• HERE is a little paradoxical sequence of a few days ago.

1. Utility workings in Wardour Street lead to duct covers loosening and clattering, night and day, whenever vehicles pass over.

2. After some days and nights resident Cave, suitably irritated, alerts Councillor Pancho Lewis on a Saturday.

3. Councillor Pancho – a star is being born – immediately and wonderfully urges Westminster City Council action.

4. Council authorities (amazingly) spring into action.

5. Remedial work is carried out on Monday.

Splendid. Save that, paradoxically, the noisy remedial work (pneumatic drilling, stone-grinding, diesel engines revving and polluting) took place late at night, adding to disturbances.

Council guidelines, I speculate, deem Wardour Street to be so busy with commercial traffic that no daytime disruption may be permitted.

Of course, that too is paradoxical given that local commercial traffic currently has the intriguing property of virtual non-existence; noisy daytime road workings are all around us; and the aforementioned remedial work required no closure of Wardour Street.

Why, we may wonder, are these duct coverings not fitted with shock-absorbing membranes, or even Blu Tack?

But then we may wonder why burglar alarms are installed that paradoxically serve solely to irritate neighbours when they alarmingly sound; and why, indeed, all the cabling works that are meant to improve people’s lives paradoxically worsen lives through the screechings, drillings and poundings.

Why, oh why?

PETER CAVE,
Soho, W1