as if I were mad. I looked at him in the same way.

Can it get any worse? It already has. Chelsea FC's away strip season 2007


Can it get even more worserer? I'm afraid it can and almost certainly will.

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