Obsessive, Moi?

I see this poster on a bus I get sometimes. It has bewildered me for years.

Actually, it has irritated me for years, but I have found myself looking at it quite fondly lately. I don't know why.

It's the brackets, you see. Or parentheses, if you're that way inclined.

(including)

(Thorpe Hesley).

It is a poster for a all-day ticket you can buy, and it is telling you that the ticket extends as far as a place called Thorpe Hesley, which google tells me is in Rotherham, in South Yorkshire.

But why is it (including) (Thorpe Hesley) and not (including Thorpe Hesley)? Who knows?

But lately I have been quite taken by the symmetry of the brackets as they are.

Lynne Truss would be ashamed. Quite rightly.

I guess there's not enough to do on bus journeys than to consider and reconsider the same old posters with the same old grammatical errors. And if it is true that familiarity breeds contempt, then maybe in this case, familiarity has bred contempt in me for my previous contempt at the excess bracket situation.

Or something.