You prove my point, Bald Eagle!

Dave (the Gnome), "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions" as Dr Johnson (definitely!) said. I remember the wonderful scale models of proposed town centre developments that were exhibited in Walsall in the sixties. They were originally made in the late forties by council planners expecting government grants--not developers looking for huge profits--when the post-war reconstruction was being planned (not that Walsall town centre got much in the way of bomb damage). They would have looked rather like the centre of Birmingham today, with tunnels and flyovers taking the traffic right into (or under) the heart of the town; all bright and clean and modern and exciting, not dirty and polluted and scruffy, and symolising the Rise Of The Nation From The Horrors Of War, etc. etc.

Even that old favourite nuclear power was intended to make something beneficial and clean out of something evil and foul (at least by many scientists with bad feelings about Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

But man proposeth and God disposeth (who said that?), and the best-laid plans turn out as lemons. I sometimes have a dreadful worry that when our children take their turn at clearing up the mess that their parents' generation bequeathed them, they'll make as bad a pig's ear of it as we have.

Steve (I'm not sure I want my mind back now!)