Skip to main content

Nice work if you can get it

Thanks go to Mrs W for this one. She happened to spy a van in the street that was offering a particularly eclectic range of services. As well as basement waterproofing, the business was promising to handle bird control, radon testing and air-quality management. We can only hope they're never asked to supply all these services at one location.

I've tracked down the company's website and you can just about make out the detail on the vehicle: www.protenservices.co.uk

They are preserving the past and protecting the future, according to their slogan. That's pretty good going when you're also controlling birds, testing for radon and so on. You have to hand it to them. It's multi-tasking in action.

Comments

  1. Anonymous8:19 AM

    Dear washedandreadytoeat,

    I am pleased that Mrs W spotted our van, and took an interest in it. We have 80 years experience in damp-proofing and timber treatments, and more recently have been developing other areas of our business. All services offered revolve around protecting buildings and their occupants, and are not as unrelated as may first appear. For example, we can exclusively provide a combined basement waterproofing and radon protection system (particularly important as the highest radon levels are found in basements).

    Mrs W may also have spotted that we are the proud holders of the Royal Warrant (which was awarded to us in 1976) – so you can add ‘keeping the Queen happy’ to our list of multi-tasking!

    Our new website, www.protenservices.co.uk has now been launched, and whilst the image of the van in question (or one of its 26 cousins) is no longer available, you may like to pay it a visit to read more about our company and range of services offered.

    Kindest Regards,

    Rebecca Kench
    ProTen Services Ltd.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Please tell me this comment is kosher.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.

Buttahz

Belatedly made it to the excellent Evolving English exhibition at the British Library. When I arrived, I found a curator talking to a large group of inner-city London teenagers who'd come with their school. "How do you spell Butters ?" he was asking them. The kids volunteered different spellings of the slang term. Museum man then posed another question. "But you don't actually say it like that, do you?" He was referring, I think, to the glottal stop that replaces the t in London English, although phonetics isn't my strong point. The youth were sent off to record slang in a booth for posterity and my attention was drawn to another class. This group was much younger and seemed to attend an exclusive private school. "Joanna! Come over here and listen to a bit of Romeo and Juliet!" The precocious little kids ran hither and thither, listening to samples of regional dialects on a superb interactive display or speeches from statesmen such as JFK and ...

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...