Vandalism in the London Borough of Sutton

As I walked down my road yesterday, on my way to work, I noticed a range of fairly commonplace but wild flowers growing. It pleased me.

I had a lie in this morning. Not for long. Lots of noise in my road. I didn't watch all of it; but, as far as I saw, this is what happened.

First a council nonce went by and blew air through the grass verges. Then another council nonce came and strimmed them. It may have been the same nonce with two machines.

Briefly it smelt of cut grass. But the flowers have gone.

I find that I am incapable of properly expressing the degree of idiocy this suggests. Fool, isn't enough. Cretin... well, that goes without saying.

Better, I suppose, this than that the nonces be swinging on a gas chamber door saying I am only obeying orders; but that will come.

It is impossible to tell them that because they will declare that the Nazi era and their attitude are entirely different. Nor, I suspect, would they encompass a charge of exceptionalism. One might as well debate with a dog turd about one's right to poop scoop it, with the turd advancing claims of its rights.

There are no guidelines. No policy statements exist because, they would hold, it is the obvious thing to do; so how does one argue? I approached the GLA Greens on related matters; and they referred me to my local councillors. Jobsworths, all of them.

The local MPs, coalition boys, do not reply.

Only the Charles Whitman approach works; and it cannot possibly be turned to, quite aside from the obvious fact that they'd shoot back before the gunperson got them all.

So we all go down together. Dungheads and grass cuttings and all. It wouldn't be so bad perhaps but one would share the plague pit with people who would see God's beneficial hand in our suffering.  

I suspect that the stimulus for this vandalism is draughts playing thinking. Someone has complained that long grass is unhealthy. Maybe it makes their polished shoes wet when they put their dustbins on it; or the grass gets in the way of their mixing of cement. Such people have votes; such people must be brown-nosed.

So the grass is kept cropped.

Sod the insects. Sod the flowers; you can buy flowers; but flowers are for the garden. And so on.

The other Whitman in my head, Walt Whitman, suggested in a poem that grass is the uncut hair of the dead. Not his finest line, and he was speaking of grass on graves. But I think of it now; and I reflect that, even in (spiritual) death, my fellows in the London Burial Ground of Sutton like to keep their hair smart.