The Gift That Keeps Giving...

A Mother’s Day walk along familiar, once almost daily-trod routes offered the opportunity for a re-acquaintance with some of the instances of the local phenomenon of the ‘double black lines’ corrective road markings specific to the place, with hopes that perhaps an example of discarded aluminium can ‘roadkill’ might be found alongside, in the manner of yore & often photographically documented accordingly. Such hopes were delightfully realised not once but twice in quick succession, with such objects being found mere yards apart.

The first example is a particularly fine one of the genre, with the can-as-was (transformed now into little more than a compressed sliver) positioned upon one of the painted lines & flattened onto in a manner that suggests, especially as its surface has become abraded of some of the paint of its branded livery (note, though, that the logo endures), that it has become embedded into the scene, the picture plane of the modernist-minimalist monochrome of the textured tarmac surface with its pair of superimposed horizontal bands.



The second ‘roadkill’ can was then encountered at rest beside an area of the double black lines exhibiting substantial surface erosion & thus significant evidence of the underlying yellow paint as originally applied upon the tarmac: note how the revealed yellow shape above the flattened can & the object itself display a coincidental similarity of form & size.