Diggin' this 'ole

There’s probably generations…

…who haven’t seen or heard this classic take on the Health and Safety nerd:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yShvgXZQBTs

Bernard Cribbins, Digging a Hole

There I was, a-digging this hole

A hole in the ground, so big and sort of round it was

There was I, digging it deep

It was flat at the bottom and the sides were steep

When along comes this bloke in a bowler which he lifted and scratched his head

Well we looked down the hole, poor demented soul and he said

Do you mind if I make a suggestion?

Don't dig there, dig it elsewhere

Your digging it round and it ought to be square

The shape of it's wrong, it's much much too long

And you can't put hole where a hole don't belong

I ask, what a liberty eh

Nearly bashed him right in the bowler

Well there was I, stood in me hole

Shovelling earth for all I was worth

There was him, standing up there

So grand and official with his nose in the air

So I gave him a look sort of sideways and I leaned on my shovel and sighed

Well I lit me a fag and having took a drag I replied

I just couldn’t bear, to dig it elsewhere

I'm digging it round co's I don’t want it square

And if you disagree it don't bother me

That ís the place where the hole’s gonna be

Well there we were, discussing this hole

A hole in the ground so big and sort of round

Well it's not there now, the ground’s all flat

And beneath it is the bloke in the bowler hat

And that's that

Next time you meet the jobsworth, the clipboard clown who thinks that, but for his intervention, we’d all have burnt to a crisp in our beds or fallen from tall buildings or otherwise met an untimely demise[1], the little hero, sing him this song: "ver woz I, a-diggin' vis 'ole, ole inda grahnd, ..."

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[1] The risk, when you talk to these mongs, is never that you may cut yourself, or bruise yourself. They don’t even deal in lacerations that require A&E and sewing up, or sprains, strains or even broken bones. Nope. Straight from rude good health to the mortuary slab in their black and white world. They all seem to be carnage-magnets, too. They see more death, destruction and limbless torsos in a week than I did serving twenty years in the London Fire Brigade, all at busy stations. Either that or they’re talking rubbish.